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https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/studentOmeka/files/original/Vol._39_num._1_Clio_-_2013/62/011_Clio_Bio.pdf
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THIS ISSUE OF CLIO
IS DEDICATED TO
THE WESTERN STUDENTS, FACULTY,
AND STAFF FROM THE GREATER
NEWTOWN COMMUNITY.
�Contributors
Theodore Billett, an undergraduate history major, is slated to graduate in May 2013. He has
been an editor at Clio for two years and this issue includes his own piece, "Elliott Roosevelt:A
Paradoxical Personality in an Age of Extremes." Mr. Billett writes about nineteenth-century
American history and the history of science.
Daniel Doty studies history at WCSU and expects to graduate in December of 2013. Outside of
his college career, he enjoys casual search on gender identity. During his free time he enjoys
playing video games and spending time with friends and family.
Paul Fuller is a senior history major at Western Connecticut State University.
Matt Mango is a senior history major at Western Connecticut State University.
Claudia Ramirez is committed to life-long learning. In addition to being a Psychology major,
she’s devoted her time to her husband, daughters, and a career as a Physician Assistant.
John Sokolowski is an undergraduate student in his final semester at WCSU. He is most
interested in twentieth century conflicts of Western world, propaganda, and watching the sun
set on summer evenings.
Jared Stammer is a Pandaren Monk in World of Warcraft. When not defeating ancient Gods to
save Azeroth, he sometimes escapes to a mystical, fantasy world of writing history papers for
his Graduate program at Western Connecticut State University.
Elizabeth Young is a senior history major at Western Connecticut State University.
Staff
Patrick Shea – President
Sean Keenan – Editor
Gillette de Berry – VP/ Secretary
Matt Mango – Editor
Shannon McDonald – Digital Archiver
Alicia Moniz – Editor
Kaitlyn O’Brien – Treasurer
Marissa O’Loughlin – Editor
Theodore Billet – Editor
John Sokolowski – Editor
Paul Fuller – Editor
Jared Stammer – Editor
Nicholle Jejer – Editor
Dr. Marcy May – Advisor
Dr. Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox – Advisor
��
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Western Connecticut State University. Department of History
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2013-05
Clio
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Women in Comedy: The Construction of Gender in Depression Era Marx
Brothers Films
Paul Fuller
Introduction
Comedy is a genre that has long been both popular and successful among many artistic
mediums, and film is no exception. The argument could possibly be made that film has become
the most successful medium for comedy, as comedies are by far the most popular style of films
consumed by viewers. With the massive popularity of comedic films, it is somewhat striking
that both these films and comedy in general have not garnered more attention amongst feminist
film critics. Feminist film theory, which came into focus during the 1970s, has more or less
ignored comedies, much to its own detriment. Perhaps more serious, dramatic movies were
believed to warrant more significant scrutiny because the tone that is generally incorporated into
these films lends itself to more analysis, but this is an unfortunate miscalculation of the power of
comedy on film audiences, which is the most sought-after genre of film for personal viewing.1
Given comedic film’s vast dissemination, the impact of any socially constructive representations
of women would be large and would greatly affect the massive audience that partakes in the
viewing of such films.
Comedic elements have been used in film since the late 1890s and by the 1920s, when
sound had been successfully incorporated into “talkies”, comedic films had become a major
source of revenue for production companies and actors such as Charlie Chaplin and the Marx
Brothers. During the Great Depression, with nine films released in the 1930s, the Marx Brothers
especially were prolific. Due to the Marx Brothers’ popularity, and the sheer volume of their
1
Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, “Responding to Comedy: The Sense and Nonsense of Humor,” in Responding
to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes, ed. Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant (Hillsdale: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 262.
�work, an analysis of their films from a feminist perspective is warranted, as the insight that
would be gained could encourage a greater understanding of the power of comedy in the
construction of social institutions, such as gender and gender roles. These films were wide
reaching and are still considered some of the greatest comedies of all time, which suggests the
incredible cultural significance that they have.2
While the Marx Brothers created films both before and after the Great Depression,
restricting an analysis to five of the nine films created during this era will allow for roughly the
same societal background in which the films would have been viewed. The Great Depression
created a massive amount of stress and hardship for the vast majority of Americans, and the
societal unrest during this time serves as a base level for each of the films that will be analyzed.
By allowing for the films to have been viewed in roughly the same time period, external societal
issues of interpretation are limited, which allows for more confidence in the analysis. Regardless
of the confidence of the analysis for the time period, however, it will still hold up for today’s
viewing of the films.
The five films that were viewed and analyzed were Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey
Business (1931), Duck Soup (1933), A Night at the Opera (1935), and A Day at the Races
(1937). Each film was viewed with particular attention paid to instances of derogatory jokes
made about women, scenes created around the image of women, negatively created women
characters, and women as objects of sexual desire. The approximate time of each instance of the
above criteria was recorded along with a short description of the event, creating a list of the ways
in which each film was overtly working to construct definitions of women and femininity. While
the lists are neither entirely comprehensive nor exhaustive, they do serve as usable measures to
2
American Film Institute, “America’s Funniest Movies” (2002). Accessed March 6, 2013.
www.afi.com/Docs/100years/laughs100.pdf
�allow for discussion of the role that these films have played in the construction of a dominant
gender norm that subordinates women, which enables the beginnings of a feminist critique to
take place. While feminist film theory has no single discipline or ideological framework, the
overarching theme has been to examine films in a different way than traditional audiences. A
discussion of the differing theoretical frameworks of feminist film theory will enable the
placement of this particular analysis inside of certain frameworks and will allow for a more
comprehensive understanding of the analysis.
Feminist Film Theory
Feminist film theory covers a wide range of interdisciplinary topics and foci, and as with
any wide ranging idea, there are inevitably views that are at odds with one another.3 The
different views offer a vast array of interpretations of certain aspects of film and cinema, and it is
through the examination of these theoretical constructs that insight can be gained about the effect
of films on audiences. A complete and comprehensive overview of the different styles and
theoretical leanings of feminist film theory is far beyond the scope of this paper, but a short
discussion of two of the most prevalent theoretical groundings of it will suffice, if only to create
a more sound grounding for the conclusions drawn from the analysis of the Marx Brothers’
films. Psychoanalytic and Marxist theories both advanced the scholarship of film theory, and
though they differ entirely in their conclusions and methods, they both help to illuminate certain
discussions and issues in film analysis from a feminist perspective. For the nature of this paper,
psychoanalytic theory will not be as useful as a Marxist reading of the films, but a short
overview of the implications that psychoanalytic theory brings out in films is warranted,
3
Judith Mayne, “Feminist Film Theory and Criticism,” Signs 11:1 (1985): 85.
�especially given the overly sexual nature of a number of the jokes frequently used by the Marx
Brothers.
Psychoanalytic Theories
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory have become the widely accepted
theoretical groundings for feminist film theory, especially after the publication of Laura
Mulvey’s pivotal 1975 article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”4 The central ideas
postulated by Mulvey revolve around the phallocentric nature of both the narrative and
production of the film. According to Mulvey, film is created predominantly by men for an
audience of men, so depictions of women are going to serve as a fetishistic, scopophilic view or
an oppressive view due to the fear of castration.5 The male gaze is dominated by the active/male
and passive/female dichotomy, which has been used to describe how films are seen and meant to
be seen by audiences in a patriarchal society.6 Each of these ideas signifies a movement towards
using a method of analysis that had previously been underutilized in film studies.
Psychoanalysis was not traditionally used in film studies, but by using this style of
analysis, the theorists were able to define both film consumption and production in terms of the
subconscious mind of men. This postulation is understandably desirable to feminist theorists, as
it works to fundamentally examine the reasons why films are created in certain ways and why
4
Mayne, “Feminist Film Theory and Criticism,”; 85; Jane Gaines, “Women and Representation,” in Issues in
Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 76;
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 6 -8.
5
Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornman
(New York: New York University Press, 1999), 58 -61.
6
Ibid., 62.
�women have been almost universally depicted in a negative or objectifying way. From the
consumption side of cinema, psychoanalytic theory allows for an understanding of why the
audience would readily and willingly partake in the viewing of films that work to subvert half of
the population. This understanding, however, comes at the price at renouncing all agency that
women viewers have and offers a solely pessimistic approach to film theory with no viable
positive outcome from viewing any mainstream Hollywood movie.7 It is because of this lack of
agency that other theoretical groundings for feminist film theory have taken root, in particular
theories with their theoretical base in Marxist ideologies. By allowing for processes of change
and creating an understanding of film through the lens of conflict theory these Marxist theories
can stand in stark contrast to those of the psychoanalytic discipline.
Marxist Theories
Marxist interpretations of film are not constructed in the same way as psychoanalytic
readings of film are. For Marxists, the interpretation of film would largely be based on the
ideological leanings of those who created the film, which, in the case of popular Hollywood
films of the day, was patriarchal capitalism.8 For feminists, this reading of film is part of what
helps to perpetuate the disadvantages and discrimination that women face in their daily lives. By
increasing their control over forms of entertainment that are viewed and consumed readily by
members of lower classes, those in power are able to cement their status as the controllers of
culture and greatly influence what goes into the culture that they work to shape. In order to
understand and expose these constructions, a different method of viewing film must be adopted,
7
Jane Gaines, “Women and Representation,” in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 77 -81; Michelle Citron et. al., “Women and Film,” in Feminist
Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornman (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 116 -18.
8
Judith Mayne, “Feminist Film Theory and Criticism,” 85.
�which has been termed “reading against the grain.”9 By reading the classical narrative of
Hollywood films against the way in which they were intended to be read, feminist film theorists
are able to deconstruct the implied meanings of films and remove the implicit subjugation of
women in society.
The analysis of all aspects of film results in a clearer picture of how the film was made
and possible answers to the question of why the film was made. Though the understanding of
how and why films were created, it becomes possible to move beyond the generally accepted
narrative of most popular films. According to a feminist interpretation, the burgeoning film
attempted to create films that do not represent the classical narrative in both execution and
interpretation.10 By examining the dominant way in which films are viewed, it is possible to
understand and move away from the accepted narrative and discourse that is put forth by the
popular film industry. This understanding of the ways in which gender and gender roles are
constructed through film is of paramount importance for feminists because it enables them to
analyze and critique films on the basis of their representation of women, which helps to foster a
more equal standing for women.
Comedy
Theories of comedy can be used to demonstrate comedy’s mass appeal to audiences and
the continued delight that people experience when watching comedies. Humor has been studied
and examined by great thinkers all throughout history, and it still has yet to be understood more
9
Judith Maybe, “The Female Audience and the Feminist Critic,” in Women and Film, ed. Janet Todd (New York:
Holmes and Meier, 1988), 23-25.
10
Michelle Citron et. al., “Women and Film,” in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornman (New York:
New York University Press 1999), 118 -21.
�or less completely.11 Zillmann and Bryant state that “[Humor] has been found in all recorded
human cultures; not in deficient quantity, but in conspicuous abundance.”12 Humor is all around,
and people have built their careers around being funny. While not everyone has the same sense
of humor, there are certain types of humor with wide appeal that have stood the test of time, as
noted with their continued success. The slapstick style of humor utilized by Harpo Marx and the
dry wit of Groucho Marx are two of those styles that are still successful today, as noted by their
films’ continued successes. Of course not all of the jokes in the movies will have the same
impact when viewed more than seventy years later due to references that would have been more
widely understood to the audiences in the 1930s; what the jokes may lack in terms of
understanding in a historical context is generally made up for in terms of sheer ridiculousness or
absurdity. The anarchic style of comedy that was utilized in the Marx Brothers films, best
exemplified by Duck Soup (1933), makes use of so many non sequiturs that a lack of
comprehension of the context of a joke is often unimportant, as the circumstances of the joke in
the film are just as important for its comedic value.
Zillmann’s disposition theory of humor posits that humor is found when one group works
to undermine, ridicule, reduce, or humiliate another group, provided that the viewers are
empathetic with the first group. When viewers can relate to the group that is making a joke of the
other, they will be more likely to find humor in the situation, so long as the joke falls short of
truly grievous harm.13 This theory fits well with the Marxist readings of films due to the conflicts
that arise between groups which are in power and those which are not. Humor allows for the
main narrative of the films to be digested with little or no thought; simply working as a benign
11
Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, “Responding to Comedy: The Sense and Nonsense of Humor,” in
Responding to the Screen: Reception and Reaction Processes, ed. Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant (Hillsdale:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991), 268-70.
12
Ibid., 268.
13
Ibid., 270.
�reinforcement of the status quo of society. By basing itself on the disposition of the viewer, this
theory of humor allows for alternate experiences of the same joke, which allows for viewers to
“read against the grain” when viewing classical films. When coupled with the deconstructive
aspect of feminist film theory, disposition theory allows for comedic films to be understood in
terms of the mass appeal towards certain jokes and styles of humor, and the viewing of Marx
Brothers’ films in regards to these theories allows for an analysis of how these films were
constructing gender.
Marx Brothers Films
The Marx Brothers created a number of films, and an in-depth analysis of every movie
that they created is a task that is too great for the purposes of this paper. However, an analysis of
five of the films that they produced during the Great Depression in the 1930s will allow for a
preliminary understanding of the role of comedies in constructing gender. Due to the films’ wide
appeal and general critical acclaim, when they were released, they were accessible to a large
audience, which increased the films’ ability to mold the conceptions of gender roles held by their
audience.14 The films are largely similar, many jokes and gags are rehashed throughout the
subsequent films, and the plots are largely unimportant. Generally, Groucho will be halfheartedly attempting to woo a rich widow, while at the same time partaking in monologues
designed around making fun of the woman. Chico and Harpo are almost always paired together,
with Harpo literally chasing after random women that he sees throughout the film. Zeppo, when
14
Mordaunt Hall, “Animal Crackers (1930) The Screen; The Marx Brothers,” The New York Times, August 29,
1930, 24; Mordaunt Hall, “Monkey Business (1931) The Screen; Groucho and His Brethren. In a German Film
Studio,” The New York Times, October 8, 1931, 29; Mordaunt Hall, “Duck Soup (1933) The Four Marx Brothers,”
The New York Times,Nov. 23, 1933, 24; Andre Sennwald, “A Night at the Opera (1935) Article Two – No Title;
Three of the Four Marx Brothers in ‘A Night at the Opera,’ at the Capitol – ‘Miss Pacific Fleet,’” The New York
Times, (December 7, 1935), 22.
�involved in the films, generally plays the straight man in the comedic troupe, and as such he is
seldom the cause for laughter. Each of the films will be discussed in some detail in the following
sections in which the lists that were created to keep track of instances of the depiction of women
as subordinate will be examined, with a final conclusion of the analysis of all of the films
following the description of A Day at the Races.
Animal Crackers (1930)
In Animal Crackers, Groucho plays the role of Captain Spaulding, a famed explorer who
has braved the jungles of Africa. For his return to America, the wealthy, socialite widow Mrs.
Rittenhouse has put together a party at her mansion where Spaulding can relax and be welcomed
and adored by those in attendance. Spaulding’s entrance is marked by a song sung by the chorus
of partygoers, with one of the lines describing how he wants the women that he is around to be
young and fit. From almost the minute that he is on camera he has already begun a comedic bit
that is centered on insulting Mrs. Rittenhouse, who is decidedly neither young nor fit.
Harpo’s character, the Professor, begins chasing girls at random around fifteen minutes
into the film, the first of three instances of this behavior by him in Animal Crackers. Shortly after
this scene, two women plot to have the unveiling of a painting, highlight of the party, disrupted
because they are jealous of Rittenhouse’s impending status as the one who threw the social event
of the summer. The painting that Rittenhouse will be unveiling is a masterpiece that was bought
by Chandler, a massively rich man who knows much about art and desires the hand of
Rittenhouse in marriage. Arabella, the daughter of Rittenhouse, is in love with a burgeoning
painter, Parker, who does not have much money. Arabella suggests that the two of them live
together and when Parker asks how they would afford anything she informs him that she has
�charge accounts at all of the stores on Madison Avenue, so they would be able to furnish a new
home together, and apparently has no awareness to the issues of debt.
The film continues in more of the same vein, with Spaulding insulting Rittenhouse every
time that he and her are in same scene. The Professor chases random women around the house,
and Arabella charms Chico’s character into doing favors for her. A large number of gags later on
in the film involve the explicit objectification of women, including one in which a woman’s
chest needs to be searched. Overall, the list that was put together during the viewing of the film
for this analysis counts twenty-three explicit instances of women being defined through negative
comments, jokes, or character development, though the latter is for the most part severely
lacking in all Marx Brothers films due to the fact that the films are comedic in nature.
Monkey Business (1931)
Monkey Business begins with the four Marx Brothers hiding aboard a ship heading to
America as stowaways. The majority of the first half of the film is spent with the Brothers trying
to avoid being captured by the crew of the ship, which is comprised entirely of men. During their
attempts to evade detection, Harpo is seen hiding by lying under a woman passenger who seems
to be oblivious to the body on which she is laying, and a number of women are shown gossiping
about the rumored stowaways. The only noticeable female presence aboard the ship, other than
passengers, is the nurse, and Harpo wastes little time before chasing a random girl around the
ship. This gag of Harpo’s is used very often in this film with at least six different instances of it.
Shortly after this first scene of Harpo’s a man is shown blatantly staring at and pursuing a girl,
only to finally be rewarded for his attempts at engaging her with the two of them talking and
walking away together.
�Also aboard the ship are two notorious gangsters who are at odds with each other, and the
Marx Brothers inevitably get roped into the conflict as both body guards and would-be assassins.
Alky, the young up-and-coming gangster, constantly dismisses his wife and bosses her around.
Groucho ends up in their room during one of his escapes from the crew and immediately begins
to woo Akly’s wife, Lucille, with innuendo and backhanded compliments. Joe Helton, the older
gangster, is just as dismissive of his daughter as Alky is of his wife. Groucho and Chico end up
hiding in his room while they attempt to avoid detection from the crew, and then become pressed
into service as Helton’s bodyguards. While they are still aboard the ship, the brothers engage in a
number of comedic actions to avoid detection, and then after the ship has docked, they need to
steal a passport so that they can disembark.
The second half of the film involves the brothers attending a party thrown by Joe Helton,
during which Alky kidnaps his daughter. During the party Harpo is seen wearing a costume of
the bump of a woman’s dress. As he moves his way through the dance floor he attaches himself
to the backside of the various women in the room. In the attempt to rescue Helton’s daughter,
women are not involved, all of the police officers are men and all of the people from Helton’s
gang are men. Groucho is surrounded by women on a number of occasions in the second half of
the film, and he insults and derides them on each occasion. Throughout the entire movie, there
were at least twenty-seven instances of overtly constructing women as socially subordinate, and
of course, the list that was compiled is neither all-inclusive nor exhaustive. In general, Monkey
Business is one of the best examples of the construction of dominant gender norms through
comedy that the Marx Brothers created, especially through Harpo’s repeated gags of literal
woman-chasing.
�Duck Soup (1933)
In Duck Soup, there are significantly less instances of the overt subordination of women,
but that is due both in part to the length of the film, only 68 minutes, and the style of it, as it is
the Marx Brothers’ prime example of anarchic comedy. There is very little need to examine the
plot of the film, as it is entirely inconsequential for the film. What little story there is, however,
does involve certain issues of gender and gender roles. Mrs. Teasdale is a wealthy widow who
will help the nation of Freedonia with its debt if Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) is appointed as
leader of the nation. In the opening scene, when this is explained Teasdale is the only woman in
the room filled with Freedonian government officials. Groucho is incredibly inept as a leader and
drives Freedonia to war with neighboring Sylvania through a number of exchanges with the
Sylvanian ambassador, Trentino. During these exchanges Teasdale is the lone voice wishing for
an immediate end to the escalating tension between the two men, who both insist that the other is
to blame for the impending conflict.
Trentino employs Chicolini (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo), along with Vera Marcal, as spies
to gather information about war plans that Firefly has been making. Marcal makes use of her
beauty to try and get Firefly to relax so that she can seize the plans, whereas Chicolini and Pinky
are more direct in their approach for obtaining information about Firefly. When Trentino
interviews the pair to see what they have found, they are buzzed in by his secretary, who is a
woman. While the pair mainly make use of slapstick style comedy in this film, Pinky has a
number of instances where he can be seen to be objectifying women, such as when his tattoo of a
girl wearing a swimsuit is shown, when he spies on a woman while she is bathing, and when he
is shown grabbing Teasdale’s rear near the end of the film. Throughout the film, Teasdale is
shown as overly emotional and attached to Firefly, who does very little to earn such admiration
�from her and only becomes interested in her when her vast wealth is brought up.
The list that was created during the analysis of Duck Soup contains only sixteen specific
instances of the film explicitly constructing women as subordinate; however, it must be noted
that the vast majority of actors in the film are men and that the almost complete absence of
women should be considered evidence of the film’s reification of dominant gender norms in
itself. This film is also extremely non sequitur and many of the gags, such as the mirror scene
and the confrontations that Pinky has with the peanut vendor, are entirely built on slapstick and
absurdity, and that these are probably the scenes that are most remembered. The plot of Duck
Soup is largely irrelevant, and much more of the Marx Brothers’ effort is spent on creating an
absolutely zany and ridiculous film that is meant to be laughed at. The slapstick nature of most of
the jokes thus do not lend themselves as readily to gender analysis as Groucho’s usual tirade
about the rich women that he is attempting to woo and Harpo’s harassment of random women.
A Night at the Opera (1935)
A Night at the Opera marks the Marx Brothers move away from the anarchic comedy that
their earlier films has done so well. In this film, the plot is central to many of the jokes, and the
characters that the brothers play are not entirely devoid of emotion towards others in the film.
Otis B. Driftwood, Groucho, is hired by Mrs. Claypool, yet another rich widow, to help her
become a member of high society through financing the Metropolitan Opera. The world of opera
in controlled by men, and Claypool must enlist the help of a man to break into the operatic scene.
While the two of them are in Italy with other members of the operatic high society looking for
talent to bring back to America, Rodolfo, a famous singer with reputation, is found and will be
chosen over a young singer, Ricardo, who has no reputation. Rosa, the female singer, is being
taken along with Rodolfo, even though she and Ricardo are in love. Fiorello (Chico) represents
�Ricardo and tricks Driftwood into signing Ricardo for Claypool, but as the members of the opera
are about to head back to New York, Ricardo and Fiorello, along with Tomasso (Harpo) are
unable to book passage on the ship. So, the three stow away in Driftwood’s massive trunk in the
hope that they will be able to make a living in New York.
Driftwood continually insults Claypool throughout the film, and once aboard the ship,
Tomasso wastes little time before chasing random women in the general Harpo gag. Rodolfo,
who is considered to be the greatest singer, believes that because of his talent Rosa should want
to be with him, not Ricardo. Rosa is shown being emotional and crying due to Ricardo being left
behind, though Ricardo is never seen to show such emotions before he sneaks aboard the ship.
Again, the crew of the ship is made up solely of men, and after the ship lands and the police are
looking for the three stowaways, the police are also made up solely of men. In the climactic
scene during the opera, when Tomasso and Fiorello are trying to give Ricardo a chance on the
stage in New York, the women singers in the chorus are thrown around and the clothes are
ripped off, resulting in a grin from Tomasso. The final song, sung by Rosa and Ricardo, has
Rosa’s face and chest as the only areas of the screen that are illuminated, and Ricardo is given
most of the credit for the applause that the two of them receive.
In the analysis of A Night at the Opera, there were a total of twenty-three instances of the
overt construction of women as subordinate that were listed, the majority of which were
introduced by Groucho’s character when talking about Claypool. While this film brought about a
shift in the style of the Marx Brothers’ humor, it did not include of a shift in tone that the
brothers had when referencing women. Groucho still attempts to elicit the majority of his laughs
through repeated derogatory jokes about women, especially the woman that has hired him and
who he is attempting to woo. Harpo’s character still chases women around and actively strips a
�woman of her clothing near the end of the film. A Night at the Opera is considered one of the
Marx Brothers most successful and best films,15 and as such, it has had an enormous impact on
the way that humor is viewed in regards to women.
A Day at the Races (1937)
A Day at the Races has Groucho playing a veterinarian, Hackenbush, who has duped a
rich woman, Mrs. Upjohn, into believing that he is a capable doctor for humans as well; in fact,
he has managed to convince her that he is the only one who can adequately treat her. In order to
save her failing sanitarium, Judy Standish implores Upjohn to invest and keep the sanitarium in
business. Upjohn’s agrees on the condition that Hackenbush will become the chief doctor, so that
she will be able to receive treatment from him. From the very beginning of the film both female
leads are shown as very emotional and eccentric, and all of the doctors in the sanitarium are men
and the nurses are all women. Tony, Chico’s character, Stuffy, Harpo’s character, and Gil
Stewart, Standish’s lover and straight man, try to help Standish keep the sanitarium in business
by keeping Hackenbush from being discovered and by purchasing a race horse. Standish
disapproves of Stewart’s purchase, and Stewart acts as though Standish simply cannot
understand the possibilities that the horse brings. While the horse is a failure in normal racing, it
turns out that the horse is an incredible jumper, meaning that Stewart will be able to win money
off of it after all.
Stewart, who is a singer, performs at a casino to make some money so he can place bets
on the horse races. During the musical number in the casino all of the dancers are women, and
every member of the orchestra is a man. Hackenbush makes numerous remarks to Standish
during Stewart’s performance about how he is surrounded by an all woman chorus, and
15
15
American Film Institute, “America’s Funniest Movies” (2002).
�Standish’s jealousy is obvious. Tony and Stuffy spend much of the film trying to help Stewart
with his horse, and after it is discovered that the horse would do well in the steeplechase, the
other horse owners want to keep it out of the race. Stuffy, who is also the jockey, eventually is
able to get the horse on the track and win the race, much to the dismay of the other horse owners,
who are all men. Stuffy spends a number of scenes either groping or ripping the clothes off of
women, all of which were already in Harpo’s repertoire of comedic gags.
In the analysis of A Day at the Races, a total number of thirty overt instances of the
depiction of women as inferior were observed, the majority again coming from the usual
comedic styles of Groucho and Harpo. Again there is a severe lack of women in roles of power,
with the exception of Standish as the owner of the sanitarium, with the police and doctors all
being men. Harpo’s move beyond simply chasing women has again been made to draw more
laughs from the crowd, and his character has grown to act more maliciously towards the women
that he encounters. Chico, who is largely absent from the way the films frame women, is fawned
over by groups of women in this film as a very handsome maestro. This film, which was the
longest at 111 minutes, contains a high number of explicit instances of the subordination of
women, especially because, while thirty instances may not be much higher than the other films,
many of the sequences in which Groucho makes fun of Upjohn contain many overtly sexist and
insulting remarks.
Conclusion
The Marx Brothers’ films work to reify dominant patriarchal gender norms in a number
of ways, such as the lack of women in positions of power, and the overall prevalence of men in
all aspects of the films. However, their most influential area in terms of emphasizing the
subordinate position of women comes from the use of comedy, especially from the usual jokes
�and gags that Groucho and Harpo make. Groucho’s repeated dialogues with the women that he is
attempting to woo are so loaded with insults and one-liners designed to decimate the woman that
it is somewhat astounding that he was able to fit them all in the time allotted for these dialogues.
Harpo’s repeated chasing, groping, and stripping the clothes off of women work to show how
such actions can be seen as funny when done by a seemingly childlike character. As the brothers’
style shifted away from anarchic comedy, their appeal increased, and A Night at the Opera was a
massive box office success.16 The success of the shift to more empathetic characters reflects the
disposition theory of humor discussed above, as audiences were able to more readily relate to the
characters that the brothers portrayed, which is troubling because it would follow that the
audiences were then more likely to attempt to replicate the jokes that they saw on screen.
This analysis has not meant to paint the Marx Brothers as terrible, sexist monsters; or to
shame those who enjoy their films. The Marx Brothers created hilarious films, and they contain
some of the funniest scenes in the history of film. It is important, however, to understand what
processes are involved in the construction of gender through these comedic films that are, even
to this day, so adored by audiences. Much of the Marx Brothers’ humor is based on the implied
secondary status of women in the world, and many of their jokes can be seen as outright sexist.
By analyzing these films, it is possible to begin to understand why certain aspects of culture
exist, even if these aspects contain insults that seemingly fly in the face of half of the population.
Through the examination of comedies with the lens of feminist film theory it is possible for some
of the most loved and viewed films to be understood in terms of what they have done for gender
construction and possibly even gender relations.
The five Marx Brothers’ films that were examined show how comedy can have a direct
influence on gender construction. Overt jokes and insinuations about women and their restricted
16
Sennwald, “A Night at the Opera (1935),” 22.
�roles are rampant throughout the films, and the blatant objectification of women by Harpo is
impossible to overlook. While these films are not the sole perpetrators of negatively portraying
women and negatively constructing femininity, the role that they played in such matters warrants
greater analysis by feminist scholars. Comedy is a genre that is extremely popular, which implies
that it has a substantial and wide-ranging audience, and the lack of attention that is has garnered
from film theorists in general is somewhat surprising. Analyzing comedy in terms of gender will
offer insight into the prevailing culture that has women as secondary citizens, and this analysis of
the Marx Brothers.
�Marx Brothers, Monkey Business
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monkey_Business_Barrels.jpg
Marx Brothers, A Night at the Opera
http://quienmemandaria.files.wordpress.com/2006/09/marx-brothers-a-night-at-the-opera.jpg
Groucho Marx
http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/styles/sas_polls_large_film_image/public/image/ducksoup-bfi-00m-kpr.jpg
�Harpo and Chico Marx
http://www.movieactors.com/freezes1/ducksoup209.jpeg
Duck Soup http://2.bp.blogspot.com/EhvUlkYX0OU/TWGjqLPOMSI/AAAAAAAABgQ/HrSevXrUXf8/s1600/duck-soup_592x299.jpg
�
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Women in Comedy: The Construction of Gender in Depression Era Marx Brothers Films
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Fuller, Paul
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Western Connecticut State University. Department of History
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Elliott Roosevelt: A Paradoxical Personality in an Age of Extremes
Theodore M. Billett
Elliott Roosevelt, the enigmatic younger brother of U.S. President Theodore
Roosevelt, is a compelling study in contradiction. Though several of Elliott’s closest
family members—from his brother to his daughter, Eleanor—became important figures
on the national stage in twentieth century America, he has largely been forgotten. The
reasons historians overlook Elliott, including his obscurity and the calamitousness of his
lifetime, are not unlike the motives that drove his family to similar reticence. Yet, a
deeper and more nuanced treatment of Elliott reveals much about late nineteenth century
America and about a complicated personality with intrinsic connections to important
historical actors. Like the Civil War of his childhood and the Gilded Age in which he
lived, Elliott’s life presents a complicated, often paradoxical existence. Born to a family
dissevered by the Civil War, raised in aristocratic society but financially inept, devoted to
social welfare causes but engaged in a life of frivolity and ostentation, praised for his
likeability but disdained for his selfishness, raised on notions of temperance and morality
but remembered for his intractable drinking and debauchery, Elliott resists simplistic,
unifying definitions.
Unable to tease apart the bifurcated nature of Elliott’s life, a more effective
picture of his character can be presented by wading into the mire of his contrasts.
Significant representations of Elliott’s duplicitous reality and his conflicting conduct can
be seen throughout his life. His household and family were wrenched by the Civil War.
He was committed to helping the unfortunate and needy, but lived the life of Gilded Age
boulevardier. While he was born into great wealth, he was so unsuccessful at managing
1
�his own finances that Theodore would eventually request control of his estate. His
church-going father and his presidency-bound brother were models of self-control, yet
Elliott would blossom into an obdurate and self-destructive alcoholic. He showed great
care and affection as a father, while simultaneously living a life of infidelity, even
fathering a child with one of the family’s housemaids.1 Elliott not only crossed social
boundaries, he overshot geographical constrictions with travels to the frontier-era western
states and to the distant subcontinent of India. Extremes, divisions, and hypocrisies seem
the hallmarks of Elliott’s span, creating a tumultuous trajectory that his daughter,
Eleanor, once described, in a tone of resignation, as “tragedy and happiness…walking on
each other’s heels.”2
The grandson of one of Manhattan’s “Wealthiest Ten,” Elliott was born in 1860 to
a notably privileged New York household.3 His own father, Theodore Sr., while not
expanding on the several-million-dollar fortune, nevertheless provided a moneyed
upbringing for Elliott and his siblings. Elliott recognized the fact by at least fourteen,
writing to his father, “I don’t believe there is any boy that has had as happy and care free
of a life as I have had.”4 Being raised in an advantaged, urban household in the 1860s
may have been “care free” at times, but there were uniquely grave realities that connected
nearly every family to the nation’s fratricidal Civil War. For Elliott, a divided house,
reflective of a fissured nation, was early on an unavoidable reality: his mother and her
1
Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Vintage Books,
2002), 140.
2
Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1937), 5.
3
David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback: the Story of an Extraordinary Family, a
Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 27.
4
McCullough, 147.
2
�family were active Confederate sympathizers, while his father and his kin were staunch
Unionist.
The Civil War was by design an internecine conflict, and the divisions that were
playing out on battlefields had their counterparts in family circles.5 The Roosevelt
household was particularly strained as a result of unharmonious maternal and paternal
allegiances. Elliott’s mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, raised in a patrician household in
antebellum Georgia, was an ardent supporter of the Confederacy.6 Conversely,
Theodore, Sr. threw himself wholly into efforts to support the Union cause, leaving home
from 1861 to 1863 to lobby in Washington for an Allotment Commission allowing
northern soldiers to send a portion of their pay home to their families.7 He was an active
member in the Union League Club and in the Loyal Publication Society, Union-loyalist
associations attended by New York’s upper class.8 A vocal abolitionist Republican,
Theodore, Sr. became remarkably intimate with President Lincoln, exchanging letters and
spending time with him in D.C.9 Theodore, Sr. would have fought for the Union cause,
but his wife had begged him to abjure on the grounds that “it would kill her for him to
fight against her brothers,” as the oldest of Elliott’s siblings, Bamie, recounted.10
Elliott’s parents were resigned to opposition in no small part because Mittie
situated her identity in her Southern familial heritage. The Bulloch’s were proud
5
Damon Eubank, In the Shadow of the Patriarch: The John J. Crittenden Family in War
and Peace (Atlanta: Mercer University Press, 2009). Eubank’s study provides an
example of torn family allegiances during the Civil War.
6
H.W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997),17. Brands
states, “Upon the outbreak of the war, a psychological fault line opened, running right
through the center of the house.”
7
McCullough, 58.
8
Dalton, 28.
9
McCullough, 59-60.
10
Dalton, 26.
3
�descendents of Georgia’s first “ ‘Revolutionary’ Governor,” Archibald Bulloch. Mittie’s
brothers, James D. and Irvine Bulloch, and her half-brother Daniel Elliott, were
committed Confederates and, with the exception of Daniel, would be forced to remove to
England at the close of the war due to their acknowledged participation in the secessionist
cause.11 During the war, James was something of a Confederate hero; he had acted as
“one of Jefferson Davis’ secret agents” to England, successfully commissioning the
construction of the rebel warship Alabama in Liverpool.12
Mittie’s consanguineous connections to the South led to open displays of loyalty;
following one southern victory, remarks historian Joseph Lash, Mittie produced a
Confederate flag, and hung it from their East Twentieth Street home.13 The display was
an irreverent and dangerous act, one that had landed others in prison.14 Mittie’s mother,
Grandma Bulloch, spent the war years with Elliott and his siblings in the house in New
York, and helped to “finance hospital supplies” for the Confederacy by selling family
silver.15
Mittie’s opposition to the Union, and her devotion to the South, did not go
unrecognized by her children. A favorite game among Elliott and his siblings during the
war years had been “run the blockade,” derived from knowledge of their rebel Uncle
James Bulloch’s daring transportation of “cargo of contraband goods” through Union
naval blockades.16 Mittie and her husband struggled to find common ground during the
war years. Evidencing a relationship placed under strain by internecine division,
11
Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of their Relationship Based On
Eleanor’s Private Papers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 5.
12
Dalton, 30.
13
Lash, 5.
14
Dalton, 29.
15
Ibid., 31.
16
McCullough, 55-57.
4
�Theodore wrote his wife from Washington, “I wish we sympathized together on this
question of so vital moment in our country, but I know you cannot understand my
feelings.”17
Elliott, young as he was, witnessed confusing displays, or, in his younger sister
Corinne’s revealing recollection, “much that was difficult and troublous.”18 A halfcentury later, Elliott’s brother, Theodore, would write in his autobiography that “towards
the end of the Civil War, although a very small boy, I grew to have a partial but alert
understanding of the fact that the family were not one in their views about that conflict.”19
Elliott, too, must have internalized the schizophrenic war allegiances that mingled in the
Roosevelt house. The conflicted couple introduced their children to a world that was
neither blue nor gray, but was instead an uncomfortable amalgam of the two, a disunited
coalition of North and South, a house both slavocratic and abolitionist. On the subject of
slavery, the Roosevelt couple was clearly conflicted; Theodore, Sr., described by a
contemporary with the maxim “firm against slavery,” could not reconcile with Mittie’s
unyielding support for the South’s peculiar institution.20 She simply could not break from
her Southern family’s dogmatic belief that slavery was justified and justifiable. Mittie’s
father had, in fact, been a close friend of Alexander Stephens, the outspoken Vice
President of the Confederacy, who asserted in no uncertain terms “the great truth that the
negro is not equal to the white man.”21 The conflicting views of Roosevelt-Bulloch
17
Ibid., 62.
Dalton, 26.
19
Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 11. Italics not in original text.
20
McCullough, 48.
21
Fordham University, “Alexander H. Stephens’ Cornerstone Address, March 21, 1861,"
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1861stephens.asp.
18
5
�couple, a response to overwhelming social and culture disunity, introduced Elliott to an
anomalous reality.
Another of Elliott’s southern descendents, Uncle Daniel Elliott, died during the
war.22 The departure of Elliott’s namesake was a solemn reminder that those family
members so regularly depicted in Mittie’s stories to her children were engaged in a lifeand-limb rebellion against the forces of national cohesion. News of Uncle Daniel’s death
would have elicited a strange intermingling of sympathy and disdain if the children
managed to connect him to their mother’s brutal tale of his having murdered his personal
slave “in a fit of rage.”23 Uncle Elliott was the embodiment of ambiguity: a violent
authoritarian and supposed murderer who was simultaneously the object of the Bulloch
women’s worries and affections.
The existential discord and contradicting personalities Elliott experienced in his
first half-decade of life continued beyond the war. Over the long term, Elliott maintained
an affectionate and lasting connection with his surviving Confederate uncles, especially
James D. Bulloch. Though James lived the remainder of his life in Liverpool, England,
his closeness with Elliott is evident in their correspondence. When Elliott was in the
propositional phase of his courtship of the blue-blooded beauty he would eventually
marry, Miss Anna Hall, he solicited a letter from James that exhibited a profound
connection with his southern relative. James’ letter, written twenty years after the war,
showed the persisting avuncular bond: “I, the near relative and friend [of Elliott]…having
often seen him in childhood and in all the stages of approach to his present condition…do
declare, that the said Elliott Roosevelt is a proper young man, and has always been
22
23
6
Dalton, 33.
Ibid., 34.
�dutiful as a son, tender as a brother, affectionate as a nephew, true and loyal as a
friend…”24 Elliott’s allegiance to his Confederate relations ran deep and, as historian
Joseph Lash has suggested, probably encouraged both him and his brother to be
“sympathetic with the restoration of white rule in the South,” and to accept the glaring
failure of Reconstruction to improve race relations.25
Elliott likely first met his Bulloch uncle when the man came to New York in 1865
or 1866, not long after the war’s conclusion.26 Still being sought by Federal authorities,
James traveled under an assumed name, a practice Elliott himself would resort to in his
own later, troubled years, when detection, even by family members, was unwelcome.27
With a deep abiding love for a man who, as Elliott knew, had illicitly delivered what may
have been the Confederacy’s largest wartime arms shipment, Elliott would have
understood that loyalty was complicated.28 That James Bulloch could be “one of the best
men I have ever known,” as Elliott’s brother described the veteran, and could also be an
agent of antisocial causes and outright martial rebellion was a Gordian conflict.29
The fissures of the Civil War years eventually gave way to the paradoxes and
paroxysms of the post-bellum period. The Gilded Age, Mark Twain’s enduring
appellation for the era 1870-1900, was coined before the end of the period it intended to
reference. Twain’s pithy designation is, therefore, freed from questions that might arise
about applying a term in retrospective inquiry or historical analysis; it is a
24
Elliott Roosevelt, Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt
Sportsman, ed. Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 147-148.
25
Lash, 27.
26
Theodore Roosevelt, 12.
27
For Uncle Bulloch’s clandestine visit see Theodore Roosevelt, 12. For Elliott’s
assuming a false identity, see McCullough, 369 and Lash, 52.
28
McCullough, 55-56.
29
Theodore Roosevelt, 13.
7
�contemporaneous phrase. Twain invoked the aphorism as the title for his co-authored
1873 novel of the same name about the corrupting material excesses of the period, and he
intended it to be a comment on the glaring social, economic, and political disparities of
the time.30 He was determined to show, as historian Rebecca Edwards said, “that
America glittered on the outside while it rotted at the core.”31 Ambivalence and socioeconomic disparity reigned, especially in the large American cities like New York.
Elliott’s reality was a United States that “combined modern technology with race hatred,
eager consumerism with grinding poverty, greed with good will, humanitarian impulses
with designs for economic empire.”32 Conflict and disparity were the defining elements of
the period, just as conflicting and paradoxical actions were the signature elements of
Elliott’s person.
The references to concomitant “greed and good will” and hypocritical
“humanitarian impulses” can be directly applied to Elliott Roosevelt’s existence. He
wore the dual-hat of selflessness and selfishness. As a young man, Elliott’s New York
was one of conspicuous socio-economic disparity. His own family home, a Victorian
architectural showpiece, was not far from the “squatter’s shanties” that had sprung up on
Manhattan’s West Side.33 A Chinese diplomat who visited New York in the period of
Elliott’s upbringing invoked a classical poem to describe the scene: “Crimson mansions
reek of wine and meat, while on the road lie frozen bones. Rich and poor but a foot
30
Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age (New York: New York University
Press, 1988), 4-5.
31
Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: American in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 4.
32
Ibid., 6.
33
Lash, 5.
8
�apart; sorrows too hard to relate.”34 It was estimated that as many as twenty thousand
homeless boys roamed the streets of New York in the 1870s and 80s.35 While still just a
boy himself, Elliott registered the human disparity, and responded to the economic
imbalance with simple attempts at redistribution. Here was Elliott’s humanitarian,
affectionate aspect. One remarkable act of compassion occurred on a cold winter
morning, when a seven-year-old Elliott came upon a ragged child in the street and, in an
effort to correct the circumstance, gave his new coat to the unfortunate youth. When
Elliott returned to the Roosevelt’s stately home he was asked where his coat had gone,
and he proudly recounted his corrective action.36
Elliott’s precocious humanitarianism reflected his father’s devotion to the
disenfranchised residents of the city. For Theodore, Sr., “philanthropy and civic
enterprise” came before business interests; humanistic causes were Sr.’s focus, and he
played an active role in founding the charitable Orthopedic Hospital, aggressively funded
the Newsboys’ Lodging House, befriended the great social reformers of his era like
Charles Loring Brace, and offered a Mission Class for impoverished young men.37 One
acquaintance of the elder Roosevelt pointed to his being unique among New York’s
moneyed circles in his interest in the poor: “At a time when most citizens of equal
fortune and education” neglected to assist the less fortunate, Sr. “was always engaged” in
philanthropic enterprise.38 Elliott accompanied his father, even as a boy, to the
Newsboys’ Lodging House, an influential tradition he would continue to act on for many
34
Edwards, 100.
McCullough, 28.
36
Elliott Roosevelt, ix.
37
Lash, 5.
38
Ibid., 5.
35
9
�years, taking up the mantel after his father’s death.39 In the late 1880s, Elliott’s own
daughter, Eleanor, accompanied him on trips to the same Lodging House. Eleanor, a
future champion of social welfare, claimed that one of her earliest memories, probably in
the late 1880s, was of her father taking her to a Christmas dinner for the newsboys.40
Throughout the 1880s, Elliott made his altruistic presence felt by New York’s
poorest residents. If, as Henry George had written in his Paradox of Capitalist Growth,
“the association of poverty with progress” was “the great enigma” of the era, Elliott
sought to provide some answer to the question of economic inequality with his own
personal acts of charity.41 The “great enigma” did not go unrecognized by Elliott, but
was, instead, made a lasting part of his reality by his constant devotion to philanthropic
action. The New York Times carried an article in the spring of 1885 describing “the
kindness of Mr. Elliott Roosevelt.”42 Elliott and his wife furnished a turkey dinner for the
West Side Boys’ Lodging House, another of the charitable institutions Sr. had originally
been familiar with. The boys “ate until their clothes didn’t fit,” and then Elliott offered
some encouraging remarks. The article closed by praising the Roosevelt couple as
“among those who make the boys happy.” The Times again recognized Elliott’s
charitable nature in December 1886 in an article aptly titled “Making Many Happy: Good
Dinners for the Poor and Those in Prison.”43 The article began:
At the West Side Newsboys’ Lodging House, No. 400
Seventh-avenue, the 120 inmates had their Christmas
dinner…It was furnished by Elliott Roosevelt, brother
39
McCullough, 247.
Eleanor Roosevelt, 27.
41
Leon Fink, Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Lexington, MA:
D.C. Heath and Company, 1993), 6.
42
“Boys With Significant Names,” New York Times, April, 30, 1885.
43
“Making Many Happy,” New York Times, December 26, 1886.
40
10
�of Theodore, and a few of his friends. These gentlemen,
attired in full dress, served the boys before going home
to their own dinners.
Along with the meal, Elliott paid for “all-wool flannel shirts” to be distributed among the
boys. Elliott had taken it upon himself to act as more than a distant fiduciary benefactor
to the newsboys: he was a physical presence in the lives of these least fortunate young
citizens. He had to enter the sphere of the impoverished children, as his father had. He
had to embrace the enigmatic disparity Henry George had indicated.
Elliott carried this charitableness with him even during the gravest periods of his
life. During his tragic final years, 1892 to his death in 1894, Elliott was forced by his
brother to accept a temporary exile in Abingdon, Virginia.44 After Elliott’s death, the
Richmond Times Dispatch published an account of the “charming gentleman” who had
spent his final years in the vicinity.45 The account described Elliott’s charitable nature as
a defining feature of his presence: “he had an almost uncanny knack of learning about
cases of sickness and distress around him and a way of quietly sending money, or
delicacies, or flowers, or words of comfort and cheer as the occasion required. At
Christmas he would buy hundreds of turkeys from the farmers and have them distributed
to the poor.” Elliott, whose life was, in the reporter’s estimation, “a daily practice of the
golden rule,” harbored the philanthropic impulses of his father, the celebrated social
reformer whose own obituaries had called him a “generous public spirit,” a devotee of
“high moral purpose.”46 Despite his apparent devotion to others, his record of giving to
44
Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume One, 1884-1933 (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1992), 73.
45
Goodridge Wilson, “When a Roosevelt Found Health in Virginia Hills,”
http://richmondthenandnow.com/Newspaper-Articles/Elliott-Roosevelt.html.
46
McCullough, 185.
11
�the needy, Elliott was simultaneously inclined to an “epicurean” existence, a word
Theodore used to describe his brother’s questionable behavior.47
It was his father, once again, who introduced him to the duplicity of feeding the
poor on one evening and, on the next, sitting down to a multi-course meal that was
prepared and served by domestic workers. McCullough, in his close study of the elder
Roosevelt, described him as “one who could work for the welfare of others without being
an acsetic.”48 Sr. combined his charity work with his love of high-class living. A striking
example of his periodically uncomfortable amalgamation of prosperity and poverty
occurred when he hosted a fundraiser for the Orthopedic Hospital at his opulent 57th
Street home. In the dining room, perched atop a large, undoubtedly expensive table, Sr.
placed “several pathetically crippled children” in order to solicit the donations of his
party-goers.49 The scene must have been shocking in its duplicity; the city’s wealthiest
men and women, like Mrs. John Jacob Astor, who was apparently moved by the
spectacle, stood in the ornate dining space of the Roosevelt’s uptown mansion while on
the table sat several crippled children who doubtlessly came from the city’s poorest
quarters.
Edwards noted the “greed” that countervailed the better impulses of the Gilded
Age personality, and though Elliott was more inclined to spending than saving, he was
certainly familiar with the lifestyle of New York’s haute monde. Although he was
committed to philanthropy, he lived like an English aristocrat, “riding to the hounds” at
his estate in Hempstead, playing polo at the Meadowbrook Club in Long Island, traveling
47
Lash, 11.
McCullough, 138.
49
Ibid., 138.
48
12
�to the garish estates in Newport, Rhode Island during summers.50 In his final years,
Elliott took to writing and produced a thinly veiled depiction of his egotistical,
unproductive life among the well to do. His story’s protagonist--Sophie Vedder-- admits,
in a reflective moment, “life has been a gamble. I have lived for pleasure only. I have
never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it.”51 The character continues
to offer explanatory aphorisms; “live and let live”; “never miss an opportunity of
enjoying life, no matter at what cost.” Indeed, Elliott was guilty of neglecting his moral
and fiduciary responsibilities. Edith Carow Roosevelt, the wife of Theodore,
remembered Elliott with unflattering clarity. “He drank like a fish,” she said, “and ran
after ladies. I mean ladies not in his own rank, which was much worse.”52
After Elliott married Anna Hall, “one of New York’s most beautiful women,” he
spent increasing amounts of time in the pursuit of expensive pleasures. According to
researcher Mason White, the couple were “prominent members of New York society and
were invited to dinners, dances, or theater parties nearly every night.”53 In the immediate
aftermath of Elliott’s tragic end, the New York World paid tribute to him as one of the
great, but forgotten, bons vivants of the age: “There was a time when there were not
many more popular young persons in society than Mr. and Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt.”54
When the couple had been married in 1883, the event was hailed in the New York Times
as “one of the most brilliant weddings of the season.”55 The Times reporter struggled to
50
Cook, 46.
McCullough, 248.
52
Ibid., 247.
53
Mason White, “Elliott, the Tragic Roosevelt,” The Hudson Valley Regional Review 5
(1988): 22.
54
“Elliott Roosevelt Dead,” New York World, August 16, 1894.
55
“The Roosevelt-Hall Wedding,” New York Times, December 2, 1883.
51
13
�convey the unmatched expense of the event with depictions of the attendees’ garish
outfits and the costly decorations like “banisters trimmed with fern and ivy.” The guest
list alone placed Elliott among the Nation’s stratospherically wealthy; listed were Astors,
Vanderbilts, Bigelows, and Livingstons.
There was a vast gulf between “Elliott the sportsman extraordinaire” and “Elliott
the philanthropist.” Each time Elliott ventured to go from one extreme to the next, it was
like crossing an invisible dividing line in society. Henry George’s “paradox” of the
Gilded Age may have been defining an existential disparity, but it neglected to illustrate
that individual men like Elliott were enigmatically to be found in both realities. All the
going-back-and-forth, from offering support for the needy on one evening to partying
uncontrollably on the following one, eventually seemed to rend Elliott’s internal world.
He lost the ability to retain control of his mental state, becoming an unpredictable, Janusfaced character to those closest to him.56 Theodore, an aspiring politician in the 1880s,
was disgusted with his brother’s “frivolous” living and did not doubt that the devotion to
ostentation was exacting a toll on Elliott. In a letter to their sister Bamie in 1888
Theodore was brutally honest about Elliott’s undisciplined existence, specifically
referring to the drinking and gaming conducted at his new home on Long Island: “I do
hate his Hempstead life. I don’t know whether he could get along without the excitement
now, but it is certainly very unhealthy, and leads to nothing.”57 Elliott’s life appeared
frivolous in other ways, as well: he lavishly spent money, but never succeeded in a single
financial venture.
56
57
Cook, 58.
Ibid., 50.
14
�This fact, that Elliott failed to profit even as those around him, like the
Vanderbilts, for example, were acquiring immense fortunes by investing in industries like
railroads, mining, and manufacturing, is almost too strange to measure.58 Theodore, for
his part, had chosen politics even before he was finished with college.59 But that Elliott
should have been unable to find some means of gain was probably the result of thinking
like that of his imagined protagonist Sophie Vedder. In the Vedder story there is a direct
reference to financial hardship, alluding to Elliott’s own stress: “wondering how long
one’s funds are going to last, takes the edge off of every pleasure in life.”60 Perhaps he
was simply spoiled by his affluent upbringing. After all, the generations previous were
historically successful, even if the fortune had waned. While Elliott’s father had
inherited two million dollars, Elliott’s inheritance was a comparatively meager
$125,000.61
Elliott’s forebears had been a tightfisted and frugal set, furiously driven to balance
their personal accounts in the direction of profit. Cornelius Van Schaak Roosevelt,
grandfather to Elliott, assured his future wife that “Economy is my doctrine at all times,
at all events till I become, if it be so, a man of fortune.”62 Van Schaak went on to cofound the Chemical Bank of New York, one of few banks to survive the Civil War, and
would make millions in plate glass importation. Elliott’s father, while not driven to great
business ends, was equally attentive to the balance of income and expenditure. Theodore,
Sr. once offered his namesake advice about his secret for maintaining financial stability:
58
Ray Ginger, Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914 (New York:
Macmillan Company, 1965), 93.
59
McCullough, 208.
60
Cook, 74.
61
McCullough, 205.
62
Ibid., 24.
15
�“keep the fraction constant.” The fraction, of course, was income-over-outlays, and Sr.
seems to have been true to his own aphorism. McCullough reports that despite an
“extravagant” lifestyle, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was more than just solvent.63
Elliott often admitted to “laziness.” In a letter written to Bamie from the
antipodes of Asia, Elliott, just into his twenties, seemed to suggest a reason for his
inaction. Explaining why he had gone to India, he wrote
There seemed little for me to do in New York that
any of you, my own people, could be proud of me for,
and naturally I am a pretty lazy fellow…If some of the
wise and strong among you don’t make a good chance
for me on my coming home I’ll make but a poor one
for myself I fear.64
Here Elliott’s laziness seems a self-deprecating cover for another issue altogether. Elliott
had always been economically reliant on others, and now, despite his having reached
adulthood, others, “the wise and the strong,” would determine whether or not he found a
profitable enterprise. Lash suggests that this learned entitlement, absorbed in his
younger years, combined with the “strong pull” of the social environment, had prevented
Elliott from finding success in the business world.65
It may, in fact, have been a fantastically ruinous investment that portended
Elliott’s physical death. Surely, Elliott’s peculiar end followed other devastating
personal tragedies, including his wife’s death from diphtheria, followed by that of his
son, Elliott. But the financial disaster he suffered in 1893 was a true blow to his waning
optimism. The Panic of 1893, a widespread economic depression, caused the failure of
63
McCullough, 206.
Lash, 13.
65
Lash, 10.
64
16
�Elliott’s banking and mining interests in Abingdon, Virginia. Abingdon reporter
Goodridge Wilson described the downturn as a paralyzing force, and noted Elliott’s
desperate but finally failing attempts to raise investment capital.66
In a letter written only days after Elliott’s death, Theodore acknowledged his
brother’s enigmatic and impenetrable two-facedness: “I suppose he has been doomed
from the beginning; the absolute contradiction of all his actions, and of all his moral even
more than his mental qualities, is utterly impossible to explain.”67 Theodore saw with
cold clarity the troubled inconsistencies in Elliott’s life. Most shocking for the aspiring
politician were the moral ambiguities that seemed to cling to Elliott. Later in his writing,
Theodore called Elliott’s life “strange,” which seemed an admission of Theodore’s
inability to understand the tensions that had pulled his brother apart. Whether he was
speaking of his deceased brother’s infidelity and alcoholism, or he was groping for a
recollection of Elliott’s better qualities when he wrote about moral “contradiction,”
Theodore was more content to remember the family myth surrounding Elliott’s “old,
generous, gallant self,” even if, or perhaps especially because, the notion of a Elliott as a
singular character, uniformly good or bad, was hard to comprehend.
The paradoxes of Elliott’s character, the gulf between his likeability and his
selfishness, became most apparent in his relationships with his wife and his daughter,
Eleanor. In part, his incongruousness was the result of something heretofore unexplored;
namely, Elliott’s alcoholism. While his brother seemed to get “fighty” when he drank, as
the future President once admitted, Elliott was prone to bouts of maudlin contemplation
that gave way to great spasms of exuberance. Most present-day historians that confront
66
67
Wilson, “When a Roosevelt Found Health in Virginia Hills”.
Cook, 89.
17
�Elliott’s drinking place it at the center of his personal failure and ultimate ruin. Lash’s
chapter on Elliott’s final years, titled “The Crack Up,” described a capricious alcoholic,
traveling abroad at great expense to half-heartedly attempt sobriety.68 Historian B.W.
Cook concluded that Elliott was, by the late 1880s, “increasingly mercurial” as a result of
his “excessive” consumption of alcohol.69
Even in death, Elliott was physically indecisive, restless for upheaval. The
Roosevelts would initially have him buried in their family plot at Greenwood, but after
his wife’s family asked that he be laid with his marriage partner and son in Tivoli, his
body was exhumed and driven north, following the treed watercourse of the Hudson.70
68
Lash, 34-35.
Cook, 37.
70
Cook, 91-92.
69
18
�Elliott Roosevelt with Elliot, Jr., Anna Eleanor, and Hall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elliott_Roosevelt_and_Children.jpg
Theodore and Elliott Roosevelt
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OUILuhErA7w/UFQkEpIG4eI/AAAAAAAAAj8/GdYyxKD6qY/s640/Roosevelts.jpg
19
�
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Elliott Roosevelt: A Paradoxical Personality in an Age of Extremes
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Billett, Theodore
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1
Gods, Men, and Monsters: The Three Faces of Nazi and Soviet Posters
John Sokolowski
During World War II, propaganda served as a prime instrument for the control and
mobilization of the masses by world governments and was used by all sides during the war. After
the war, propagandists would be charged in war crimes courts for the first time in history.1
Wartime propaganda in Nazi Germany would prove to be so successful that, even after the war,
Germans would not believe or trust information from the Allies, their former enemies.2
Posters
were a great tool for propagandists; they were cheap, transportable, and easily understood by
their intended audiences. The posters used by the governments in both Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union are remarkably similar; they are often only different in the language of the text and
whether the primary figures are donning a black swastika or a red star. The infamous uses of
World War II-era visual propaganda illuminated the ideologies held and sought to be spread by
those in power during this dreadful era of total war. First, both parties depicted their own leaders
as superhuman. Second, propaganda posters represented their citizens and allied people as
humans with great value to their country. Third, both sides portrayed their enemies as inhuman
monsters. The imagery in posters used by both the Nazis and Soviets elaborated the likenesses
of both parties and their ability to affect the minds of their people in order to strengthen the war
machine in their own territories.
The propaganda posters of both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union present their leaders
as superhuman, and glorify them to a point that brushes the level of deity worship, aiming to
1
Steven Luckert and Susan Bachrach, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda (Washington DC: The
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; New York: Distributed by W. W. Norton, 2009), 141.
2
Ibid, 144.
�2
further trust in these leaders and inspire the masses to get behind them. Both Nazi Germany and
the Soviet Union are well known for the personality cults of their primary leaders, Adolf Hitler
and Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union would frequently depict Vladimir Lenin, Stalin’s
predecessor, in posters as well. However, Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin were rarely depicted amongst
typical people, with the odd exception of young children, and would instead be portrayed as
standing in front of a crowd of people or as a giant towering over them. This figurative
presentation suggested that the three men were ‘above’ their people, literally portraying the sense
that they were the utmost leaders to their people.
Hitler was commonly depicted on propaganda posters before World War II began, first in
campaigning posters and afterwards as a savior to Germany. Hitler would often be depicted in
posters as a lone subject standing tall and looking either off into the distance or staring directly
towards the viewer. In later cases, Hitler would be illustrated standing in front of a massive
crowd of loyal and proud Germans, usually saluting him. Hitler was almost always depicted in a
military tunic, which presented him as a soldier and furthermore as a man of the people.3
Captions tended to be simple slogans, including “Führer we follow you! All say Yes!”4, “One
People, one Reich, one Führer!”5, and the simplest and most glorifying, “Adolf Hitler is
Victory!”.6 Each of these simple slogans emphasized Hitler’s importance to the German people
and his supreme leadership as Führer. Slogans on propaganda posters in general would be brief
and express the point clearly; different posters would often present the same idea but
3
4
Ibid, 111.
Olive-Drab, “Nazi/German Propaganda Poster,” http://olive-
drab.com/gallery/npp_description.php?top_photo=gp0016.jpg (accessed May 2, 2012).
5
Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation, “Nazi Propaganda,”
http://library.thinkquest.org/C0111500/ww2/german/naziprop.htm (accessed May 2, 2012).
6
Randall Bytwerk, “Nazi Posters: 1933-1945,” German Propaganda Archive,
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters2.htm (accessed May 2, 2012).
�3
differentiate the manner in which it was written. Hitler is commonly shown to be adored by the
public, especially by young children. In several posters, Christian imagery was used that
suggested Hitler was a messiah to the German people and that he was the embodiment of all that
is good in the Third Reich. In one particular poster, with a caption reading “Long live
Germany!”, a celestial light is shining past a flying dove and down onto Hitler, who is waving
the Reich’s flag in front of a crowd of more German flag bearers.7 This would suggest that the
war was some sort of holy quest or crusade, inspiring Germans to work harder for their nation
and instill a deeper sense of pride.8 The crowds that surrounded Hitler in posters further
established his supreme power as the Führer and demonstrated the German people’s
unconditional support for his glory. Spatially, Hitler would often take up the majority of the
poster or he would be portrayed as something of a giant, which suggested his paramount
importance and power.
Posters from the Soviet Union glorified Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin as supreme and
all powerful icons as well. Although Hitler was commonly portrayed as both a superhuman
leader and a deity in posters, Stalin and Lenin would split the roles. Stalin would be depicted as
a powerful and masterful leader, and Lenin would be portrayed as something of an immortal god.
Lenin died in 1924, more than a decade before World War II began, and his presence alone in
propaganda posters would suggest his immortal spirit. The two Soviet icons would be portrayed
as supermen of great power and intellect. Lenin would never be portrayed smiling and, thus, was
presented as a stern taskmaster pushing the Russian people to win the war.9 Lenin was
7
Olive-Drab, “Nazi/German Propaganda Poster,” http://olivedrab.com/gallery/npp_description.php?top_photo=gp0136.jpg (accessed May 5, 2012).
8
Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation.
Essortment, “Soviet Propaganda Posters,” http://www.essortment.com/soviet-propaganda-posters37362.html (accessed May 1, 2012).
9
�4
frequently depicted as a face on a flag or with strong resemblance to a statue, making his
presence much more symbolic than Stalin’s more human-like depictions. Stalin, on the other
hand, would be shown smiling and, similar to Hitler, amongst children, sometimes even
embracing them.10 On most occasions he would be
signaling a military attack with one hand and in the other he
would be holding a pair of binoculars or parchment of some
sort. This implied that Stalin was an intelligent military
strategist who oversaw everything and a functional military
commander of the Soviet armed forces. Stalin’s typically
commanding hand seemed to signal the military beneath
him to press forward into battle. Soviet posters would
contain slogans glorifying the two men as well. For
instance, the caption reading, “Stalin is a greatness of our
time! Stalin is a banner of our victories!”, suggested that Stalin was the embodiment of Soviet
victory, similar to the previously mentioned German poster with the caption “Adolf Hitler is
Victory!”. 11
During World War II, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were autocratic regimes.
The imagery used by both parties in propaganda posters depicted the leaders of the two countries
as superhumans or gods, which strongly reflected their autocratic status by constantly stressing
the leaders’ supreme power and superiority over the people. The images used in posters would
ideally reiterate this relationship between the leader and the citizens of the respective country.
10
Essortment.
All World Wars, “Russian WWII Propaganda Posters,” “Stalin is a greatness of our time! Stalin is a banner of our
victories!” http://www.allworldwars.com/Russian%20WWII%20Propaganda%20Posters.html (accessed
May 2, 2012).
11
�5
Posters also aimed to instill trust in leaders, as well as make them symbols of hope. Leaders
became symbols of patriotism and would hopefully inspire such in whoever viewed these
posters. The trust in leaders and furthered patriotism would be a major asset to the governments
of Germany and the U.S.S.R., both of which needed recruits to fight in the war, and the public’s
backing and trust to achieve victory. The propagandists of World War II would simultaneously
remind the people of their own importance and their leaders’ reliance on them to win the
conflict.
Propaganda posters used by the Nazis and Soviets depicted their own citizens as capable
and valuable human individuals in order to empower and inspire their people to take part in the
war. Posters containing soldiers or citizens usually pictured one person or emphasized one
greatly amongst the others pictured. Often, a single soldier would be shown accomplishing a
great task. In the Soviet poster captioned, “Glory to the heroes, partisans destroying fascist’s
rear” a lone fighter is shown cutting power lines by a burning landscape.12 This poster portrayed
the devastation caused by what is implied to be a single individual. The people featured in
posters were illustrated as humans; though it may sound insignificant that people were portrayed
as people, this stood in deep contrast to how all-important leaders and outsiders were represented
in posters. By depicting average, but strong-looking people, posters would create a more
identifiable image to their audiences. Citizens and soldiers were not only shown to be valuable
and capable, but they were also individually glorified as heroes.
The posters used by the Nazis and Soviets depicting citizens and soldiers shared so much
in common that it seems the poster artists could have used the same template. Soldiers were
12
SovietPosters.com, “Soviet Propaganda Posters,” http://sovietposters.com/showposter.php?poster=41
(accessed May 3, 2012).
�6
depicted taking up the majority of the poster with their faces always visible; the background may
contain military vehicles or other soldiers moving forward, but there was always heavy emphasis
on the individual in the foreground. The individual portrayed in a poster was much more
identifiable than images of military masses standing below a giant leader. Although the posters
of leaders served their own purpose of showing the leader’s importance, these posters of
nameless individuals aimed to show the importance of the people. Whether the individuals in
posters were factory workers, farmers, or soldiers, they would all be glorified as heroes to the
country. Individuals would be depicted standing strong and tall, representing preparedness for
whatever lies ahead. People shown to be moving were usually leaning forward, as if in a charge,
showing their relentlessness and courage. Soldiers were shown to be well armed, well supplied,
cleanly shaved, neatly dressed, and having the skills for the job. Soldiers were rarely depicted as
being wounded or, for that matter, even having dirty or battered clothes. Instead, the uniforms of
illustrated soldiers seemed to always look brand new. This created a very positive image of
friendly soldiers as respectable people, and that they were living in conditions not as harsh as
those one would normally associate with war. Soldiers would almost always be depicted with
their mouths closed and would never be depicted screaming or showing signs of fear. This
presented the notion that soldiers should and would be courageous and conserved, even in the
heat of combat.
Ancestral imagery used with modern people was another common occurrence in Nazi and
Soviet propaganda posters. Hitler believed that the forgotten epochs of history could be salvaged
and successfully made useful in the present, and this would be proven in ancestry-related
posters. 13 In these posters soldiers would be moving into action in the foreground, and in the
13
Luckert and Bachrach, 13.
�7
background the men would be paralleled by images of soldiers from a conflict of that region
years ago. The use of ancestry also built off the idea that the spirits of the dead are passed down
bloodlines into modern generations. Ancestors tended to be depicted in black and white or faded
colors, suggesting spirits even further. The posture of the soldiers in the present mimicking the
heroes of the past hinted at reincarnation, but, more importantly, that World War II soldiers were
the modern equivalents to the glorious heroes of the past.
A
Soviet wartime propaganda poster featured a soldier leading
troops into a charge, and in the background Kuzma Minin, a
Russian war hero from the 17th century, in the same posture
leading a charge14. The text above Minin quoted him in
saying, “There will be no force which can enslave us.”15 The
text below the World War II Soviet soldier featured a quote
from Stalin saying, “Let courageous image of our great
ancestors inspire you.”16 Stalin’s quote explains the objective
of using ancestry in propaganda posters. By associating
soldiers with the glorified heroes of the past, current soldiers
would be thought of as heroes and would be inspired to follow the paths of their ancestors.
Russians that were familiar with Minin might have already held him as a personal hero, and
therefore many would consider it an opportunity to follow his model by joining in the current
conflict.
14
All World Wars, “Russian WWII Propaganda Posters,” “There will be no force which can enslave us. (Minin,
17th century). Let courageous image of our grea t ancestors inspire you. (Stalin)”
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
�8
Another common aspect in posters was that individuals would be staring off into the
distance, in the same manner that Hitler was often portrayed. This gaze gave a sense that the
individual was optimistically looking into the future. This
expression is comparable to other famous images that promoted
hope and optimism, including the iconic image of Che Guevara
and the more recent “Hope” campaign poster of President
Barack Obama. This optimistic and bold gaze towards the
future was used in World War II as a means to incite hope and
optimism in the masses, assisting the country in moving forward
into further conflict.
Many Nazi and Soviet propaganda posters focused on
factory workers as well. Posters of factory workers frequently
portrayed a union between soldiers and workers, often marking them as equals. 17 This equality
would be developed by portraying soldiers and factory workers as mirror images of each other.
Soldiers and workers were often depicted as having identical faces and being the same height.
The only major difference between the two figures would be the clothes they were wearing. This
would give the idea that workers were just as important as soldiers and additionally that workers
were just as capable and vital to the war effort. In a German propaganda poster, captioned with
the slogan, “You are the front,” a shirtless and muscular blacksmith is depicted with the black
and white image of a German soldier looking optimistically into the distance behind him. The
slogan of this poster elaborates the importance of the home-front worker and the soldier’s
reliance on him. Posters like this one tended to display muscular men at work because the
17
Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation.
�9
depiction of masculine strength was believed to inspire further confidence.18 Other posters
depicted workers handing supplies to soldiers or soldiers thanking workers for their efforts.
These images presented the military’s reliance on workers by illustrating a nonexistent physical
interaction between workers and soldiers. The posters would remind workers of their
significance in the war effort, offering the thanks of the military that workers probably never
received.
The posters used by the Nazis and Soviets depicting their people served as a major means
of inspiration. Soldiers and workers alike were glorified as heroes in the propagandists’
illustrations. The emphasis on individuals furthered the point that everyone served a purpose and
that one person could accomplish a lot towards the war effort. The soldiers and workers depicted
in posters created role models for the public.19 The glorious illustrated heroes of posters would
ideally inspire recruitment, greater effort, cause to fight and work harder, and even encourage
personal sacrifice from individuals. The glorification of the people in general and as individuals
would express their necessity and capability in the war effort. The governments of the Nazi and
Soviet regimes would rely on the support and commitment of their people in the war effort, so
propagandists would need to empower the people in order to achieve the governments’ goals in
the war. Posters would show how all efforts were important, even if they were just the actions of
a single human being. These images would glorify military actions, but posters would still need
to create an image of the enemy to remind viewers why they were fighting.
Nazi and Soviet posters both depicted their primary enemies, most often each other, as
inhuman monsters capable of great terror and destruction. All of the participating governments
18
19
Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation.
SovietPosters.com.
�10
in World War II realized that effectiveness in the war required their people to accept the enemy
as vile and barbaric.20 The enemy subject of Soviet wartime propaganda was primarily the
Germans, but on some rare occasions the allies of Nazi Germany would be pictured as well. The
Nazi party had a larger variety of enemies and depicted them all, including the Americans and
the British, but depictions of Jews and Bolsheviks were the most hateful.
Hitler actually admired the effectiveness of Allied propaganda campaigns during World
War I, especially for representing the Germans as bloodthirsty and barbaric.21 These
representations increased Allied rage and hatred towards the Germans and simultaneously
prepared their own soldiers for the horrors of war.22 Using images of the enemy as brutal
barbarians evoked the necessity to defend a country against said enemy and implied that fighting
in the war and killing the enemy was morally justifiable.23
The two most represented enemies in Nazi posters were Jews and Soviets. Jews were
depicted as an alien race that leeched off Germany while destroying the country from the
inside.24 Jews were given devilish looks that suggested treachery and conspiracy, and they were
frequently compared with rats and other longstanding negative stereotypes.25 The depictions of
Soviets would be despicable stereotypes or personifications of an insane hatred towards
mankind.26 These horrendous representations would sometimes come together to present the
supposed Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy across Europe described in other Nazi propaganda.
Soviet propaganda, too, would regularly and ruthlessly target their enemy, the Nazis. Soviet
20
Luckert and Bachrach, 2.
Ibid, 14.
22
Ibid, 14.
23
Ibid, 14.
24
Ibid, 86.
25
Oracle ThinkQuest Education Foundation.
26
Luckert and Bachrach, 124.
21
�11
propaganda in general aimed to constantly denunciate the enemy and, furthermore, attempted to
expose their every mistake, injustice, and weakness and wind these into a central theme. 27
Soviet posters “demonized Hitler and dehumanized Germans in general.”28
Both parties tended to depict one another’s soldiers in either of two general manners. In
many instances enemy soldiers would be depicted as monsters. Their faces were often distorted
and pictured with an open-mouth grimace, and locked in a menacing and rather mindless stare.
In a Soviet poster captioned, “Kill the fascist monster!”, the German enemy is depicted as a
strange creature with pointed ears and whiskers wearing a monocle and Nazi officer’s hat.29 In
another poster captioned, “For the honor of your wife, for the life of your kids, for the happiness
of the Motherland, kill the invader!”, a German soldier is seen walking away from a lifeless
woman, who is possibly pregnant, with a child clinging to her still body.30 The German soldier
is depicted as a creature that is half-man and half-ape, shown with an under bite, hunched back,
and hairy arms.31 When using inhuman imagery, Nazi posters stuck to the image of Bolsheviks
as poorly dressed, ruthless, and stupid savages; although, in a few cases the Bolsheviks were
depicted as devils as well. Their faces were usually heavily deformed and missing teeth while
they dressed in heavily worn clothes and held an outdated pistol. Both parties often depicted
their enemy carrying a torch, a major symbol of sabotage and destruction as both parties partook
in the scorched earth retreating policy. The torch would often be combined with apocalyptic or
burning landscapes, painting the enemy as a harbinger of devastation. If the enemy was not
portrayed as an inhuman monster, they were still largely devoid of prominent human
27
Jean-Marie Domenach, “Leninist Propaganda,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 15:2 (Summer 1951)” 267-270.
Essortment.
29
All World Wars, “Russian WWII Propaganda Posters,” “Kill the fasc ist monster!”
30
All World Wars, “Russian WWII Propaganda Posters,” “For the honor of your wife, for the life of your kids, for
the happiness of the Motherland, kill the invader!”
31
Ibid.
28
�12
characteristics and would remain largely faceless. Faces of the enemy would be mostly obscured
or the only exposed part of their face, usually the eyes, would be strongly expressing frustration,
implying hatred. At other times the enemy would be plainly depicted as a dead body laying face
down. The Soviet poster captioned, “Cut the bastards!”, illustrates a Russian soldier on
horseback about to cut down a German soldier with his sword32. The Russian and his horse take
up most of the poster, and only the German’s nose is visible
from underneath his helmet. Even the caption in this poster
seeks to conceal as much of the German’s human identity as
possible, referring to him only as one of the common
“bastards”.
32
All World Wars, “Russian WWII Propaganda Posters,” “Cut the bastards!”
�13
The leaders of the opposition to either side would not be spared, the depictions of the
enemy’s supreme leader tended to be the opposite of how the enemy portrayed their own leader.
Stalin, depicted by his people as an intelligent military commander, was illustrated by the Nazis
as a caveman-like brute with a protruding forehead and mindless gaze. Hitler, depicted in
Germany as an all powerful and courageous deit y, was portrayed by the Soviets as small, feeble,
and cowardly. Both sides frequently portrayed their opposition’s leader to be covered in blood
or, at least, with bloodstained hands. These depictions challenged what may have been presented
by the international media in the past. The posters of opposing leaders were more of a satire than
a means to spread fear and seemed not to have been taken as seriously as the depictions of enemy
combatants.
Enemy soldiers depicted in the same poster as allied
soldiers were either shown to be dead, dying, or about to be
struck down. Enemy soldiers were never shown overpowering
the friendly soldiers. In these cases, the friendly soldier would
be facing the poster’s viewer and the enemy soldier would
almost always be falling with their back turned to the viewer. If
their face was exposed, it would not be expressing fear of their
certain death, but, instead, a frown or snarl. A Nazi poster--used
in Ukraine--with the caption, “Stand up to fight Bolshevism in
the ranks of the Galicia division”, depicted a grotesque looking
�14
Soviet soldier being stabbed by a German.33 Ironically, the German is clean and the Soviet
soldier is not bleeding all over him; however, the Soviet monster’s hands are covered in blood
and he is dropping an already bloody knife.34 The bloodstained hands suggest the enemy’s guilt
in murdering others. It was important that depictions of the enemy soldier did not show his fear,
as this would suggest that the enemies could be considered as victims. By continually showing
the opposition as only expressing anger or hatred, even when the subjects were facing their own
deaths, posters maintained the enemy soldiers’ identity as monsters. In addition, the horrid
identity of the enemy simultaneously made the friendly soldiers look even better. The enemy
would be thought of as a monster that killed innocent people, but the allied soldier would be seen
as a man that heroically killed monsters in defending innocent people.
The primary goal of the monstrous and inhuman depictions of the enemy was to
dehumanize them. Once enemy soldiers had been ridden of their human identity, posters could
turn them into diabolical monsters that deserved to die. This transformed the opposing forces
into a threat that soldiers would be more willing to go toe-to-toe against than another human, like
themselves. It is important to remember that battles fought in World War II, especially those
between the Germans and Russians, were unforgiving and brutal. Soldiers could expect to
engage in hand-to-hand combat and any hesitation in killing an enemy soldier would mean
certain death. The horrific depictions of enemies found in propaganda posters aimed to prevent
soldiers from having any hesitation from killing the enemy and, instead, would glorify their
killing. The images of enemies found on propaganda posters would fuel the hate machines of
both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The threat of a monstrous enemy would be the third
33
Randall Bytwerk, “Nazi Posters: 1933-1945,” German Propaganda Archive,
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters/russia.jpg (accessed May 5, 2012).
34
Ibid.
�15
and final piece in propaganda posters necessary to mobilize the minds of both Germans and
Russians and to prepare them for war.
The obvious similarities between the propaganda posters of Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union allow us to consider the similarities of these two regimes that hated each other so
intensely throughout the conflict. The damage done by the war went beyond the physical death
and devastation of armed conflict. The effects of the worldwide use of mass propaganda also left
imprints on the minds of the people of each nation. The propaganda posters of World War II are
a look into the mentalities of this era, granting access to an imaginative representation of how
people could have perceived themselves and the rest of their world, or more accurately what
propagandists wanted the masses to perceive. The disgracefully glorious and unbelievably
grotesque images featured in Nazi and Soviet posters show how vulnerable the mentality of
humans can be, especially in such desperate warring times. It is hard to imagine, but at one time
these posters literally filled and littered popular city streets. Average people were exposed to
these posters on a daily basis, and whether they initially believed or disregarded these posters, it
would surely leave some sort of an impression on them. Nazi and Soviet propaganda posters
were primarily used to convince the public of the war’s necessity and for everyone to ‘do their
part’ in the effort. The numerous and specific uncanny similarities between Nazi and Soviet
posters further demonstrated how the two governments shared the same simple goal: to mobilize
a hate machine against the other as a means to overpower the enemy and survive the war.
The ultimate irony of Nazi and Soviet posters is that this paper, and all research regarding
propaganda posters, are written testament that the propagandists failed. The designers of these
posters attempted to paint their own deceiving history of World War II as it happened, but these
�16
posters can now be used years later in an attempt to honestly generate a deeper understanding of
the historic conflict and the ideologies behind it.
�17
�
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Vol. 39, num. 1, Clio - 2013
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Gods, Men, and Monsters: The Three Faces of Nazi and Soviet Posters
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Sokolowski, John
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Western Connecticut State University. Department of History
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https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/studentOmeka/files/original/Vol._39_num._1_Clio_-_2013/58/007_Stammer_-Threats_to_French_Republicdone.pdf
470644cfd66c3a09fd49047720088ccb
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Text
Stammer 1
The Reign of Terror: A Background to the Bloodshed that Saved the
Revolution
Jared M. Stammer
“They repeated that she must shout ‘Vive la nation!’ With disdain, she refused. Then one of the
killers grabbed her, tore away her dress, and ripped open her stomach. She fell, and was finished
off by the others. Never could I imagine such horror. I wanted to run, but my legs gave way. I
fainted. When I came to, I saw the bloody head. Someone told me they were going to wash it,
curly its hair, stick it on the end of a pike, and carry it past the windows of the Temple. What
pointless cruelty!” 1
-Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, September 1792
“Now what is the fundamental principle of democratic, or popular government – that is to say,
the essential mainspring upon which it depends and makes it function? It is virtue… that virtue
which is nothing else but love of fatherland and its laws… The splendor of the goal of the French
Revolution is simultaneously the source of our strength and of our weakness: our strength,
because it gives us ascendancy of truth over falsehood, and of public rights over private
interests; our weakness, because it rallies against us all vicious men, all those who in their
hearts seek to despoil the people…It is necessary to stifle the domestic and foreign enemies of the
Republic or perish with them. Now in these circumstances, the first maxim of our politics ought
to be to lead the people by means of reason and the enemies of the people by terror. If the basis
of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the basis of popular government in time of
revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue without terror is murderous, terror without which
virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing else than swift, indomitable justice; it flows then, from
virtue.”2
-Maximilien Robespierre, addressing the National Convention, February 5, 1794
1
Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme, Les nuits de Paris (Paris: Hachette, 1960) 247-53
France. National Convention, Maximilien Robespierre, “Speech to the National Convention”, February 5, 1794,
quoted in Raymond P. Stearns, Pageant of Europe (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947), 404-405.
http://www.pitt.edu/`syd/terror.html (accessed January 19, 2013).
2
�Stammer 2
Was the Reign of Terror necessary to the survival of the fledgling French Republic? Or
was it superfluous and senseless carnage, fueled by a radically extreme and paranoid regime?
Understandably, these are not simple issues to resolve, and have provoked a great degree of
scholarly debate from historians such as William Doyle, Georges Lefebvre, Albert Mathiez, and
Albert Soboul, with each author trying to understand the motivations and actions of not only the
twelve members of the Committee of Public Safety, but also of their opponents. This essay
examines the threats that faced revolutionary France from 1789-1794, and will then address the
actions of the Montagnard-controlled National Convention and Committee of Public Safety
beginning after the expulsion of the Girondin from the National Convention in June 1793, to
consider the effects that they had on French government, society, and the military.
The necessity of the Jacobin “Reign of Terror” can be traced back much further than the
dropping of the guillotine blades in late 1793 to the multitude of domestic enemies that
threatened to dismantle the populist gains of the Revolution. These enemies included the
Bourbon monarchy, the aristocracy, conservative clergy members, and legislative members who
hindered the success of the war effort and the stability of the French economy. Their efforts to
unravel the revolution cement a view of the Jacobin Terror as an act of political bloodshed; a
societal purge that maintained the strength of Parisian leadership of the Revolution and rallied
French passions for the economic and military successes of 1794.
Prior to and during Montagnard control of the French Revolutionary government, the
French government faced numerous and serious domestic threats to the survival of the
revolution. These included threats from the Bourbon monarchy, former aristocratic members of
the Ancien Régime, the rebels of the Vendée, Girondin and Federalist resistance, and the
Catholic Clergy opposed to the Civil Constitution of 1790. While not all of these forces were
�Stammer 3
counter-revolutionary, their opposition to the French government in its various forms from 1789
to 1793 either threatened to undermine support for the regime within France, or to assist the
foreign invaders of the First Coalition. The Montagnard response to its enemies, which it
perceived as counter to the ideals of the Revolution, and harbingers of a return to Louis XVI’s
absolute monarchy, was radical action, which included the Reign of Terror that began in
September 1793 and concluded with the fall of the Montagnard government and the execution of
Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794.
The duplicitous actions of King Louis XVI had endangered the revolution even from its
infant stages in 1789, and as the revolution progressed and spread beyond Paris, the deceptive
nature of the monarch remained unchanged. Indeed, King Louis XVI grew increasingly resistant
to the concept of a constitutional monarchy, and he became more of an impediment to the good
governance of France. Despite his claims to have adopted “without hesitation a favorable
constitution,” his stated willingness to “bequeath him [his son Louis XVII] a constitutional
monarchy,” and his reaffirmation of happiness and freedom within the new French government,
Louis’s actions proved his desire to undermine the revolution and restore the Ancien Régime. 3
The King sought to flee in order to regroup with his supporters on the frontiers of France, to
weaken the Legislative Assembly against its internal detractors, even as he was also complicit in
starting a war with Austria, and pleading with foreign governments to intervene on behalf of the
old social order.
The Flight to Varennes, King Louis XVI’s attempt to escape to royalist supporters on the
frontiers of France, displayed the King’s true sentiments concerning the revolution, and his
3
John H. Stewart, A Documentary Survey of the French Revolution (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951),
200-202. (Letter from Louis XVI to Foreign Courts, April 23, 1791)
�Stammer 4
desire to see it undone. The plan, orchestrated and financed by Count Axel de Fersen, a close
friend and possible lover of Marie-Antoinette, involved transporting the King out of Paris
disguised as a common bourgeoisie with a small guard, supposedly protecting a shipment of
money. Louis would travel to Montmedy, into the hands of François Amour, the Marquis de
Bouillé, a still loyal French general. Then, once he was safe from the Parisian clubs and the
Legislative Assembly, the King would join French royalists and Austrian forces to demand the
dissolution of the revolutionary assemblies and the restoration of his absolute authority.4 Despite
King Louis XIV’s proclamations of loyalty to the Constitution of 1791, his failed attempt to flee
from the watchful eyes of the revolutionaries in Paris showed his desire to restore the Ancien
Régime through armed foreign intervention.
Although he was within the legal rights granted him as constitutional monarch under the
Constitution of 1791, Louis XVI’s rejection of legislative decrees hindering counterrevolutionary movements also undermined the very constitution which empowered him, and
which he was charged with upholding. These decrees, involving émigré and clergy that had
refused the Civic Oath, were designed by the Legislative Assembly to force potential counterrevolutionaries to return to France and the new social order. Louis XVI vetoed the first decree on
October 31, 1791, which ordered the Count of Provence, his brother, to return to France. The
Legislative Assembly was concerned about his émigré status, as the Count would be the legal
regent in the event of Louis XVI’s death while the Royal Prince was in his minority.5 On
November 9, 1791, the King vetoed a second decree, which ordered émigré to return to France,
lest they be charged with “conspiracy against the Patrie,” punished military officers who
4
Albert Soboul, The French Revolution 1787-1789: From the Storming of the Bastille to Napoleon (New York:
Vintage Books, 1975), 222-223.
5
Stewart, Documentary, 271-272. (Proclamation Ordering the Count of Provence to Return to France, October 31,
1791)
�Stammer 5
abandoned their posts, and sentenced to death those émigré who recruited and enlisted men to
resist the French government.6 This was a measure designed to protect the fledgling government
in Paris from military defectors forming a counter-revolutionary army outside of France.
King Louis XVI also vetoed legislation requiring that all clergy who had not already
taken the Civic Oath of loyalty do so, as required by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. If these
clergy members refused, they would forfeit their pensions and stipends that they received from
the government and be held accountable as accomplices for religious disorder manifesting itself
as anti-government or religious sectarian violence within their parish or diocese.7 This exercise
of his royal veto power was another example of King Louis XVI attempting to create a
constitutional crisis in France by hindering the Legislative Assembly from protecting itself
against counter revolutionary threats. In vetoing the legislation, Louis XVI aided the non-oath
taking, or refractory clergy, in their resistance to the French government and the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy, and further enabled them to link the causes of the French Catholic
Church with that of counter revolutionary forces and ideas.
However, the King’s unwillingness to approve decrees designed to thwart counterrevolutionary threats did not apply if those decrees or legislative decisions would lead into a
disastrous European war. Aptly playing off the political infighting within the Legislative
Assembly, Louis XVI used Girondin and Jacobin animosities to further his own political agenda
of restoring power to the monarchy. As the crisis with the Holy Roman Empire arose over the
concentration of armed émigré across the border in Trèves, the King eagerly issued his
ultimatum to the Elector of Trèves, demanding the dispersal of the émigré. Secretly, Louis hoped
6
7
Ibid, 273-274. (Decree Ordering Émigrés to Return to France, November 9, 1791)
Ibid, 274-279. (Decree Requiring Non-Juring Clergy to Take the Civic Oath, November 29, 1791)
�Stammer 6
that it would be rejected, and that the crisis would erupt into war. In a letter to the Imperial
Court, he wrote that “…there would be a political war in Europe and this would greatly improve
the situation. The physical and moral condition of France is such as to make it impossible for her
to resist even a partial campaign.”8 The King believed that a disastrous French defeat would lead
to the restoration of his absolute authority.
As the Revolution grew in 1789 and Louis XVI began to lose control of the French
government and military, he began reaching out to foreign courts with the hope that other
European monarchs would assist in the destruction of the Revolution and the restoration of his
absolute monarchical powers in France. In a letter from November of 1789 to Charles IV of
Spain, he decried the degradation of his dynasty and royal dignity.9 In a letter to the King of
Prussia, dated December 3, 1791, Louis wrote of the revolutionaries’ “scheme for destroying the
remnants of the monarchy.” Louis XVI’s correspondence with other European monarchs carried
the warning that their states could also succumb to the republican passions that France now
endured, unless the royal families of Europe jointly resolve to aid one another. He proposed the
idea of a congress of royals from Russia, Prussia, the Holy Roman Empire, Sweden, and Spain to
create an armed force to stop the revolution and prevent “the evil which torments us from
overcoming the other states of Europe.”10 While Louis XVI publically embraced the Constitution
of 1791, his private correspondence shows the steadfastness of his resolve to oppose the new
constitution and the Revolution. Rather than submit to the Legislative Assembly and surrender
his absolute monarchical authority, Louis XVI preferred the possible devastation of France
8
Soboul, French Revolution, 236.
John Hardman, Louis XVI, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 174.
10
Stewart, Documentary Survey, 279-280. (Counter-Revolutionary Letter from Louis XVI to the King of Prussia,
December 3, 1791)
9
�Stammer 7
through war if it would mean the overthrow of the Legislative Assembly and the destruction of
the Revolution.
Though King Louis XVI was ultimately outmaneuvered by the assemblies that gradually
eroded and then abolished his absolute monarchical authority, Louis himself was a substantial
threat to the early political gains of the Revolution. Although he finally failed to restore the
ancien régime, the threat that he posed to the fledgling French Republic was immense. Louis
XVI’s attempt to flee France and the control of the Legislative Assembly would have
delegitimized the new constitution and government, and helped gather crucial support for
counter-revolutionary forces. Having failed to escape France and finding himself confined within
Paris, Louis XVI still found ways to frustrate the government of France, using his power of veto
to thwart important measures intended to hinder and thwart counter-revolutionaries. Yet Louis
XVI was not only willing to support counter-revolutionaries to resist the French government; he
would see the devastation of France at the hands of foreign invasion if it meant the return of his
absolute monarchy.
The King and his royalist supporters were not alone in their counterrevolutionary
activities. Reactionary elements of the French Nobility, through the assembly of notables, played
a significant role in driving King Louis XVI to call the Estates General in 1789 by refusing to
sanction Calonne’s proposal to reform the French tax system, and instead suggesting a
convention of the three estates for the first time since 1614. Though this significant action would
ultimately lead to the Revolution and his downfall, the nobility was outraged and disgusted with
the radical transformations of French government and society that followed. Indeed, much like
Louis XVI, members of the nobility such as Dumouriez and de Bouillé feigned loyalty to the
Revolution while seeking to undermine it and the threats it constituted to their historic noble
�Stammer 8
privileges. The nobility sought to use its hold on the French military to cripple the Revolution, to
foster civil war by removing the King from the control of the National Convention through
outright treason and the support of revolt and rebellion in disaffected regions of France.
As the threat to Louis XVI’s crown and person became increasingly apparent between
1789 and 1792, the danger to the Revolution of the aristocratic entrenchment in the military also
became obvious. Still loyal to the ancien regime, generals from the nobility created dissent
within the military by punishing, dismissing, and disgracing those soldiers within their armies
supportive of the Revolution and abusing their control of regimental funds.11 As a result of these
abuses, soldier mutinies against the corruption of their aristocratic generals forced violent
conflict between units, and also disrupted and damaged the cohesion of the armies.
Aristocratic resistance to the attacks on their status and privileges within military ranks
had begun early during the Revolution in1789. Admiral d’Albert thwarted workmen’s attempts
to join the National Guard in Toulon, and forbade the wearing of the National Guard cockade,
causing a mutiny of workmen and sailors in November 1789.12 However, these disruptive
incidents were not limited to Admiral d’Albert or Toulon, as similar aristocratic abuses and
resulting mutinies occurred throughout France, in Brest, Strasbourg, Marseilles, and Perpignan.13
These mutinies and outbursts against the abuses of noble privilege in the military were not
limited to any particular region, this aristocratic retribution and resulting disorder could be found
throughout France.
11
Albert Mathiez, The French Revolution, trans. Catherine A. Phillips (New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1962), 74
A circular symbol or knot of ribbons with distinctive colors pinned to a hat to displ ay political allegiance.
13
Mathiez, French Revolution, 74-75
12
�Stammer 9
At Nancy in August of 1790, the most serious of these soldiers’ mutinies occurred and
was violently suppressed. Soldiers of the régiment du Roi, the regiment de Mestre-de-Camp
Général, and the régiment suisse de Châteauvieux mutinied following the excessively brutal
punishment of soldiers who had demanded an audit of the regimental funds and had been
subsequently beaten and forced to run a gauntlet. In response to the mutiny at Nancy, the
Marquis de Lafayette ordered General de Bouillé to take “vigorous measures against the
mutineers,” who then ignored parley attempts from the mutineers and marched on Nancy. The
mutiny, which had erupted because of the abuse of noble privileges within the military, was
suppressed in a manner of contempt and scorn for the mutineers. Lafayette encouraged military
actions without heed to the soldiers’ grievances, and de Bouillé was determined to force a
military confrontation rather than to convince the mutineers to stand down and peacefull y
surrender. Following the defeat of the mutinous regiments on August 31, their political clubs
were closed, twenty of the mutineers were hanged, and forty-one were condemned to serve on
the galleys.14 This was certainly a defeat for the mutinous soldiers, but a disaster for the Second
Estate, as such cruel actions only highlighted the aristocratic abuses of their military privileges to
the more radical elements of the Revolution. Lafayette, de Bouillé, and other French nobles
within the military were willing to use to cruel and violent measures to retain their privileges
against the commoners and bourgeoisie soldiers within the military.
The King’s attempted flight to royalist supports at Montmedy, which had been devised
and enacted with the complicity of elements of the nobility, was another indicator of their lack of
loyalty to the Revolution and danger to the French government. The conspiracy sought to free
the King from his captivity in Paris and deliver him safety to a royalist army led by General de
14
Mathiez, French Revolution, 75-76.
�Stammer 10
Bouillé, the same de Bouillé who was responsible for the violent suppression of mutineers in
Nancy in 1789.15 However, this was not the first attempt to rescue Louis XVI from Paris; a
previous attempt to escort him from the Tuileries had been attempted by four hundred nobles.
Acting while the National Guard was quieting a disturbance at the Chateau de Vincennes on
February 28, 1791, the chevaliers du poignard were only thwarted by Lafayette’s quick return.16
If either of the attempts to rescue Louis been successful, the King’s escape to the French frontier
or to the Austrian lines would have provided a powerful symbol around which the counterrevolutionary forces could rally.
Noble émigré under the leadership of King Louis XVI’s brother, the Comte D’Artois
threatened the Revolution by seeking the courts of foreign, European monarchs and hoping to
persuade them to take direct, military action against the revolutionaries in Paris. By September
1789 the Comte D’Artois had established a quasi-sanctuary for noble émigré in Turin, in the
Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled by his father-in-law Victor Amadeus III. From here the Comte
D’Artois first began to reach out to European monarchs for assistance, such as the Austrian
Emperor Joseph II and the Spanish King Charles IV, urging them to use their militaries to
pressure the French government into releasing Louis XVI and the royal family, but he was not
successful.17 In May 1791 the Comte D’Artois first met with the Austrian Emperor, now Leopold
II, who had succeeded his heirless, older brother in September of 1790, but was refused any
tangible support. A month later, the noble émigré relocated to Coblenz, and in July the Comte
D’Artois met with Leopold II and Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm in Pillnitz, where the two
15
Sobul, Revolution 1787-1789, 222.
Mathiez, French Revolution, 124-125.
16
The Chevaliers du Poignard, translated as the Knights of the Dagger, were named such after the fact to mock their
attempt to free the Louis XVI.
17
Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution Doctrine and Action 1789-1804 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971), 149-152.
16
�Stammer 11
German monarchs dismissed émigré pleas for direct, military involvement, but agreed to the
Declaration of Pillnitz, which warned the French revolutionaries against further actions towards
the French royal family.18 Though the Comte D’Artois was unsuccessful in convincing the
European monarchies to secure the release of the French royals and aid the counter
revolutionaries, the growing interest of the Austrians and Prussians in the well-being of the
French monarch showed the dangerous influence that the émigré could have abroad.
The defection and treason of Charles Dumouriez, General of the Armée du Nord, was a
disaster for the French military, and another indicator of aristocratic resistance to the Revolution.
Events in the first weeks of March 1793 had already begun to indicate that Dumouriez had
become contemptuous of the actions of the National Convention, such as the closing of political
clubs in Belgium, the restoration of church property, and the arrest of Executive Council
commissaries.19 On March 23, only days after his defeat at Neerwinden by the Austrian Prince of
Saxe-Coburg, Dumouriez was in contact with the Austrian camp, plotting to dissolve the
Convention, restore the Bourbon monarchy, and surrender Belgium to the Austrian forces.
Though Dumouriez arrested and handed over Commissaries from the National Convention sent
to arrest him, he was ultimately not able to convince the Armée du Nord to march on Paris to
dissolve the convention. Instead, he was forced to flee to the Austrian lines after he was fired
upon by Battalion Commander Davout and volunteers from Yonne in the first week of April.20
Dumouriez’s defection was a disaster for the Armée du Nord, for the morale of the struggling
French military, and for his supporters within the government, such as members of the Girondin
factions and Georges Danton.
18
Godechot, Counter-Revolution, 155-157.
Mathiez, French Revolution, 300.
20
Mathiez, French Revolution, 302.
19
�Stammer 12
Members of the aristocracy also sought to take advantage of rebellions and insurrections
within France, especially in disaffected regions outside of Paris such as the Vendée, Midi, and
the cities of Lyon and Toulon. In the Vendée, the nobility arrived months after the initial uprising
in early March with the intent of leading the farmers and peasants that had risen up against the
government in Paris, such as Lescure and Rochejacquelein, who joined the Vendée revolt only
after the defection of Dumouriez in April, 1793.21 In the Midi, the nobility attached themselves
to the Catholic and royalist camp entrenched at Jalès in August 1790, which was finally forcibly
dispersed in February of 1791.22 During the Federalist Revolt, counterrevolutionary nobility
arrived in Toulon and Lyon to organize and command those cities’ resistance to the republican
government. In Lyon, the comte de Precy commanded the defenses of Lyon and quickly staffed
his headquarters with nobility and émigré, while in Toulon, nobility and royalist refugees raised
the Bourbon flag under the protective watch of British forces commanded by Admiral Hood.23
After it became clear that the conservative reforms that the nobles sought would not
occur and that it would not benefit from the radical transformation of French politics and society
brought about by the Revolution, the French aristocracy maligned and impeded the security and
stability of the new government at every opportunity. Generals such as de Bouillé and
Dumouriez worked to cripple the military by harassing non-noble soldiers, conspiring with
royalists, using their military positions to scheme for personal power, and ultimately, defection.
In the Vendée and other disaffected regions of France, they attempted to subvert local discontent
with the failure of the Revolution to bring meaningful change and turn that discontent into
royalist insurrections. The nobles also fostered civil war by attempting to garner support in
21
Mathiez, French Revolution, 308.
Soboul, Revolution 1787-1789, 170, 212.
23
David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2005), 187-188, 237.
22
�Stammer 13
foreign courts and they hired foreign mercenaries with the intent of returning to France to
dissolve the new government and restore the ancien regime. Their actions were a serious danger
to the survival of the Revolution, and one that the Jacobins were keenly aware of as they
assumed control of the French Republic in 1793.
Conservative elements of the French clergy were also a threat to the survival of the ideals
of the Revolution and the republican government in Paris. The curés that supported the
Revolution hoped that it would address class and corruption issues within the French Catholic
Church, which saw a vastly uneven distribution of church funds between the more rural, lowerorders and the more urban, higher-orders, chapters, bishops, and cardinals.24 Although the lowerorder clergy administered parishes that provided over half of the French Catholic Church’s total
funds, they had no say in the allocation of these funds instead, this privilege was reserved for the
higher-orders and members of the clergy.25 Additionally, access to the more influential higherorders and rank within the French Catholic Church was informally restricted to the off-spring of
wealthy nobles, who could pay to ensure the advantageous placement and advancement of their
sons. The result of this was that in 1789 nearly the entirety of the higher-orders and upper
echelons of the French Catholic Church consisted of noble-born officials from just thirteen noble
families.26 The economic and social divisions that plagued late eighteenth century France were
mirrored in the French Church.
The overwhelming support that the curés gave the Revolution was first manifested in the
elections and convening of the Estates General in 1789. Despite the expectations from the
Church hierarchy that the upper-echelon of the clergy would be selected, they were in fact
24
Curés are parish priests of pastors, normally of the lower orders.
William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 34.
26
Doyle, Oxford History, 34-35.
25
�Stammer 14
terribly rejected; of the 303 deputies elected to represent the First Estate, over 75% were curés,
15% were bishops, and the remaining 10% were a scattered assortment of officials from varying
religious orders, chapters, and urban parishes.27 As a result of the success of the curés in the
delegation elections, the demands of the First Estate mostly represented their interests, including:
“higher stipends, abolition of tithe impropriation, unrestricted access to diocesan administrative
posts, canonries, and bishoprics[SIC], and church government by elected synods.”28 Though the
curés agreed with the Church hierarchy on the role of the French Catholic Church in French
society, they hoped that the Revolution would bring egalitarianism to the Church without
challenging that privileged societal status.
The hope and faith that the curés placed in the ideals and goals of the early stages of the
French Revolution concerning ecclesiastical affairs was irrevocably destroyed for many of the
clergy with the introduction and establishment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July of
1790. The Civil Constitution of the Clergy was by no means the start of the French government’s
consolidation of the Church into the realm of the State. Tithes had been abolished and Church
revenue nationalized in late 1789, and many ecclesiastical orders had been dissolved in February
of 1790, while the administration of church property had been handed over to the French
government in April of 1790. Whereas the previous ecclesiastical reforms had concerned
themselves with the revenue and expenditures of the French Catholic Church, the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy sought to completely reorganize Catholicism in France. In addition to
restructuring the boundaries and number of dioceses and parishes in France, and guaranteeing an
annual salary of livres as compensation for the loss of church tithes and vestry fees, the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy subjugated the French Catholic Church to the French government, and
27
28
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 99.
�Stammer 15
not the Pope.29 For many conservative members of the clergy, this was overstretching state
authority. The ecclesiastical measures being passed by the National Assembly no longer were
reforms concerning hierarchical corruption. Instead, they were an attack on the Catholic Church
itself. This was only reinforced by the refusal of Pope Pius VI to sanction the Civil Constitution
of the Clergy and break the Concordat of 1516.30 As oaths were taken and refused surrounding
the clerical acceptance of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, it was in French Catholicism that
the Counter-Revolution obtained its first real amount of popular support.
The refractory clergy, or those members of the French clergy who refused to take an oath
of loyalty to the French constitution, became a potent, counter-revolutionary threat following the
passing of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. These threats from the clergy manifested in the
poorer and more religiously fervent portions of the French countryside, particularly in southern
and western France. With few exceptions, Catholicism and the refractory clergy normally played
a supporting counter-revolutionary role, linking French traditions, religion, and monarchy,
advocating them as the solution to the radical regime in Paris, which it blamed from the
economic troubles France endured through the early 1790s.
The most dangerous threat to the survival of the Revolution and the republican
government to arise as a result of the counter-revolutionary, refractory clergy was the uprising in
the Vendée that began in March of 1793. Though the uprising in the Vendée was primarily a
popular response to the economic hardships that remained unaddressed first by the Legislative
Assembly and later the National Convention, in conjunction with unpopular conscription
29
Doyle, Oxford History, 136-142.
The Concordat of 1516 guided relations between the King of France and the Pope. It gave the King authority of
the Church in France in temporal matters, and a great measure of control over ecclesiastical property holdings. Th e
Pope still maintained authority in spiritual matters.
30
�Stammer 16
measures enacted to sustain the French armies to combat the foreign enemies of the French
government, the refractory clergy also played a prominent role in the anti-government violence
throughout the region, as the rebels targeted priests who had sworn the oath to the constitution
for violence and adorned themselves with religious imagery.31 The refractory clergy did not take
up arms themselves, but they encouraged and gave religious sanction to the anti-government
crusade of the Vendéans.
John McManners argues in The French Revolution and the Church that the violent
uprising that occurred in the Vendée was based solely upon the economic hardships of the
regions, as well as the rural alienation from the perceived “foreign” metropolitan government in
Paris. McManners contends that since the refractory clergy did not incite the Vendéans to
rebellion, religion did not play a role in the outbreak of violence in that département. He points
to reduced revenue in the Vendée département as well as the increased taxation upon the rural
poor and the reintroduction of conscription, the levée en masse, which authorized a national levy
of 300,000 conscripts, as the reasons behind the Vendéan uprising against the republican
government. McManners explains the avowed Catholicism of the Vendéan rebels away as
merely a product of the religiously conservative region and as their subconscious method for
rationalizing their armed rebellion against the French Republic to themselves.32 McManners sees
the refractory clergy and Catholicism not as the causes of the Vendéan rebellion, but rather as a
subconsciously derived rallying cry from the Vendéans and as a scapegoat from the atheist,
Parisian, republicans.
31
32
Mathiez, French Revolution, 309.
John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982) 81 -84.
�Stammer 17
McManners is correct in identifying the economic hardships and outrage with the levée
en masse as two of the primary reasons for the Vendéan uprising against the republican
government, but the Catholic religion was also at the heart of the conflict. The Vendée in 1793,
in addition to being a poor, rural département, was so staunchly Catholic that it did not even have
a Protestant minority. The French Catholic Church was involved in nearly all of the social
activities and traditions of the peasantry. With little access to the metropolitan activities and
lifestyle, and no means of procuring them, the lives of the peasants revolved around their local
parishes. It is not surprising then, that when the rural curés rejected the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy, the peasantry overwhelmingly rallied behind them.33 The clergy of the Vendée, like their
counterparts in Western France, refused the oath in numbers greatly disproportionate to the other
départements of France. While the average percentage of refractory clergy per département
throughout the rest of the nation was 55%, the average in Western France was closer to 90%.34
Catholicism was not a sub-conscious motivation for the Vendéans, used only for their own
personal self-justification, as McManners argues. It was an important and central aspect of the
Vendéan Uprising.
Although the most resolute clerical resistance to the Revolution began with the adoption
of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in July of 1790, some clerical counterrevolution preceded
it. François Froment, a spurned Catholic ecclesiastic who visited the comte d’Artois in Turin in
January 1790, gained approval to capture towns in the Midi in preparation of an émigré invasion
and raised a small Catholic military unit.35 In the city of Nǐmes in June of 1790, prior to
departmental elections, Froment’s Catholic militia clashed with Protestant National Guardsmen.
33
Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000), 327.
34
Ibid., 328.
35
Godechot, Counter-Revolution, 152.
�Stammer 18
For four days, Froment’s militia, reinforced by religiously fervent peasants from the surrounding
countryside, fought the Guardsmen for control of Nǐmes, though they were ultimately defeated
and suffered close to 300 deaths by the time the fighting ended. The Protestant minority in
Nǐmes not only physically controlled the city, but also won sound victories in the département
elections.36 As a result, Catholics in and around Nǐmes saw the Revolution and the republican
government not only as anti-Catholic, they viewed it as potentially pro-Protestant.
Following the outbreak of war between France and Austria, and soon thereafter, France
and Prussia, the Girondin quickly proved themselves to be impediments to military victory and
therefore a threat to the survival of the Revolution, for if the French military failed to resist the
foreign invaders, the ancien regime would reestablish itself in France. As the French economy
and military faltered in the face of foreign threats, the Girondin, as representatives of the middleclass, property-owning French, were unwilling to embrace the necessary reforms to safeguard the
nation and the Revolution. Furthermore, once their power and influence diminished in Paris and
they were expelled from the National Convention, it was the Girondin who threatened to plunge
the fledgling republic into civil war through insurrections advocating federalism and the
reduction of Parisian power, as well as seeking reconciliation with and assistance from the same,
reactionary counterrevolutionaries who sought to destroy the Revolution and reinstate the
Bourbon monarchy. Though the Girondin themselves were not, as a whole, counter
revolutionary, it was their inept governance and ultimate treason that nearly destroyed the
Revolution at the hands of insurrectionary royalists and foreign soldiers.
Ever fearful of legislative assaults on property rights and supportive of laissez-faire
economic policies, the Girondin were apprehensive about taking the decisive, radical actions
36
Doyle, Oxford History, 137-138.
�Stammer 19
needed to safeguard the Revolution, and terrified of the sans-culottes and lower-class French
men and women whose support they would need to effectively run the country. In spite of
rampant price inflation and food shortages in Paris, which had led to increased popular support
for extreme radicals such as the Enragés and Jacques Hérbert, the Girondin refused to entertain
the notions of supply and price regulations.37 Anxious about the increasing power of the lowerclass, especially those already serving in the French army, the Girondin opposed military reforms
to reorganize the army and merge professional and volunteer units, and also opposed attempts to
increase recruitment of much needed volunteers in spite of manpower shortages and foreign
invasion.38 Further, in seeking to diminish the influence which Paris held over the National
Convention, their advocacy of a more federated state would have decentralized power in France
at a time when centralization was necessary for a successful conduct of the war effort against
Austria and Prussia.39 The failure of the Girondin to coordinate between the rebellious
départements during the Federalist Insurrection hints at the disastrous effects that their policies
would have had on military organization and effectiveness in combating the Austrian and
Prussian threat to the Revolution.
It was Girondin ineptitude that led to unnecessary war with Austria and Prussia in the
spring of 1792, nations that, while concerned with the well-being of the Bourbon royals and the
general affairs in France, had no direct interest or desire for war that year. Both Austria and
Prussia, along with Russia, were far more interested in territorial gains to the East, particularly in
Poland. Although all three powers were nominally opposed to the French revolutionaries and the
concept of republicanism, no power desired to risk a commitment to a conflict with France and
37
Morris Slavin, The Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Girondin (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 4.
38
Ibid., 6.
39
Ibid., 7-8.
�Stammer 20
render itself unable to acquire Polish lands as a result.40 Furthermore, Austria, after having
recently emerged from a victorious but disappointing war with the Ottoman Empire, still faced
potential threats from the Prussians and Polish to the North.41 The lack of interest that that
Austrians and Prussians displayed in making war on France was not unique; the other European
powers were also preoccupied. The Kingdom of Spain and Great Britain nearly went to war in a
dispute over the Nootka Sound in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, a dispute
which would not be resolved until 1795, long after French government had declared war on both
states.42 These wars, initiated by the Girondin, forced the attention of the European powers to
turn to France. These declarations of war were not the response of foreign threats or activities,
however; rather, they pulled the French nation into unnecessary wars which threatened the
French state and Revolution.
The zeal of the Girondin in forcing war with the Austrian, and soon thereafter, Prussian
monarchies proved nearly fatal to the Revolution and to an unprepared French republic. The
French army, plagued by desertion, disorganization, and inadequate logistical support, was not
ready to wage a military campaign in 1792, let alone one against two of the great powers of
Europe. In the wake of the Revolution, the army had experienced a mass desertion of its officer
corps, as members of the nobility increasingly emigrated from France as the Revolution became
progressively more radical and their noble privileges were dismantled. Already by June of 1791,
over sixty per cent of the French officer corps had deserted their posts and fled the country to
join the émigré.43 Additionally, the army remained disorganized and divided into two distinct
branches: one comprised of professional soldiers who had served the old regime, and one
40
T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787-1802 (New York, Arnold, 1996), 42.
Ibid., 39.
42
Ibid., 42.
43
Blanning, Revolutionary Wars, 85.
41
�Stammer 21
comprised of patriotic volunteers dedicated to the Revolution. This resulted in infighting
between the two branches over matters such as rank, pay, and status, and it had already led to
mutinies in 1791 in Lille, Hesdin, Perpignan, Metz, and Nancy.44 The volunteers, while fervent
supporters of the Revolution and the French nation, were poorly trained and exhibited poor
military discipline; it was questionable how reliable they would prove under the command of
noble generals.45
Ultimately, it was the Montagnard faction of the National Convention that was cognizant
of the Girondin ineptitude in governing the young republic, and it was the Montagnard faction
that realized that the Girondin faction, despite good intentions, was a threat to the continued
existence of republicanism in France. On March 25, 1793, the Montagnard Bertrand Barère
proposed the idea for a Committee of Public Safety to serve as an executive power for the French
Republic, with the hope that it would consolidate legislative war measures, lead to a simpler,
more centralized decision structure, and stop individual ministers and committees from impeding
the war effort through conflicting interests.46 Instead, the Girondin sought to use the Committee
of Public Safety to promote their own political interests, to combat radicalism and Parisian
influence over the National Convention. Their first target was Jean-Paul Marat, editor of the
radical publication “L’Ami du peuple” and later “Le Journal de la République française,” but
under overt pressure from the sans-culottes and the urban poor of Paris, Marat was acquitted.
Unable to silence Marat, the Girondin attempted to move the seat of government from Paris to
Versailles, but this to, due to Parisian resistance, was unsuccessful.47
44
Doyle, Oxford History, 147.
Blanning, Revolutionary Wars, 84.
46
Doyle, Oxford History, 227-228.
47
Doyle, Oxford History, 288-229.
45
�Stammer 22
Frustrated with Parisian obstruction of their anti-radicalism measures, the Girondin then
sought to investigate and purge insurrectionary activity in Paris and the National Convention. To
this end they established the Commission of Twelve, which was quickly successful in securing
the arrests of Jean-François Varlet, leader of the Enragé faction, and Jacques-René Hébert, both
radicals. After intense criticism of these arrests, the Girondin Maximin Isnard threatened the
destruction of Paris with help from the other départements should Parisians and the sans-culottes
attempt to intervene, declaring that “Soon they would search along the banks of the Seine to see
if Paris had ever existed.”48 This and similar Girondin statements promising département
vengeance should the National Convention be assaulted by Parisians produced the opposite result
than what was intended, and on June 2, 1793 outraged Parisians, along with between 75,000 to
100,000 National Guardsmen surrounded the legislative chambers of the National Convention
and demanded the arrest of the Girondin deputies, a demand that the Convention complied with
before the day was through.49 Though the Girondin had now been purged from the very National
Convention that they themselves had sought to purge, Girondin sympathizers in the départements
threatened to plunge the republic into civil war.
Following the expulsion of the Girondin from the National Convention and their
subsequent arrests, rebellion broke out in Girondin-sympathetic départements across France.
Though many of these départements soon recanted their bold declarations against the Convention
and laid down their arms, this was not the case everywhere. In Lyons and Toulon, events
occurred that displayed the lengths that the Girondin would go to in order to protect their
property rights over the survival of French republicanism.
48
49
Ibid., 233.
Ibid., 235.
�Stammer 23
Lyons had been in revolt even prior to the expulsion and arrest of the Girondin, after
having recognized that Montagnard economic policy was prevailing. In early May, the city
mobilized its locally controlled National Guard, overthrew the Jacobin Commune and the
Jacobin municipal authorities, and declared against the convention.50 Fearful of retribution from
Paris, Lyons allied themselves with counter-revolutionary aristocrats, tried and imprisoned local
Montagnards and Jacobins, executed the leader of the Jacobin club in Lyons, Joseph Chalier, and
entrusted the command of their National Guard to a returned émigré, the Comte de Précy in
July.51 The resistance in Lyons, however, was short-lived, as the Army of the Alps quickly
returned from its campaign in Savoy, isolated Lyons from other rebellious départements, began
bombarding the city in August, encircled it in September, and finally forced the surrender of
Lyons on October 9, 1793.52
Though the rebellion of Lyons had outraged the Montagnards, as France’s second largest
city arrested radical deputies and collaborated with émigré, the revolt in Toulon went far further
in its opposition to Paris and the National Convention. In August, the Girondin and aristocracy of
Toulon were bolstered by like-minded refugees from Marseilles, after infighting there had driven
the Girondin and royalist rebels out.53 Cognizant of the armies now sieging Lyons, and
disheartened by the collapse of federalist resistance in Marseilles, the Toulonais panicked and
requested the protection of the British and Spanish fleets that were currently blockading the
city’s access to the Mediterranean Sea. On August 27, British and Spanish soldiers occupied the
city, French Admiral Jean-Honoré de Trogoff de Kerlessy surrendered his fleet, and the city
50
Doyle, Oxford History¸231.
Mathiez, French Revolution, 318-319, 330.
52
Ibid., 340.
53
Doyle, Oxford History, 249.
51
�Stammer 24
declared for Louis XVII as King, something even Lyons had not done.54 After the fall of the
other insurrectionary cities, the Republican armies surrounded Toulon, which, with foreign
assistance, resisted until December, when Captain Napoleon Bonaparte captured the heights
surrounding the harbor of Toulon and the British and Spanish fleets were forced to withdraw and
abandon the city.55
Threats to the French Revolution came from numerous and diverse elements of French
society, whether they were royalist and aristocratic counter revolutionaries or the conservatives
and moderates of the Revolution among the legislature and in the distant départements. The
Girondin had seen the necessity of radical action to correct the economic and military troubles of
France, but were paralyzed by their fear of the sans-culottes and the lower orders of Paris. The
Montagnards adeptly realized that a paralyzed French government would lead France to collapse
before her foreign and domestic enemies, and cast away their reservations about involving lowclass French in radical action. By harnessing the patriotic zeal of the sans-culottes, the
Montagnards, under the leadership of Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, made
“Terror…the order of the day” across France.56 They drove counter revolutionaries from the
French armies and reformed the military along more equitable lines, more firmly linking rank
and promotion with talent. They also undertook a measure of economic reforms that disposed
émigré, combatted hoarding, and worked to alleviate the economic plight of the rural peasants
and the urban poor.
Although many of the Old Regime generals and officers had joined the émigré and fled
France long before the fall of the Girondin in May and June of 1793, the Montagnards were
54
Godechot, Counter-Revolution, 244-245.
Doyle, Oxford History, 254-255.
56
French National Convention Decree of September 5, 1793
55
�Stammer 25
determined that those remaining would be completely loyal to the Revolution or that they would
be consumed by it. They had excellent reasons for being distrustful of military commanders with
any undecided or royalist sentiments. On August 19, 1792 General Lafayette had defected to the
Austrians after failing to convince his army to march on Paris, and on April 6, 1793 General
Dumouriez attempted the same, which also failed and forced his defection to the Austrians.57
Admiral de Troguff de Kerlessy had betrayed his fleet, marines, and the military port of Toulon
to Allied forces, and National Guard commanders in many of the départements had rebelled
against the National Convention in the summer and autumn of 1793.58 The Montagnard solution
to heading off treason was to more effectively use fervent political commissars, making them
nearly always on hand and granting them near limitless authority while on mission. 1793 and
1794 saw the dismissal of 357 high-ranking military officials, and opened positions for talented
officers such as Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, Lazare Hoche, Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, and JeanCharles Pichgru.59 These were the commanders that drove the foreign invaders from French soil
and launched successful offensive campaigns in the North, East, and South.
Although the Girondin had resisted the amalgamation of professional and nonprofessional units in the French military, the Montagnard-controlled Committee of Public Safety
saw the necessity of unifying these two forces for stability within the ranks, as well as to increase
the discipline and training of the non-professional soldiers, hoping to improve the overall
efficiency of army. Beginning on July 23, 1793, not long after the expulsion and arrest of the
Girondin deputies, the National Convention ordered generals to begin embrigadement, wherein
two battalions of non-professional soldiers would be combined with a battalion of professional
57
Blanning, Revolutionary Wars, 72, 99.
Godechot, Counter-Revolution, 244-245.
59
Blanning, Revolutionary Wars, 118, 126-127.
58
�Stammer 26
soldiers to form a demi-brigade. The goal of demi-brigades was to improve the training and skill
of the non-professional soldiers while infusing revolutionary spirit into the professional
soldiers.60 This desire for integration coincided with mass conscription aiming to bolster the
strength of the French armies. In August of 1793, the National Convention declared universal
conscription, and by January 1794, around 800,000 Frenchmen were available for active service,
by far the largest military force in Europe.61 However, these conscript were almost completely
untrained, hence, the National Convention recognized the need to expand upon the
embrigadement and fully amalgamate the military, which it ordered in January. The combination
of universal conscription and amalgamation was not immediately effective for traditional, linefiring tactics employed by most European armies, as the semi-trained French units fired
considerably slower than their professional Austria or Prussian counterparts. The French turned
to the bayonet, neutralizing the advantage of their adversaries’ faster reloading times and testing
their professional discipline against French revolutionary zeal.62 Committee of Public Safety
member Lazare Carnot later established this as official military policy, declaring that “The
essential instructions are always to maneuver en masse and offensively; to maintain strict, but
not overly meticulous discipline…and to use the bayonet on every occasion.63 The
reorganization and enlargement of the French military, coupled with unorthodox tactics that best
utilized semi-trained soldiers greatly assisted French successes from 1794 onwards.
The Committee of Public Safety also utilized aspects of the Terror to help resolve
lingering economic issues in France. Immediately after the expulsion of the Girondin from the
National Convention, the Law of June 3 was passed, which dispossessed émigré of their property
60
Blanning, Revolutionary Wars, 121-122.
Ibid., 120-121.
62
Ibid., 121-122.
63
Blanning, Revolutionary Wars, 123.
61
�Stammer 27
holdings in France. This freed lands to be sub-divided into smaller, more manageable plots, and
allowed them to be purchased with a ten year allowance for full payment.64 On July 17, 1793 the
Montagnards dismantled the last remaining aristocratic privileges by abolishing all feudal dues
and payments without compensation.65 In doing so, the Montagnard controlled Committee of
Public Safety not only alleviated some of the problems faced by the peasantry, but also rallied
some of the peasantry to the revolution and eliminated any remaining aristocratic power. The
Montagnards also passed measures through the National Convention to improve the living
conditions of the urban poor. On July 26, 1793 the National Convention passed an anti-hoarding
measure that not only outlawed the practice, but made it a crime punishable by death, and on the
27th, they outlawed speculation, making it a capital offense as well.66 Additionally, the Law of
Maximum created on September 29, 1793 again established price controls on basic necessities,
with the goal of allowing the urban poor to afford the food stuffs for survival.67 Although not
entirely effective, their removal in December 1794 during the Thermidorian Reaction, which
subsequently saw skyrocketing prices of grain and meat and the starvation of Parisians, shows
that the Law of Maximum did help to protect the urban poor.68
Though the bloodshed that France endured during the Reign of Terror was infamous in its
brutality and cold, calculated execution, it was incredibly effective at shoring up domestic
support for the republican government and mobilizing French resources for war. Though
formally, the Terror did not begin until the autumn of 1793, its necessity can be drawn back to
the abundance of domestic threats that France faced from counter-revolutionary forces such as
64
Mathiez, French Revolution, 337.
Ibid., 338.
66
Doyle, Oxford History, 346.
67
Ibid., 264-265.
68
Doyle, Oxford History, 286.
65
�Stammer 28
the monarchy and conservative members of the aristocracy, as early as 1789. Whether
subsequent threats came from the monarchy, nobility, clergy, or even from conservatives with
the legislature itself, their purging from French society and politics became necessary for
centralizing executive and legislative authority while best maintaining the spirit of 1789.
Robespierre and the Montagnards understood as early as the trial of King Louis XVI in 1792 that
the Revolution could only succeed against their foreign and counter revolutionary enemies
through decisive, radical action, and not the paralyzing indecision and moderation of the
Girondin. Through extensive military reforms and a purge of disloyal commanders and officers,
as well as economic and land reforms designed to alleviate the hardships endured by the working
poor and maximize land-usage and efficiency, the Montagnards mobilized France for war with
its enemies. The result was a drastic reversal from the low point of July 1793. As 1794 began,
the federalist revolts had been defeated and royalists again driven from France, the Allied armies
invading France had been turned back, and French armies were again prepared to take the
offensive against the reactionary monarchies of Europe in the name of liberty.
�Stammer 29
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/ca/Heads_on_pikes.jpg/250px-Heads_on_pikes.jpg
http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/french/liberty.jpg
�Stammer 30
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�
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The Fallacy of the Emanation of the Dalai Lamas
Claudia Ramirez
Since the fourteenth century, the Dalai Lama has served as a spiritual leader or guru. In
the seventeenth century, this role advanced to that of both a spiritual and political leader. “The
practice of selecting a successor, the next Dalai Lama, to a monastic seat by finding the child
into which his consciousness has been reborn, who is known as a tulku, is a special feature of
Tibetan Buddhism.”1 Around the thirteenth century, Tibetans came to believe that tulkus could
perpetually hold their estate through the course of their reincarnations. A dying guru, on his
deathbed, could choose his rebirth. According to followers of Vajrayana Buddhism, living
forever through reincarnation serves to further the religious practices and beliefs of Tibetan
Buddhists. Each subsequent Dalai Lama is systematically looked for, carefully chosen, and
ceremonially initiated into his divine role, as he is considered an emanation of the deceased guru.
While “all varieties of Buddhism hold that the mind continues to exist after death and returns as
the embryo of a new sentient being, only in Tibet did this become the mechanism for selecting
the successor to a high religious position.”2 This careful, deliberate system of identifying his
emanation is fundamentally corrupt, and its roots are seeded in political and financial gain while
under the guise of perpetuating the Buddhist faith.
Sonam Gyatso was recognized at the age of three as the rebirth of a recently deceased
abbot, but it was not until his religious influence for the Gelugpa School was coveted by Altan
Khan that he was given the title of Dalai Lama. Sonam Gyatso would become the very first
tulku to enter the role of the Dalai Lama simply by virtue of the title that was given to him by his
1
2
1
Sam Van Schaik, Tibet: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 89.
Ibid.
�political ally and Mongol leader, Altan Khan, who was in search of a comrade to aid his agenda
of cementing Tibetan Buddhism as the religion of the land. In keeping with the traditions of the
patron-priest relationship of his predecessors, Altan Khan declared himself the emanation of
Kublai Khan, and named Sonam Gyatso the first Dalai Lama. Altan Khan was in search of
someone “who could bring Buddhism to the people and prestige to the Mongol court” for the
Mongols had forgotten the ways of their Buddhist religion, and the old Mongol rituals, including
animal sacrifice, had come to dominate the religious practice of the time.3 For Sonam Gyatso,
such an alliance with the Mongols advanced Tibet’s efforts towards preserving Buddhism in
Tibet.
Sonam Gyatso bestowed teachings and tantric initiation upon Altan Khan. In
return, he received a promise of patronage, and a Mongolian title that was ...
shortened by the Tibetans to ‘Dalai’. Thus Sonam Gyatso became the first Tibetan
to receive the title Dalai [during his life-time].4
Because Tibet’s small armies were no match for the fierce Mongol warriors, peace with them
meant financial and military support, and was a superior option to engaging in armed conflict.
For Altan Khan, declaring himself the reincarnation of Kublai Khan meant political
reverence and religious backing. Kublai Khan was revered as the fierce Mongol leader of the
Yuan Dynasty during the thirteenth century, and was credited with conquering all of China, and
“appropriating no fewer than 237 temples in China” by converting them from Daoism into
Buddhism.5
The other effect of Mongol rule in Tibet was to end the fragmentation of power,
and to bring back the idea that some kind of central authority was achievable. The
period of complete fragmentation that had followed the collapse of the Tibetan
3
Ibid., 115.
Ibid.
5
Alexander Norman, Secret Lives of the Dalai Lama: The Untold Story of Holy Men. (New York: Doubleday,
2008), 121.
4
2
�imperial line was now over, never to return. There has been a shift of power away
from the clans and towards the Buddhist schools. This [brought] a degree of
stability [to Tibet].6
The Khan maximized the trade of goods along the Silk Road, such as silk and salt, improved the
Postal Service along the road, and also increased profits through the establishment of an efficient
taxation system.7 The Silk Road was a network of interlinking trade routes connecting parts of
East, South, and Central Asia to Europe and the Middle East. Though silk was certainly the
major trade item from China, may other goods were traded, as where various technologies,
religions and philosophies. Tibet had long been influenced by different ideas, rituals and
technologies that reached their land from travellers of the Silk Road.
Together, Altan Khan and Sonam Gyatso had more power than each did alone. They
could be viewed as the previous power-duo: Kublai and Phagpa, whose relationship saw many
advances for Tibetan Buddhism. “Phagpa adapted the Uighur script so that the Buddhist
Scriptures could be translated into Mongolian, which, until that time, was an unwritten
language.”8 With Kublai’s support, Phagpa created a new writing system for the multilingual
Yuan Dynasty based on a modified version of traditional Tibetan script, which eventually, albeit
short-lived, became the official writing system of the empire, replacing the Chinese Uyghur
script.
It was the prestige of coming from a wealthy aristocratic family and his family’s
patronage of the Gelugpa School that awarded Ngawang Losang Gyatsos’ official identification
as the fifth Dalai Lama despite having failed the monk’s tests. The monk’s method of conducting
6
Van Schaik, Tibet, 89.
Ibid., 83.
8
Thubten Jigme Norbu and Colin M. Turnbull, Tibet: Its History, Religion and People (New York: Penguin, 1972),
195.
7
3
�the tests dictates that the genuine emanation of the previous Dalai Lama should be able to
identify objects from his previous life-time. Identifying the correct tulku, the next Dalai Lama,
involves presenting him with objects familiar to the deceased; rosaries, tea-cups, books, etc.
Additionally, tulku are believed to be able to choose their manner of rebirth, and, on their
deathbed, make known the place of their next birth. Sometimes they provide details of their
future parents, homeland, etc., to aid the monks in locating them and identifying them as their
emanation.
Unfortunately, the future fifth Dalai Lama utterly failed the tests, as he readily
admitted in his autobiography: “The Master of Ten showed me the statues and
rosaries, but I wasn’t able to identify any that I recognized. Then he went to the
door and said, ‘I have great confidence in his recognition.’ In the end he became
my tutor. When I wasn’t attentive, he used to say, ‘Oh why didn’t I confess at the
time that you couldn’t recognize the objects!’”9
From an early age, the fifth Dalai Lama was also a political pawn, chosen for his wealth,
to rescue the Gelugpa School from the ruler of Tsang, Karma Puntsog Namgyal. This new leader
forced the ruler of U, patron of the Gelugpa School, into submission. Though the school was not
dismantled by Namgyal, the Gelugpa School was threatened to be led by a king that also
supported many other schools, such as the Sakya, Nyingma and Jonang schools, thereby
potentially decreasing their revenue. Namgyal also attempted to ban the Gelugpa monks from
appointing a new Dalia Lama, a move that would have secured his political power if successful.
Concurrently, the Karma Kagyu School and the Gelugpa School, were bidding for a particular
chosen child to be the next Dalai Lama. In what would be a fatal decision, Namgyal allowed the
Gelugpa lamas to claim Ngawang Losang Gyatso as their Dalai Lama. Years later, Ngawang
Losang Gyatso, the fifth Dalai Lama and Gushi Khan, military warlord of the western Mongol
tribe, defeated and killed King Namgyal. This defeat saw the Kagyu monasteries of Tibet
9
4
Van Schaik, Tibet, 119.
�converted into Gelugpa monasteries, the works of the Jonang and Sakya scholars banned, and
followers of the Nyingma School either killed or imprisoned.
Ngawang Losang Gyatso failed the monastic tests required to prove that he was the
genuine reincarnation of the fourth Dalai Lama, and therefore he himself would admit he was not
a good candidate for the position. Nonetheless, he was given the title of the Great Fifth Dalai
Lama for his many religious and political achievements:
Under his rule, the Gelugpa schools’ influence in Amdo became superior to others
and the ‘rule of religion’ was finally firmly established ‘even to the layman, to the
nomad, or to the farmer in his fields’. This was not only the supremacy of the
Gelugpa School over Bon, or over the other Buddhist schools, but ‘the dedication
of an entire nation to a religious principle.’10
Losang Gyatso sought to secure his legacy and that of Tibetan Buddhism for generations when
he embarked on constructing the Potala Palace upon the historically significant land that
previously housed the Red Palace.11 The Red Palace was a strategically chosen site because
Songtsen Gampo, the founder of the Tibetan empire, ordered its construction. His many lasting
cultural and political influences for Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism made its location auspicious,
since many Tibetan Buddhists credit Songsten Gampo with introducing Buddhism to Tibet by
ordering the translation of scriptures. Unfortunately, Losang died before completion of the
palace, and it was the Desi, Sangye Gyatso who held the power to complete it. As the holder of
the position of Desi, he was a regent considered head of state, only second in command to the
king or ruler. He held administrative authority of Tibet and astutely managed the political and
religious agendas of Tibetan Buddhism. Sangye knew erecting another palace in such a place
would have far-reaching influence. For Tibetans and for their foreign rivals, it came to represent
10
Thubten Jigme Norbu, Tibet is my Country: Autobiography of Thubten Jigme Norbu, Brother of the Dalai Lama
as told to Heinrich Harrer. (New York: Dutton, 1960).
11
Van Schaik, Tibet, 123-4.
5
�a locus of political and religious power and was understood as a physical manifestation of the
progress of the Tibetan people.
The Desi chose the sixth Dalai Lama just as strategically as the monks had, for the
patronage of the thriving Gelugpa School, and with similar disregard for the validity of the
monk’s tests. The Desi set his sights on a child from a region that had previously proved
unconquerable by the powerful Mongol military: Burma, a resource-rich country that had
connections to the profitable Silk Road and a contiguous coastline to the Tibet’s southwest. More
importantly, the child was from a wealthy family that supported the Gelugpa School. “The
Gelug School was only supported by one of the local noble families, and it was a boy from this
family who was recognized as the new Dalai Lama.”12 Dominance of Burhma and its routes of
trade promised economic, cultural and religious progress for Tibet, and a child chosen from such
a wealthy family promised financial backing.
Hoping to maintain the stable political climate of the time and the prosperity of Tibetan
Buddhism, the Desi chose to keep the death of Losang Gyatso a secret. He also kept silent that
his choice for the next Dalai Lama had failed the monk’s tests, which were designed to prove
that he was the incarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. Pressured to produce a replacement for
the fifth Dalai Lama, the Desi allowed the sixth Dalai Lama to read the secret autobiography of
his predecessor, “in the hope that the accounts of visions contained therein would awaken
memories of his previous life.”13 This self-serving deception continued, but not without
embarassing the Tibetan leaders.
The new Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, chose to reject both his novice and monastic
vows and criticized the Gelugpa School, further reinforcing the impression that was forced to
12
13
6
Van Schaik, Tibet, 130.
Ibid., 130.
�assume a role he had no intention of playing and further emphasizing that he lacked any divine
inspiration to equip him. Further setting him apart was his lifestyle, he failed to uphold the
moral code of conduct required not only of monks but especially of a Dalai Lama. In The Final
Teaching of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama was said to exhort his followers “consider your
body; think of its impurity; how can you indulge its cravings as you see that both its pain and
delight are alike causes of suffering?”14 yet he indulged in promiscuity and drunkenness. The
Buddha continues, “My disciples, the teachings that I have given you are never to be forgotten or
abandoned. They are to be treasured, they are to be thought about, and they are to be practiced!”,
yet he avoided his tutor and did not study the Buddha’s teachings.15 Ignoring the Buddha’s
command, the sixth Dalai Lama displayed more interest in living a promiscuous life than he did
in studying, meditating or working to prosper Tibetan Buddhism.
Despite the fact that Sangye Gyatso provided political and religious tutoring, and the
Panchen Lama leadership advisement, Tsangyang, the sixth Dalai Lama had trouble assuming
his role as leader of Tibet. This was significant because “the Gelugpa School had placed
particular emphasis on monastic vows. All of its reincarnate lamas were monks, and the Dalai
Lama was by far the most important of them.”16 Tsangyang was so disillusioned with his role,
he expressed desire to recant his novice and monastic vows. Had the abbots of all the major
monasteries not persuaded him to keep, at least, his novice vows, his decision to take neither
could have been catastrophic.
While he pacified the public with the occasional, customary meet-and-greet and the
abbots of the monastery with his novice vows, he defied other important traditions required of a
14
Dwight Goddard, ed. and trans. Buddha, Truth, and Brotherhood (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), 8.
Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, The Teachings of Buddha (New Delhi: Sterling, 2004).
16
Van Schaik, Tibet, 131.
15
7
�Dalai Lama; celibacy and sexual self-restraint. In The Lyric Poems of the Sixth Dalai Lama,
there is evidence of his double life:
The girl of the market place
And I made that “True Love Knot.”
I did not try to untie it,
It untied of its own accord.17
The new Dalai Lama had no trouble expressing his true interests and ignoring his role as political
and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. His criticism of the Gelugpa School was echoed in one
of his poems:
The oath-bound great Buddha’s Protector,
Who lives in the realm of the “Tenth Stage,”
If you have supernatural powers,
Then please kill the enemies of the Sage.18
The sixth Dalai Lama was plucked from a privileged family for the financial benefits his
family could provide despite having failed the tests that, according to the Tibetan tulku system,
should have proven he was a true reincarnation of the fifth Dalai Lama. “Whether from fear of
the Lhan, or disillusionment with the Dalai Lama, the abbots capitulated and signed a statement
that the essence of enlightenment no longer dwelt in this Dalai Lama.”19 The Desi and the abbots
recanted because they could no longer ignore the fact that Tsangyang was not the reincarnation
they had proclaimed.
The Tibetan people have overcome many obstacles that threatened their religion by
appointing children no different than any other, with the exception of the chosen tulku having
profitable family lineage, respectable ancestors or politically savvy potential. Had the system of
finding the tulku of the previous Dalai Lama been truly divinely inspired, its focus would not
17
C.M. Chen, trans., “The Lyric Poems of the Sixth Dalai Lama,”
http://www.yogichen.org/cw/cw41/bk131.html (accessed March 23, 2013).
18
19
8
C.M. Chen, “The Lyric Poems of the Sixth Dalai Lama.”
Van Schaik, Tibet, 134.
�have been directed towards land that provided valuable resources, children selected from wealthy
families that promised financial support of Tibetan schools, nor would have monks ignored
failed tests. The Dalai Lama’s repeated failure of the monk’s tests, differing religious beliefs,
and criticisms of Tibetan Buddhism have been overlooked because the benefits provided to the
land of Tibet and the Buddhist religion fulfilled their abbot’s hidden agenda and has allowed the
Tibetan religion to survive the threat of annihilation by other schools of Buddhism and other
religions that may have otherwise silenced it.
9
�
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The Fallacy of the Emanation of the Dalai Lamas
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Ramirez, Claudia
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Western Connecticut State University. Department of History
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2013-05
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https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/studentOmeka/files/original/Vol._39_num._1_Clio_-_2013/55/004_Doty_-_Gender_in_Tibetan_Buddhism.pdf
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Text
Doty 1
The Question of Gender in Tibetan Buddhism: The Case of Orgyan Chokyi
Daniel Doty
Orgyan Chokyi, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, is the main subject of Kurtis R. Schaeffer's work
Himalayan Hermitess. The text includes an early autobiography by a woman, which is uncommon
among Tibetan historical works. The life of Orgyan Chokyi is documented from her youth up until her
time as a Buddhist nun and subsequent isolation during her self-imposed hermitage, with an afterword
by Schaeffer chronicling her accidental death. During many points of her writing, Orgyan Chokyi takes
great pains to focus on her gender, usually through lamenting it or even despising it. However, the most
important factor in this is that she continually wishes to be reborn through samsara, the Buddhist term
for the concept of a cycle of death and rebirth, as a male. It seems that her problems and wishes stem
from the apparent gender roles in Tibetan society at the time of her writing, as Schaeffer describes in
his commentary. However, it is possible there is another layer to her opinion of her gender. Tibetan
Buddhism, in a strictly spiritual sense, transcends the concepts of physical gender and gender identity.
Orgyan Chokyi was perhaps using her faith as a conduit through which to convey her dissatisfaction
with her own physical gender and to express her true gender identity.
In order to fully examine this issue, Schaeffer’s understanding of gender must be dissected. In
the chapter entitled “Women, Men, Suffering,” Schaeffer describes not only Orgyan Chokyi's
frustration with gender-related subjects, such as her dissatisfaction with the typical male as seen
through her eyes, but also with gender in Tibetan Buddhism and culture in general. The problem with
Schaeffer's view is that it is entirely binary. According to Schaeffer, gender is a completely stationary
concept with a clear divide between male and female, and this is especially prevalent in his continual
emphasis that gender differences play a very large role within Tibetan Buddhist practices. As Schaeffer
writes, “I see this line of inquiry as but a part of a larger endeavor to look at gender as an important
aspect of Buddhist religious life in specific times and places, and to relate this to transcultural Buddhist
�Doty 2
themes.”1 While his view is not incorrect, it is still very simplistic. The problem that Schaeffer
encounters when analyzing Orgyan Chokyi's Life is exclusion. He recognizes that both men and women
exist and face different problems within the Buddhist faith, but he neglects to recognize the very
possible factor of transgendered people within his work. In modern society, it is clear that gender is not
such a black and white field, and that such individuals exist. Schaeffer's understanding of gender
concepts leaves more to be desired.
Regardless of Schaeffer's comprehension of gender, Tibetan Buddhism as a spiritual practice is
an accommodating religion, one which goes beyond notions of gender due to its very anti-materialistic
nature. It is true that certain gender stigma does exist within the religious practices. Women are
considered the embodiment of samsara due to biological functions such as childbirth. As Schaeffer
states, “Women's bodies are – in her terms – the round of rebirth and suffering, the negative pole in the
dualistic system of bondage and enlightenment that constitutes the Buddhist predicament of human
existence.”2 However, such stigma is created by human social constructs. At its core, Buddhism speaks
to the spirit rather than to the body. If the idea is that the physical form represents attachment, then
gender becomes completely irrelevant in the face of the ultimate goal of Buddhist faith: to rid oneself
of attachment and break through samsara.
The accommodating nature of Tibetan Buddhism also exists in the portrayal of the various
Bodhisattva, or enlightened beings, within the Buddhist faith. Especially after its migration from India,
Buddhist depiction of these beings are completely androgynous in both their features and their
character within artwork. In their book Dunhuang Art: Through the Eyes of Duan Wenjie, authors
Wenjie Duan and Chung Tan state, “After entering Gaochang, the Indian Bodhisattvas lost their gender
1
Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Himalayan Hermitess: The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun (New York: Oxford UP,
2004),.8.
2
Ibid.
�Doty 3
distinctions. The eight categories of supernatural beings present behind the Buddha also lacked
distinctions of age and sex.” 3 This speaks to the notion that once one has attained enlightenment and
become a Bodhisattva that person may, like the religion in general, completely transcend all that is
physical and material, including gender.
This view of gender within Buddhism can even be found in the writings of Orgyan Chokyi
herself. While it is clear that she longed to be reborn as a man, towards the end of her life
enlightenment became a higher priority for her. The ending of her purification vow recitation strongly
alludes to this, “By the merit obtained, Through preserving moral conduct, May all sentient beings,
Quickly attain the state of the powerful Sage.”4 This suggests that enlightenment is an event that can
happen to any sentient being, regardless of physical aspects such as gender. This anti-materialistic view
is also defined by Orgyan Chokyi's master, Orgyan Tenzin, when he instructs her on how to properly
meditate: “If you understand the mind, you are a Buddha. Do not look elsewhere for Buddha. You must
meditate correctly on consciousness.”5 This teaching helps to further illustrate the irrelevance of the
physical within Buddhist thought, and solidifies the idea that physical and mental gender are
completely unnecessary factors in the search for true enlightenment.
In understanding the anti-materialistic nature of Buddhism, one may wonder why Orgyan
Chokyi displays such a strong drive to be reborn as a male and expresses such hatred for her current
gender and station in life. The fact is, people are material simply by being born. The material form
cannot be denied, though Buddhists through their practices seek to rid themselves of attachment to it.
Buddhism also teaches that those who have not reached enlightenment still suffer from attachment. As
faithful as she was, Orgyan Chokyi still submitted to this attachment in her strong desire to be reborn as
3
4
5
Wenje Duan and Chung Tan. Dunhuang Art: Through the Eyes of Duan Wenjie. (Abhinav Publications, New
Delhi, 1994), 223.
Schaeffer, Kurtis R., Himalayan Hermitess, 177.
Schaeffer, Kurtis R., Himalayan Hermitess, 148.
�Doty 4
a man. It is also certainly accurate to consider in the socially constructed aspects of Buddhist teaching,
the female body is regarded as a vessel of samsara, and thus a wish to not be a vessel of samsara would
only seem natural. There is also a tantric aspect to this; indulgence can be used to cure attachment.
Orgyan Chokyi's reoccurring wish to be reborn as a male could be considered a form of tantric
thinking, and perhaps, through this, she could better rid herself of the desire to be a man. Further still,
one can look back to the concept of provisional existence. Khedrup writes that life by its very nature is
an impermanent construct and will not be the same thing hundreds of thousands of years in the future.
Orgyan Chokyi does seem to borrow a bit of this thinking when she again expresses herself in verse,
“When I ponder our female bodies I am sorrowful; impermanence rings clear. When men and women
couple – creating more life – Happiness is rare, but suffering is felt for a long time.”6 Orgyan Chokyi
clearly seems upset by the impermanent nature of life during this verse and she seems to support the
notion of the female body being a vehicle for samsara. She goes on to state, “When acts of desire are
committed, suffering must follow. When I see the mare suffering, melancholia flares. Behold us with
mercy, Lord of Compassion. Let me not be born a woman in all lives to come. When I ponder the
suffering of beings, melancholia flares.”7 Orgyan Chokyi believes strongly in the teachings of
provisional existence, and the role that the female plays within this concept.
It seems that Orgyan Chokyi's wish to be male ventures beyond the fundamental teachings and
concepts of Buddhism. This is especially noticeable in her intense, almost constant hatred of her
gender. She relates her mental state to the idea of the mare, “May I not be born again in a female body.
May the mare not be born as a mare. The steed follows yet another mare. When I see the shamelessness
6
7
Schaeffer, Kurtis R., Himalayan Hermitess, 100.
Ibid.
�Doty 5
of men, [I think:] May I be born in a body that will sustain the precepts.”8 Not only does this passage
illustrate her hatred of being a woman, but it also illustrates her general criticisms of men. Her writings
establish that her gender identity obviously does not coincide with her physical form. It would seem
that Orgyan Chokyi is in some form transgendered; the gender identity in her mind is male with some
reservations as evidenced by her mistrust of the typical male. This conclusion is further supported by
her gradual transformation over her life according to her biography, in which she is seen as holding
constant disdain for her suffering, especially suffering perceived to be brought about by her gender
when she is young. Her later religious experiences run parallel to these thoughts taking a lower priority
in her mind than seeking enlightenment, or so the literal interpretation of the text would lead the reader
to believe. When considered on a deeper level, this fading of her disdain could be characteristic of a
peace growing within her mind, an acceptance of her state as a transgendered individual and the
realization that, just like “seeking the Buddha” as her master Orgyan Tenzin taught, her true gender
identity lies within her mind and spirit rather than elsewhere.
One can further look to her final stage of life and her becoming a hermitess for insight into
Orgyan Chokyi's identity. The entire concept of isolation could easily be interpreted as a passive
rejection of her society. Though isolation was by no means unheard of in her time, Orgyan Chokyi's
self-imposed exile seems to be a pivotal point in her life. By detaching herself in this way, her inner
peace could further grow, leaving room for her continued quest for true enlightenment. She writes of
this isolation, “Now, in this rocky cave of mine I am unbothered by snow and rain. I do not hear the
noisy sounds of birds and bees. This rocky cave of mine is not lit up by the kitchen fire. There is no
rock like this one in the meditation cells of Tadru.”9 This passage supports the idea that her isolation
8
9
Schaeffer, Kurtis R., Himalayan Hermitess,142.
Schaeffer, Kurtis R., Himalayan Hermitess, 171.
�Doty 6
brings her a great deal of peace, and of particular note is the phrase “not lit up by the kitchen fire.”
Earlier in her life, one of her last chores when she was younger was to tend the kitchen. Social
constructs dictated that kitchen work was considered a feminine thing, as evidenced by Orgyan
Tenzin's response to her complaints, “'You are wrong to be unhappy at the kitchen,' he replied. 'Men
are just right for the field, Women are just right for the kitchen.'”10 In Orgyan Chokyi's isolation, not
only do we see a developing inner peace, but we also see a rejection of feminine things, further
solidifying the idea that her gender identity did not match the positions in life that she had to suffer
through during her formative years. Her isolation may very well have been a way of rejecting her
feminine past and expressing her inner masculinity.
Orgyan Chokyi's life story is a situation of a woman in body whose mind has a different
concept of gender identity. However, the most striking thing about this is that her case is not unique in
the larger scheme of Tibetan Buddhism. Schaeffer writes on the subject of the desire to be reborn as a
man, “This is not an unusual request among Buddhist nuns in the Himalayas. Even nuns living at Bigu
Nunnery in Nepal during the 1970s expressed such a wish.”11 This establishes the fact that not only are
these sentiments found in other women, but also that they are not limited to Orgyan Chokyi's period in
time. This is interesting in the sense that Tibetan Buddhism is a very accommodating religion, with
core principles far beyond gender and gender identity. While other religions such as the JudeoChristian faiths may emphasize the human body and the material and regard them as sacred,
Buddhism's focus on the mind creates a haven for those with questions regarding the self and the nature
of gender. This focus can foster and even promote a transformative process within the mind in which
the true identity of their being is revealed to the practitioner. While the general understanding of the
10
11
Schaeffer, Kurtis R., Himalayan Hermitess, 160.
Schaeffer, Kurtis R., Himalayan Hermitess, 100.
�Doty 7
desire to be born a male is to avoid being the embodiment of samsara, perhaps the true meaning of this
phenomenon is one that stems from a far greater understanding of the ego that following the teachings
of Buddhism can potentially unlock.
Orgyan Chokyi's life, from its humble beginning to its pious end, paints a vivid portrait of a
woman who struggled with her gender identity and the meaning of the self. Through her
autobiographical work we are led through a tale of great suffering, spiritual insight, and new concepts
related to gender identity not only in the individual Buddhist but in the Tibetan Buddhist religion as a
whole. Schaeffer's writing implies that Orgyan Chokyi's continual wishing to be reborn through
samsara as a male stems solely from the socially constructed gender roles of her time, but the careful
reader is able to piece together a story of what may be one of history's earliest documented cases of a
transgendered individual. Furthermore, Tibetan Buddhism as a whole conveys the idea of a religion
that, by virtue of being focused on the mind and the spirit rather than the body and the material, lends
itself to being extremely accommodating to men, women, those who are questioning and those who are
in between. The spiritual and meditative focus found in Tibetan Buddhism has great potential to
provide a path to inner peace for those following its teachings, as shown by Orgyan Chokyi's journey
from a Buddhist practitioner to an isolated hermitess, claiming solitude as her home and focusing
inward in order to achieve a greater understanding of her being. It is also important to remember the
fact that Orgyan Chokyi's case is not unique within the scope of Tibetan Buddhism, nor is it specific to
the time period in which she lived. This incites us to further investigate the phenomenon of the desire
within Buddhist women to be born again as men. Could this be evidence for a largely overlooked
aspect of the religion, in that it provides the solace and avenue necessary for one to explore the depths
of their mind and inner being in order to discover the truth about their own gender and identity? Does
Tibetan Buddhism have the potential to serve as a conduit for any of its adherents to fully realize and
express their true selves? In closely examining the life story of Orgyan Chokyi and Kurtis Schaeffer's
�Doty 8
commentary and examination of her writings, this religion clearly has an understated power to move its
members in such a way that not only is enlightenment possible, but a true definition of one's ego,
gender and otherwise, can be obtained simply by following its teachings.
�
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The Question of Gender in Tibetan Buddhism: The Case of Orgyan Chokyi
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Doty, Daniel
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Western Connecticut State University. Department of History
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2013-05
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https://archives.library.wcsu.edu/studentOmeka/files/original/Vol._39_num._1_Clio_-_2013/54/003_Young_-_Civil_War_Poetry.pdf
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1
“Sing Poet in Our Name”: The Arc of National Emotion Portrayed and Preserved
in the Poetry of the Civil War1
Elizabeth Young
Every generation experiences tragedy, upheaval and catastrophe. Often times these
episodes are defined and depicted by an art form, be it music, painting or prose. In the era of
the American Civil War, it was poetry. In reading various secondary sources on the Civil War, I
became engrossed in and enamored of the poetry. Its proliferation before, during and after the
war provide an accurate chronology of the events as well as the emotions that accompanied
them. Reading the poetry one can find vivid descriptions of a battle and a corresponding verse
by a mother who lost her son in that same confrontation. The poetry renders heart wrenching
insight into the conflict as a whole, its sheer devastation, as well as its impact on a deeply
personal level. Poetry was the art form that mirrored and channeled national and private
sentiment during the American Civil War.
The unique nature of the war, taking place on American soil, American against
American, was perhaps a reason for so much emotional writing. The loss of life touched
everyone.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow articulated this eloquently in his poem, “Killed at the
Ford”
That fatal bullet went speeding forth
Till it reached a town in the distant north
Till it reached a house in a sunny street
Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry
……………………………………………………..
And the neighbors wondered that she should die.2
1
Walt Whitman, Civil War Poetry and Prose, edit. S. Applebaum and C. Ward (New York: Dover Press, 1995), 35.
2
Drew Gilpin Faust. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. (New York: Random
House, 2008), 143.
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Drew Gilpin Faust observes in her book that the Civil War marked a new relationship
with death for Americans.3 The evolving American concept of death and valuation of human life
play a role in the desire to document feelings, reactions and experiences using a dramatic and
beautiful form. More than merely journaling, poetry is art and, with its creation, may have
provided some solace.
Poetry was authored by all manner of individuals, regardless of education, economic
status, race, creed or gender.4 It served many purposes, to communicate, mourn, comfort, and
rebel among them. Was poetry a byproduct of the events as they unfolded? Did poetry serve
as means to expound on what was happening? Or was it an impetus for action? The
abolitionist’s poetry by both blacks and whites drew attention to their cause before Lincoln’s
unleashing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The poetry of the Confederacy stimulated a
patriotism and unity of purpose, prior to and during the years of battle. The question is, did the
vast supply and variety of poetry fuel the fire, fan the flames or simply describe them? Do the
volumes of Civil War poetry still being read today, enhance the legacy of the war?
Much of the work was personal in nature and has remained private. However volumes
of work were published in locally and nationally circulated periodicals, newspapers and
magazines. In this venue, poetry was shared.5 The Atlantic magazine commenced publication
in 1857, with a determined abolitionist bent.6 Its pages were rife with articles, prose, poetry
3
Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 271.
4
Library of Congress. Poetry Resources, Accessed June 12,2012,
http://www.loc/rr/program/bib/lcpoetry/cwcv.html
4
5
Ibid.
6
Edmund Quincy. "Where Will it End?" The Atlantic: Special Commemorative Issue (2012): 12-13.
�3
and photography drawing attention to the scourge of slavery and calling for its i mmediate end.
In its pages, James Russell Lowell, the Atlantics first editor wrote in 1860“The discussion of
slavery is dangerous…….But dangerous to what?....In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen
to think.”7 The circulation of the magazine, bearing poetry of a like opinion was influential to all
who read it. The use of this early form of media to convey opinions in an effort to convince was
only as successful as its readership. Yet as with all printed material, the mere fact that it was
printed validated it to a degree. Therefore, it stands to reason that the more printed material in
circulation, the more citizens would be influenced by its content.
The buildup to the Civil War began with a call to prohibit the spread of slavery in states
newly joining the Union. The defensive and bellicose nature of Southern poetry in the
antebellum period was evidence of vulnerability in the southern economy. The assumed
dependency on slavery to perpetuate the southern lifestyle of an elite few was vigorously
defended with a “bring it” attitude apparent in the poetry. James Ryder Randall wrote My
Maryland in May 1861. He was not above name calling and threats
The despots heel is on the shore,
Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland, my Maryland!8
Randall went on to refer to Unionists as vandals and tyrants.
7
James Bennet, "Editor's Note," The Atlantic: Special Commemorative Issue (2012): 6-7.
8
Paul Negri, Civil Poetry (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997),12.
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The Cambridge History of British and American literature claims that the explanat ion for
such a limited quantity of Southern Civil War poetry was most likely secondary to Confederate
absorption in politics, the pre-eminence of the spoken word as compared with the written, as
well as the absence of centers of thought and life. The far flung residential configuration of the
southern states limited daily contact and circulation of periodicals, apparently. These priorities
and circumstances took precedence over sentiment conveyed in the written word. Most
southern poets were perceived amateurs prone to a quick jotting of a poem, yet not committed
to a life of literature. Poetry was considered a past time and many anthologies were collections
of jottings over a life time rather than a concentrated effort.9 Research for this paper does
indeed draw the conclusion that there is far less Southern poetry than was produced in the
North. The prolific nature of northern writers in general indicates there was greater support for
and readership of northern authors and poets. Comparing the quantit y of poetry between the
two factions allows me to conclude that southerners were much less likely to act in response to
poetry, as there was simply much less of it. Also, literacy rates in the south were far lower
among adult white males than the same demographic in the north. Literacy census taking in
the mid nineteenth century revealed a literacy rate among adult white males in the south to be
approximately 66%, the northeast boasted a relatively high ( in some polls 99%) literacy rate.
Reports reveal a skyrocketing volume of newspapers, books and mailed letters, affirming the
demand for printed material and implying its massive influence.10
9
A.W.Ward and W.P. Trent, eds., Poetry of the Civil War II; The Cambridge History of English and
American Literature in 18 Vols. (New York: G.P.Putnam’s Sons, 1907-21), accessed June 2, 2012,
http://Bartlesby.com/226/1801.html.
10
"Literacy." Accessed July 2, 2012, http//www.enotes/literacy-reference/literacy.
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Abolitionist poetry abounded and was produced by blacks and whites, literate slaves
and free blacks, men, women and children. The powerful emotions evoked by the poetry
sparked outrage. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a free black woman born in Maryland in 1828,
first published her poetry in 1845, at the age of 17. Her writing was widely circulated in
newspapers and then published under the title “Autumn Leaves” later renamed “Forest
Leaves”. She wrote in excruciating detail of the wrenching of child from mother in “The Slave
Auction”:
The sale began-young girls were there,
Defenseless in their wretchedness,
Whose stifled sobs of deep despair
Revealed their anguish and distress
And mothers stood with streaming eyes,
And saw their dearest children sold;
Unheeded rose their bitter cries,
While tyrants bartered them for gold.11
Reading this verse, one could not help experiencing a deep emotional connection to the
mother and her child.
The Atlantic Monthly published Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular poems, “Paul
Revere’s Ride”, on December 20, 1860, the exact day that South Carolina seceded. Long
perceived an anthem of the American Revolution, referencing the ride that woke the states to
the British invasion, it is rather a plea to galvanize the Union once again to fight for the nation’s
founding principles.
That was all! And yet through the gloom and the light
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by the steed, in his flight,
11
Janeen Grohsmeyer, "Frances Harper," Unitarian Universalist Historical Society, Acessed Mar.
7,2013, http://www25-temp.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/francesharper.html.
�6
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.12
Recalling that America had so recently unified to endure together a war on its homeland,
Longfellow called for raising awareness of what it meant to be an American, the ideals the
nation, north and south, fought to protect. A fierce abolitionist, he was not opposed to blood
being shed in the fight to end slavery. He clearly felt the cause worthy of the sacrifice. Aga in,
this piece speaks to the ultimate Northern purpose of the war, preservation of the Union,
without slavery.
Curiously I encountered a void of poetry directed solely at maintaining the Union,
although at the outset, it was the defining purpose of the Union effort. There is much in the
correspondence of Union soldiers and their families that
describes the inspiration for their initial enthusiasm to be
preservation of the Union.13 The poetry emanating from the
Union, in the Antebellum period anticipated the Emancipation
Proclamation. It spoke to the ultimate purpose of the conflict
and its only possible resolution. While the initial effort was
“Soldier Group,” Library of Congress.
couched in preservation of the Union, the poetry reveals a
grass roots movement that allowed for the declaration of war and endorsed its perpetuation
until slavery was rooted out. Early victory for the Union would perhaps not have achieved this
goal.14 Even the justification for the sin of killing was deemed acceptable in the effort to
overturn the wrong of slavery.15 The Union poetry of the pre and early war period gives voice
12
“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” The Atlantic: Special Commemorative Issue, 2012: 26-27.
13
James M. McPherson. For Cause and Comrades: Whiy Men Fought in the Civil War (New York/Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997),16-17.
14
Charles Elliot Norton. The Atlantic: Special Commemorative Issue, 2012: 52-53.
15
Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 34.
�7
to the eventual goal of the war. While not perhaps directly influencing the change in purpose
during the battles leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation, the poetry allows insight into
the hearts and minds of those who sacrificed much.
Poetry written prior to and during the initial phase of the American Civil War provides
inspiration for both sides. Vilifying the institution of slavery in the no rth, and support of states
rights in the south, became the purpose of writing poetry as well as a means to communicate
the message. In that way it helped to stir up an infectious and communal enthusiasm for war.
Following the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, the poetry became concurrent
with the events of the war. Poetic descriptions of the horror of the battles abounded. Scraps
of paper found on battlefields contained verse by the combatants, some described the battle,
in this last letter home.16 Esteemed poets and journalists on the battlefield were inspired to
document events in poetry.17 Edmund Clarence Stedman’s ”Sumter” anticipated a short
conflict ending in punishment exacted for the sin of Southerners:
Not too long the brave shall wait:
On their own head be their fate,
Who against the hallowed State
Dare begin;
Flag defied and compact riven!
In the record of high Heaven
How shall Southern men be shriven
For the sin!18
This call to arms is for preservation of the Union and retribution for secession. The
blame for starting the war is placed squarely on the heads of the Southerners and the
16
Ibid., 23-24.
Negri, Civil Poetry,iii.
18
Ibid., 52.
17
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militaristic response of northern men revealed they were itching for a fight and this cause was
enough.19 Union volunteers wrote home of their sense of duty to fight for” freedom and right
as opposed to slavery and wrong.”20 The motivation coalesced around joined purposes and the
poetry reflects that. Its content not only describes what should be done, but what is
happening. The events are unfolding and poets become not only narrators but instigators as
well.
Three million men enlisted in and saw combat during the four long years of the Civil
War. Walt Whitman wrote retrospectively of his pride in the people of his hometown, New
York, in Leaves of Grass, the section “Drum Taps” his “First O Songs for a Prelude”:
To the drum-taps prompt
The young men falling in and arming
The mechanics arming, (the trowel, the jack-plane, the blacksmith’s hammer,
tost aside with precipitation,)
The lawyer leaving his office and arming, the judge leaving the court
The driver deserting his wagon in the street, jumping down, throwing
the reins abruptly down the horses’ backs
The salesman leaving the store, the boss, book-keeper, porter, all leaving
Squads gather everywhere by common consent and arm21
All manner of men from all walks of life signed on eager to face uncertain and violent
circumstances. The war was expected to be short, a quick undertaking with Northerners
convinced of a sure Union victory, Southerners equally as certain of Southern triumph. This
confidence was contagious and prompted many to suit up and bear arms. James McPherson
categorizes the statistics of the soldiers in both armies and these figures bear out the diversity
of the troops, married, single youthful, middle-aged, educated, laborer, alike were “spoiling for
19
20
McPherson, For Cause and Comrades,30.
Ibid., 22.
21
Whitman, Civil War Poetry and Prose, 1.
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a fight”.22 The poetry describing this massive enlistment defines an extraordinary sense of
purpose, willingness and even enthusiasm cutting across a broad swath of the population. In
abolitionist James Sloan Gibbons’ “Three Hundred Thousand More” Lincolns call for 300,000
Union volunteers in July, 1862 was answered in unison by men of many ilk:
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,
From Mississippi’s winding stream and from New England’s shore
We leave our ploughs and workshops, our wives and children dear,
With hearts to full for utterance, with but a silent tear;
We dare not look behind us, but steadfastly before;
We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more!23
The major lyric poet of the prewar South, Henry Timrod, was called the Poet Laureate of
the South. He wrote a number of Civil War poems calling to his countrymen to unify and fight.
His poem ”A Cry to Arms” rallies southern citizens to battle:
Ho, woodsman of the mountainside!
Ho, dwellers of the vales!
Ho, ye who by the chafing tide
Have roughened in the gales!
Leave barn and byre, kin and cot,
Lay by the bloodless spade;
Let desk and case and counter rot,
And burn your books of trade!
…………………………………………………………….
Come, flocking, gayly to the fight,
From forests, hill or lake;
We battle for our country’s right,
And for the lily’s sake!24
22
McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 10.
Negri, Civil Poetry, 11.
24
Ibid., 7.
23
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Like Pa in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, those who were too old or unable, found
work in the hospitals, stables and kitchens servicing the soldiers. Most men had a singular zeal
to serve. Much of the poetry of both the north and the
south, describing the response to the call, was written after
the events. The fervor of the multitude is palpable in the
words, they respect and honor the memory of those who
gave so willingly, no matter what they sacrificed,
James Gardiner, “Wounded soldiers from
the battles in the "Wilderness" at
Fredericksburg, Va., May 20, 1864,”
Library of Congress
professionally or personally, to serve.
A majority of the poetry describing the battles was
written by correspondents who were moved by what they witnessed. Journalists documented
events not only as news but also in verse, perhaps to convey the emotional devastation. T he
pieces themselves are populated with the now mythic figures of the war, from Stonewall
Jackson and Lee to Grant and Sherman. The battles of Fredericksburg, Shiloh, Bull Run and
Gettysburg, as well as many other major battles are written of.25 These poems are written by
Americans as eyewitnesses to momentous events in U. S. History. Many are written at the time
of the battle or shortly thereafter. Herman Melville wrote many poems compiled into an
anthology entitled Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, published in 1866. The March into
Virginia, Ball’s Bluff, Shiloh and Malverne Hill among others offer graphic detail of the struggle.
Agonizing emotion is figured into flawless verse. Melville’s “Rebel Color-bearers at Shiloh”
concludes with:
Sunday at Shiloh, and the day
When Stonewall charged-McClellan’s crimson May
25
Ibid., iii.
�11
And Chickamauga’s wave of death,
And of the Wilderness the cypress wreathAll these have passed away
The life in the veins of Treason lags,
Her daring color bearers drop their flags,
And yield. Now shall we fire?
Can poor spite be?
Shall nobleness in victory less aspire
Than in reverse? Spare Spleen her ire,
And think how Grant met Lee.26
Bravery, honor, valor, righteousness and Godliness are claimed by both sides with an
ardor evidenced in the poetry. The battle poetry is fraught with emotion and charged with
veneration. Was this verbiage a true reflection of the spirit of the troops? One would have to
believe that the actual events inspired these words rather than vice versa. Th e poets recorded
observations and accompanying emotions in real time, not considering how to inspire troops to
carry on but rather remarking on their resolution despite, the grueling and gruesome
circumstances. Madison Cawein, writes in “Mosby at Hamilton” of the willingness to further
sacrifice the sons of the south following a failed raid on Union lines by Captain John S. Mosby:
While Yankee cheers still stunned our ears,
Of troops at Harpers Ferry,
While Sheridan led on his Huns,
And Richmond rocked to roaring guns,
We felt the South still had some sons
She would not scorn to bury.27
This poem in particular speaks
to human characteristics evident in the
war, bravery in combat as well as the
26
27
Ibid., 45.
Ibid., 55.
James Gibson, “Brandy Station, Va. Officers and a lady at headquarters
of 1st Brigade, Horse Artillery,” Library of Congress.
�12
fortitude to continue the fight. In terms of the first aspect, McPherson writes, in Cause and
Comrades, of those who could not face battle and hid or ran, although they had enlisted and
the punishment for skulking was severe.28 I could not find poetry that addressed this. Honor
and heroism are the stuff of Civil War poetry. Given the dearth of verse regarding the shirker’s
response to battle, despite the fact that it was widespread, the conclusion can be drawn that
the poetry is not a complete account. Rather it focuses on the valor of those who willingly
served. In this way poetic license was taken to provide a myopic image of the actual events,
excluding those perceived cowardly or dishonorable. The massive body of poetry may not be
accurate to the boots on the ground experience. It is not meant to be. Its purpose is
emotionally charged and not held to the standard of truth in journalism.
To stay the course in the presence of such carnage required a sense of purpose, duty
and pride that is inconceivable. Day after day soldiers witness death and destruction while
facing their own mortality. Fellow citizens and families experienced unimaginable loss. Poets of
all manner recorded fear, exhaustion and grief. Yet the nations carried on. Death was
preferable to cowardice and at the depths of despair, it offered relief. But the cause inspired
endurance to continue. Longfellow wrote:
Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!29
28
McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 48-49.
29
Mary Louise Kete, Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle Class Idenitity in Ninteenth Century
America (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2000), 121-122.
�13
As the war continued far longer than was initially anticipated, the collapse of morale
among the troops and the weariness of the nation could have been expected. Yet poetry
speaks to a continued inspiration even as the circumstances, on many levels, grew increasingly
dire, the destruction more costly and the violence more fatal. The consequences of defeat by
either side were cataclysmic and neither would relinquish their ideals to preserve lives. John
Greenleaf Whittier, a Quaker abolitionist, used his poetry to endorse and solidify patriotism in
the fight against slavery. “A Word for the Hour” gently encourages perseverance:
….Give us Grace to keep
Our faith and patience; wherefore we should leap
On one hand into the fratricidal fight
Or, on the other, yield eternal right,
………………………………………………………
In closer union, and, if numbering less,
Brighter shall shine the stars which still remain.30
In Whittier’s ode to Barbara Frietchie, a plucky older woman who hangs the Stars and
Stripes out her window despite the oncoming confederates demanding its removal;
She leaned far out on the window sill,
And shook it forth with royal will
“Shoot if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame
Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life over that woman’s deed and word;31
This poem was written to tell a true story of an act of bravery by an old woman, as
Stonewall Jackson led his troops down a main thoroughfare on his way to Fredericksburg. The
30
Negri, Civil Poetry, 17.
31
John Greenleaf Whittier, "Barbara Frietchie," The Atlantic: Special Commemorative Issue, 2012: 63.
�14
poet was a contributor to the Atlantic and the periodical published the poem. While reporting
an incident revealing bravery and patriotism, the poet alludes to a retained sense of
compassion and respect for humanity on the part of Stonewall Jackson, thereby revealing
members from both sides to share qualities of goodness. The poem endorses understanding
and respect, no matter the configuration of your flag. This reader feels this poem is unique in
its understated method of making this point, by incorporating the message into the story. It
reveals sensitivity and hope on the part of the poet, without hamme ring the point home.
More than at any other time in the war, the poetry written during the years of battle
appear to speak directly to those who were serving and all who were suffering. By reiterating
the motivational purpose of the conflict from both perspectives, poets inspired those who gave
so much, to carry on the fight. The war was everywhere; the poetry reflected and respected
that fact. Reverential recording of honorable death and sacrifice on the battlefield incented
others to follow in their path. Defining the suffering of those on the home front validated their
sorrow and fortified them to endure.
The dichotomy in the poetry is one of mourning and yet inspiring further battle. No
poem stirs up more passion than Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” with its
homage to a deity and claiming it for the Union cause. This poem was set to music which still
today sets a tone of honor and patriotism. The allegiance to a God who willingly “loosed the
fateful lightening his terrible swift sword”32 for the cause, signals forgiveness for the sin of
killing. Lines such as “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,” added
religious righteousness to the mission.
32
Negri, Civil Poetry,1.
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Six hundred and twenty thousand died embroiled in the violence o f the Civil War, on
home soil.33 This number represents a huge percentage of the population. Drew Gilpin Faust
speaks to the transformation of the concept of death as a result of the magnitude of this loss. It
would be incomprehensible today to imagine a catastrophe that would result in such a
mortality rate. And yet from 1861-1865, it was tolerated, permitted and praised. The loss of so
many lives caused indescribable grief.
Poems about the experience of the individual soldier began appearing in the m iddle of
the war. These poems were written by average citizens and esteemed poets.34 Ethel Lynn
Beers wrote of “The Picket Guard” also entitled “All quiet along the Potomac” in 1861. The
tragedy of the loss of a father and husband on guard, not in a batt le, but while walking the
picket;
“All quiet along the Potomac,” they say,
“Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot as he walks his beat to and fro
‘T is nothing: a private or two, now and then,
Will not count in the news of the men,
Moaning out, all alone, the death rattle”
…………………………………………………………..
There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And thinks of the two in the low trundle-bed
Far away in the cot on the mountain
His musket grows slack; his face, dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayed for the children asleepFor their mother-may Heaven defend her!35
33
Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xi.
Library of Congress, “To Light us to Freedom and Glory Again,” The Role of Civil War Poetry, accessed June
12,2012, http://www.loc/rr/program/bib/lcpoetry/cwcv.html.
35
Negri, Civil Poetry, 34.
34
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Then he is shot, in a moment of quiet reflection. He is but one life, yet so vital to those he has
left at home. This poem alludes to the shifting value of a single human life. The number of
dead in the Civil War was massive; a single life risked becoming anonymous in such quantity.
Much of the poetry in the years of battle gave voice to the individual, their loss and its impact
on their survivors. Many poets paid respect to the soldier as a person, George Henry Boker, in
his “Dirge for a Soldier” a staunch Unionist, his poetry laments individual losses on both sides. 36
Mourning became an inevitable national past time. People took to their pens to
commemorate, reflect and heal. Poetry appears to have served as a catharsis for grief. This
private realm of sorrow was not given to publication but rather for personal consumption. If
taken out of context, much of this work may be considered melodramatic. Read with
knowledge of the circumstances, it is rich and moving. Mary Louise Kete writes of mourning in
the 19th century and its association with the development of sentimentality. She quotes
extensively from Harriet Gould’s Book, explaining that the poems in this book “trace the way
that hardscrabble farmers deployed poetry in an economy of sentimental artifacts through
which they were able to define and claim the center of cultural power as they defined and laid
claim to a revolutionary, new sense of self.”37 It was in this era that sentiment became part of
Americanism and the voluminous quantity of Civil War poetry validates Kete’s point. The
American expression of grief heretofore dismissed as “sentimental” and inconsequential
became what Kete states Emerson considered the urgent work of “reattaching even artificial
things and violation of nature, to nature” and thereby healing the “dislocation and
36
37
Ibid., 77.
Kete, Sentimental Collaborations, 3.
�17
detachment” of man from God.38 This connection between man and God, of which Kete writes,
is perhaps the major impetus of the civilian poet. The solace provided by poetry is akin to
prayer. Prayer for the religious is the conduit to God. The sentimental quality of the poetry
allows for highly personal prayer.
Before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Walt Whitman wrote of reconciliation, of grief
for the bilateral loss, and hope for a unified future. A study of Civil War Poetry would be remiss
if it did not recognize the literary contribution of this revered American poet. Randall Fuller
writes in his article “Daybreak Gray and Dim” of the arc of Walt Whitman’s poetry as the war
was waged. He wrote defining poetry during every chapter of the conflict. Fuller claims
Whitman writes with much celebration and eagerness for all to leave their lives and loved ones,
to sign on. It is not without anxiety that he became the music to which they marched. Within a
year of the firing on Fort Sumter, after the first battle of Bull Run, Whitman’s poetry takes a
distinctly different tone. Whitman referred to Bull Run as a “crucifixion” he will ”never
forget.”39 In “Beat! Beat! Drums!, Whitman tries to illustrate the chaos and social cost of war.
Make no parley-stop for no expostulation,
Mind not the timid-mind to the weeper or prayer,
Mind not the old man beseeching the young man,
Let not the child voice be heard, nor the mothers entreaties,
Make even the trestles to shake the dead why they lie awaiting the hearses,
So strong you thump O terrible drums-so loud you bugles blow.40
38
Ibid., 2.
39
Randall Fuller, "Daybreak Gray and Dim: How the Civil War Changed Wlt Whitman's Poety ," National
Endowment for the Humanities, accessed June 16, 2012, http://www.neh.gov.
40
Whitman, Civil War Poetry, 4.
�18
Whitman echoes the morale of the nation in this piece. As unbelievably awful as this
situation was, for everyone, they must carry on. This was no time to think too much, inner
voices were stilled, the noise of the cause propelled them.
Whitman’s brother, George was injured in the Battle of Fredericks burg, Walt left New
York to find and care for him. This journey led Whitman to a theatre of war he could never
have imagined. He sought work in an army hospital and traveled interviewing, observing and
recording as he went. His concern for the wounded and the dead knew no prejudice, and he
writes, in a number of his pieces, of his concern for the human toll. Fuller argues that this
changes the character of his poetry altogether, to one Whitman previously f elt was unworthy of
describing this epic war. Avoiding sentiment apparently became impossible once Whitman
bore personal witness to the mutilation and murder of thousands. Fuller writes that the poet
whose career began with heroic and noble descriptions of the human form, who had praised
”the body electric”, now turned his voice to describe and console those who suffered and died,
regardless of the color of their uniform. His sympathy for all involved is the seed for
reconciliation. In “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim” he describes finding dead
bodies covered on a battlefield:
Young man I think I know you-I think this face is the face of Christ himself,
Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.41
Whitman’s poetry takes a sentimental turn, which he had previously disdained. In doing
so, he reaches into the hearts of every man and makes a case for reconciliation.42
41
Randall Fuller, "Daybreak Gray and Dim: How the Civil War changed Walt Whitman's Poetry,” National
Endowment for the Humanities, Accessed June 16,2012, http://www.neh.gov.
42
Ibid.
�19
“The Blue and the Gray”, by Francis Miles Finch tells of a woman form Mississippi
decorating the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers.
Love and tears for the Blue
Tears and love for the gray.43
The poetry of reconciliation recognized that only by mourning and honoring the dead
collectively could the spirit of recovery develop.
As with almost all recoveries, this one was not
instantaneous. Poetry did not have the power to
assuage all wounds, yet its message was one of
mercy and forgiveness. The forcibly reunified
United States adopted the goal of
rapprochement, individually enacting this
Timothy O’Sullivan, “Dead Confederate soldier,”
Library of Congress.
concept was a harder road to hoe and some
poetry reflected that.
My knowledge of Civil War poetry is new, my reading of it just beginning and my
understanding of it evolving through study. The fact that the poetry was not only available to
large portions of the population, but also written by it, makes it singularly informative of the
Civil War period. Research has borne out that the concept of death in America, until this time,
had been remote and depersonalized. The Civil War delivered death to every doorstep. The
poetry generated not only provides a chronology of the events, it also articulates humanity in
43
Negri, Civil Poetry,78.
�20
all its agony. As mentioned in the preceding sections, poetry shifted focus as the harsh realit y
of war set in. Walt Whitman’s poetic arc deftly exemplifies this. The journey from enthusiasm
to despair took less than a year. Poetry written by soldiers begging for death to gain relief
opened a door on incomprehensible suffering. Work written retrospectively honors and
grieves. Continued study of the poetry perpetuates the legacy of this apocalyptic chapter in
American History.
Kate Putnam Osgood writes in her poem ”Driving Home the Cows”:
For news had come to the lonely farm
That three were lying where two had lain;
And the old man’s tremulous palsied arm
Could never lean on a son again.
……………………………………………………………..
The great tears sprang to their meeting eyes;
For the heart must speak when the lips are dumb;
And under the silent evening skies,
Together they followed the cattle home.44
Despite tremendous suffering and loss, life went on. Broken, bent and bereft, survivors
went home. Work and families were reconfigured and restored. Life in the United States went
on, the nation as a whole survived, as this poem illustrates.
44
Ibid., 116,
�
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“Sing Poet in Our Name”: The Arc of National Emotion Portrayed and Preserved in the Poetry of the Civil War
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20 pgs
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Young, Elizabeth
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Introduction
Ted Billett
A man calls his wife from a cell phone, his voice quivering with emotion as he describes
his love for her and for his children. He works on the top floors of the World Trade Center. The
date is September 11, 2001.
The President steps to a podium in the mid-afternoon and sheds tears of sadness on
national television. He makes brief comment on events that unfolded in Newtown, Connecticut
earlier that day. The date is December 14, 2012.
Jackie Kennedy stands at the side of her husband's casket and though her face is hidden
behind a mourning veil, tears can be seen rolling off her cheeks. The date is November 25, 1963.
Human life is emotional. It is defined by subjective internal emotional states and those states are,
in turn, realized within social contexts. The internal worlds of human beings are shaped by the
ebb and flow of emotion. Anger, love, disdain, fear, elation: each of these emotions, and this list
is by no means inclusive, has a role in propelling or inhibiting the human being along life's path.
But is emotion fair game for the historian? This loaded question has only very recently been
settled. An even cursory review of the current state of the historians' field turns up a fastproliferating literature concerned with the history of emotion, though, as Dr. Marcy May points
out, the subject is not devoid of conceptual disagreements. It is no small indication that the
innovative and pioneering Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin now includes
among its eighty associations the new Research Center for the History of Emotion. Ute Frevert,
former Professor of German History at Yale University, is the first and current head of the
Center, having taken up the mantel in 2008. She has offered a compelling justification for the
role of emotion in historical inquiry: "Our research rests on the assumption that emotions –
�feelings and their expressions – are shaped by culture and learnt/acquired in social contexts.
What somebody can and may feel (and show) in a given situation, towards certain people or
things, depends on social norms and rules. It is thus historically variable and open to change."1
Emotions are complicated and temporally capricious. They vary over time and space,
and they exist both within the individual and in the society at large. Yet the variability of
emotion is one very good reason, according to historians Carol Z. and Peter N. Stearns, why their
incorporation into social history is no less than revelatory. Nearly thirty years ago the Stearns
noted that "the study of emotion may become one of the hot new topics in social history"
because of its ability to shed new light on social, political, and economic changes through an
interdisciplinary understanding of emotion as a driver of those shifts.2 Just as the burgeoning of
women's history si new avenues of research, so the history of emotion has and will continue to
present the historian with untrammeled realms of inquiry.
Historians are not a detached set, for all their bookish and ascetic qualities. They are
social participants, members of human communities, emotionally tied-in to the collective. And
historians bear great responsibility in that they must attempt to record and interpret the emotions
of others, of persons separated by time and space and all else that alters unknowably in the
continuum.
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, "Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and
Emotional Standards," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813-836.
1
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, "History of Emotions." Accessed March 13, 2013,
http://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/history-of-emotions.
2
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, "Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional
Standards," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 813-836.
�
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Title
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Introduction
Description
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2 pgs
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Billett, Theodore
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Western Connecticut State University. Department of History
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2013-05
Clio
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Is There a History of Emotion?
Marcy May
We laugh, we love, we grieve, we suffer. The emotional expressions shared by humans
are part of the rich territory historians explore in their investigations of the past. Joy and sorrow
often serve as pivotal points in our analyses, from the triumphal ending of wars to the sad
passing of national leaders. As historians, we know that the emotions of the people and
populations we are writing about often act as the true center of our storytelling and analysis, the
thing that sparks a deeper connection with the past.
An examination of the history of emotion itself is far less common, however. Until
recently, few historians have directly addressed how the expression of emotions such as love or
anger may change over time. Much of what we have identified about historically variable
expressions of emotion comes from work that has been done on gender and sexuality, violence,
or mourning. We know about how nineteenth century white Americans perceived the ideal love
between spouses, for example, through exploration of women’s roles and sexuality. Historians
who have considered childhood may offer us insight into rebellious sons in Regency England or
twentieth-century America with nuanced portraits of the limits and boundaries of anger and
disobedience.
From the 1980s onward, a number of historians have begun a more explicit investigation
of emotion. American historians Peter S. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns argued for a new field
focused on “emotionology” in the American Historical Review, pointing out that anthropologists
and other scholars were already comfortable with studying feelings. Despite the Stearns’
eagerness and a series of books on anxiety, fear, and “cool” which followed, most historians
placed their work on emotion into a larger context. Karen Haltunnen, for instance, considered
the changing perceptions of pain and fear within a study of nineteenth century Gothic
imagination. In her prize-winning This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust considered the
importance of grief through the crisis of massive casualties in the Civil War.1
1
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Em otional
Standards,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), pp. 813 -836; Karen Haltunnen, Murder
Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. ( Cambridge: Harvard U. P. 1998); Drew Gilpin Faust,
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. (New York: Vintage, 2009).
1
�More recently, the reluctance some historians expressed about the legitimacy of an
explicit investigation of emotion has given way to encouragement. Historian Jan Plamper wrote
in History and Theory about the study of emotional history as a “burgeoning field”, while the
American Historical Review editors highlighted this “new historical territory.” A Center for the
History of the Emotions at the University of London, and a History of Emotions Research Center
at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, along with the Australian Research Council Center on the
History of Emotions, illustrate the growing global attention to this scholarship.
Disagreement over how to conceptualize the historical study of emotion enriches the
field. Duke University anthropologist William M. Reddy explores the connections between
language and emotion in his 2001 The Navigation of Feeling, linking language and the
expression of emotion in evolving community norms and rituals. Medieval historian Barbara
Rosenwein challenges the work of Norbert Elias, whose 1939 The Civilizing Process presented a
simple evolution in emotion from the “wild, cruel,…violent” people of the Middle Ages to the
restraint, moderation and self-control of the modern era. Rosenwein rejects what she terms a
“grand narrative” for the concept of “emotional communities.” Historians should look at social
communities, she argues, to undercover “systems of feeling: what these communities define and
assess as valuable or harmful,” the perception of emotions among others, and the ways in which
emotional bonds are expressed, reinforced, or ritualized. As American historian Nicole Eustace
notes, examining the history of emotion allows us to consider how emotion serves as a means of
social communication, the role that emotion plays in constructing political or social power, and
how individuals consider a notion of “the self” in society.2
All of this work gives us new ways to think about how people experience their worlds,
what forces shape or constrain their responses, and how they assign meaning to what they feel
and what they know. In this issue of Clio, the editors have selected a variety of articles which
shed light on emotional experiences, from the fear generated by propaganda to the sympathy
constructed in Civil War era poetry.
2
“AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotion,” American Historical Review 117 (2012): 1487-1530; Nicole
Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2008); Jan Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with William Reddy, Barbara
Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,” History and Theory 49 (2010): 237-265; Barbara Rosenwein, “Worrying about
Emotions in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 821-845; William M. Reddy, The Navigation of
Feeling: A Framework of the History of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2
�
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Is there a History of Emotion
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May, Marcia
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Cover: Is There a History of Emotion
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Clio
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Clio
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History Department
WESTERN CONNECTICUT STATE COLLEGE
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�VOLIDIIE I I, NUMBER 1
S f'ptfmbf'r, 1974
CONTENTS
I ntroduction
PElgE'
ThE' WorkE'\ o f E dwprd StrElit€'mey<:'r:
A N E'glected Sourc<:' o f Cultur~l H istory
b y R ichard G allEl,gher • ••••••••••
1
" Civil WEI,r LE'ttE'rt=l"
b y E rni HElmlin • •••••••••••••••••••••••••• 8
H. L . rl.IE'ncken md thE' WEltch El.nd W~rd S ociety
o f BOE'\ton
b y B lpis<:' Bis~illon • •••••••••••••••••••• 1 4
W flltE'r G ordon M E'rritt p nd L~bor-MflnElgE'mE'nt
0
•••••••••
Rel~tions
b y A liE'\on C . R oth Elnd L~urEl Show~h • ••••• 2 2
RE'view EE'\fI~-y: F ogel E\,nd EngE'rmfln o n
S lElvery
b y ThomE"fI J . K elso • ••..••••••••••••••••• 2 9
H ifltory N E'wfllE'tter • ••••••••••••••••••••••••• 33
�INTRODUCTION
S E'ptrmbC'r l lPrkfl t he b eginning o f p nE'W
f lchool Y N'r p nd w ith i t f 'n o pportuni t y t o p lf'n
nC'w rC'fl<:'f'rch E 'ndC'f'vors. T hifl f irst i8SUC' o f
CLIO c oncC'ntrp.tC' fl o n t h(' th(,llE' o f inc] E"pend E'nt
f ltudy. I t p rC'flC'nts p pprrfl r esulting f rom h i8toricf'l r <:'scf'rch.
T hifl iSflUC" o f CLIO Wf'fl e dit<:,d b y A lison
R oth p nd L purp Sho\t11ph. A s CLIO b E'gins i t 8
flE'Conc] YC'f.'r o f p ublicf'tion, t h(' e Gitorfl w ould
l ikC' t o t hpnk t h(' IDf.'ny who mpd(' i t p os8iblC'.
S hpron NoC"l g rf'ciouflly o ffE'rC'd t o t ypE' thE'
f lt('ncils f or t hifl i ssue. W(' p r(' i nd('btec] t o
R ichprd G f.'llpghE'r, B rucE' CE':vPllE'ugh. p nd R ichf'rd
DucC'y, p ll 1 974 h istory g rf'dflf't<:'8, f or t heir
flUggE' f ltion8 [' i d i ng t his p ubl.icF'tion. F inf' l ly,
p v C'ry s pE'cipl t hpnlw m ust GO t o D r. H erbert
J pnick, C hf'irIDPn o f thE' h if!t.ory d('p~'rtJilE'nt,
f or h ifl E'Ver e nthusiPfltic c ncourpgemE'nt.
CJ.JIO, thC' mUfle o f hi~tory, i s p ut)lishE'd.
f our timC'fl ( 'Pch f lcllo01 yC"pr b y thE' S igmp E tf'
C hpptE'r o f P hi A lptp Th~tf' ( th(' I nternf'tionpl
H istory H onor S ocic t y), i n c oopE'rptiol1 vvi t h thE'
W('fl-[.crn C onnE'cticut St(~C' C ollege H istory C lub.
CLIO i s f inE'ncE'd b y S tu] e nt GovC'rnnJ.0'nt· A Sflociption f unds ( through t he H i8tory C lub) E'no thE'
g E'nC'rosity o f p rivpt0' 6 0norfl. I t i s f r0'(, o f
c hf'rge t o f-'ny IDE'mbE'J" o f t h0' s tuo0'nt b ody. L If'il
8 ubflcriptiollS c ost ~p2.50 p Y rf'r t o CCVE'r c ost
p nd h pndling.
HO'!]:S ON lJONTRIBUTORS
RICHARD GAIJL1tGI-IEH i s
P
1 974 B .A. h istory g rE'duf'tE'
f rom W csconn.
ERNI HAI,:::LIN i s p 1 974 g rpdupt(' VlJith [. B .A. i n
E ngltsh f ror. S t. LE'vv:r E'ncE' U ni v (' r si ty~ flhe p lc'ns
t o c ontinu(' i n g rpdup t e Vlrork.
BLAISE BISA;I:LLOn i fl
f'
IDE'IDbE'r o f thE'
fl"~f'ff
E 't
V i(,8tern Cor.nE' c ticut f :;tf'te C ollC'[;(' J.Ji b rr' r y.
AllISON RO'l'lI AND J~UH..;. SHOWAH prE' 8 E'nicrs i n h iflto r y E 't
j jJ?.
W,
THOI'.~~6
8
C011.11.
KELSO i s
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t C'PchE'r o f h istory f It
W ('sconn. H(' k indly c ontributE'o E' b ook r E'view,
b E'ginnint, whp t we h o)(' w ill b(' E' r E'gulf'r f E'f'ture
f or C LIO.
�
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Vol. 02, num. 1, Clio - 1974
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33 pgs
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Cover, Toc, Introduction, Clio, Vol. II, No. 1
Description
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Introductory pages of vol. II, No. 1.
Clio