[TWiH took a two week hiatus following the changeover to DK5. Don't worry, the missing stories will show up next year when November rolls around again. We now resume our regularly scheduled storytelling, every Monday on Daily Kos]
"History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance." - R. Jackson Wilson |
This Week in History presents summaries of a few selected historical events for each calendar week of the year. |
November 23 - A Jewish girl in blackface becomes the last of the red hot mamas (1926)
Anyone who has been lucky enough to enjoy one of Bette Midler's outrageously imaginative live shows will remember her bawdy character Soph who regales the audience with quips like this:
"I was in bed one night with my boyfriend Ernie and he said to me, "Soph, how come you never tell me when you're having an orgasm?" I said to him, 'Ernie, you're never around!'"
The brash and delightfully honest Soph is based on a real life artistic heroine of Bette: the legendary Sophie Tucker, known as The Last of the Red Hot Mamas.
Sonya Kalish was born in 1884 in the Ukraine, then part of the Russian empire, as her parents were about to emigrate to the United States. Settling in Hartford, Connecticut, the family opened a restaurant and rooming house, popular with performers travelling on the vaudeville circuit. Their little girl, known as Sophie—the Americanized version of her name—was enchanted by the talents and exciting lifestyles of actors and singers who streamed in and out of the family establishment.
Young Sophie started her performing career as a child, singing for tips in the restaurant, and the applause she received fired her ambitions. Her dreams soon reached higher than being the culinary chanteuse of Hartford.
Nevertheless, her parents traditional ways pushed her toward marriage and children rather than a career. She eloped with one of the town's dashing gadabouts, Louis Tuck, when she was 16. The couple returned to Hartford and Sophie's parents arranged an Orthodox wedding to legitimize the civil marriage through Jewish tradition.
Sophie, having yielded to her parents' wishes to settle down to the 'proper' role of women, soon found herself pregnant and gave birth to a son, Albert. At 19, she was a wife and mother but found herself yearning for much more. So Sophie Tuck asked her husband for a divorce, packed her bags, left her son with her parents, and headed for New York City.
Adding an extra syllable to her married name, Sophie Tucker made the rounds of the legions of cafés of the Big Apple, singing for money and meals. Any money she had left at the end of the month was sent home to support her son and her parents, amounts that increased exponentially as her fame and fortune grew over the years; she abandoned her son but at least she scrupulously ensured that he was well provided for.
Sophie finally got a break, landing a job in a vaudeville theater in 1907. She was not a typical artiste of the era, slender and graced with beauty. Sophie was what we might tactfully call Rubenesque; in her own words, she was a 'fat girl.' While the theater owner loved her voice, he didn't think the audience would take her seriously because of her plain looks and more than ample figure. Sophie would have to become something other than who she was.
Many actors and actresses have faced similar choices when they are powerless novices: principles or paycheck and career. The black actors and actresses in the time of Sophie's early career also were forced into limited choices: play the maid or cook or servant or give up on acting. Sophie hated the ultimatum she was given but accepted it nonetheless, for the time being: playing in blackface. A big black 'mammy' was something the audience could enjoy, a fat Jewish girl singer was simply out of the question.
After more than a year of embarrassment about her performing conditions, fate intervened: her luggage, including the hated blackface makeup, was lost while touring—and as everyone knows, the show must go on. Sophie Tucker appeared as Sophie Tucker, in all of her Jewish, plain, full-figured glory and the audience loved her. Never again would she perform as a coon-shouter.
Once she was allowed to be herself, she remained true to herself: a big gal and a sexy gal and a brassy broad with a biting wit. Her repertoire is filled with musical tributes to real women rather than fantasies, like I’m The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas and Nobody Loves a Fat Girl, But Oh How a Fat Girl Can Love.
Nevertheless, that year of experience had broadened her musical repertoire, performing the ragtime hits written by black composers or based on black beats. A versatile artist, Sophie also added blues and jazz to her performances of popular tunes. In 1909, she met a talented young black composer, Shelton Brooks, who wrote the song which made her famous as well as launching his own long and successful career. Sophie was well known as musically adventurous and happy to work with and promote black musicians and composers, so the two became great colleagues. She recorded Shelton's wistful jazz number, Some of These Days, the next year and it became her theme song for the rest of her life, as well as the title of her autobiography.
Although that record sold moderately well, she knew she could improve on it. Fifteen years later, on this day in 1926, Sophie Tucker recorded Some of These Days again. That recording went on to sell over a million copies, a staggering amount in that era, and remained the number one hit on the charts for five weeks.
Sophie Tucker became one of the most popular entertainers of the 20th century. As the bawdy songs in burlesque theaters and the salacious repartee of vaudeville faded in fashion, she moved with the times and adapted to work in other venues. She starred in three Broadway hits and then took them on the road to entertain the nation. Her fame spread internationally and Sophie's performances in Europe were acclaimed just as much as they were at home.
Sophie had her own radio show in the 1930s and Hollywood put her on the silver screen in such films as Honky Tonk and Follow the Boys. With the advent of television, she became a popular guest star on countless TV shows, including a memorable performance on What's My Line. All the while, she never left singing for her supper, churning out dozens and dozens of singles and albums as well as being featured in collaborative works with other artists.
From Broadway to a command performance in London for the king and queen, Sophie was adored everywhere she went. She had a heart as big as her own full figure, giving charitably not just in hands-off donations but personally helping the poor, the abused and the hopeless wherever she travelled.
In an era when women were supposed to be either demure maidens or damned harlots, Sophie expressed herself as a real person, a complex mix of many things, including a healthy and normal sensuality. She shook up the world's assumption that only a lithe and lovely starlet could be a sex symbol. Sophie tore down the illusions about women's natures and showed that their reality was far more interesting and fulfilling. She was proud of who she was and unflinchingly challenged people's stereotypes about women, about weight, about female sexuality and about race.
She kept performing right up until her death in 1966. Her influence on comediennes, actresses and singers has been acknowledged by some of the greats: Carol Channing, Mama Cass Elliot, Roseanne Barr, Ethel Merman, Joan Rivers and more. Sophie Tucker left behind a legacy for generations of female entertainers: being authentic and comfortable in one's self is its own kind of beauty.
November 24 - In the beginning was protoplasm (1859)
A journey of five years, another twenty years to analyze and theorize, and then three more years to compose: one of the most important books in history was 28 years in the making. On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Most of us refer to it today as "The Origin of Species" but a wide swath of the American populace probably thinks of it as something more like "Satan's Own Handbook for Corrupting Souls."
Oddly enough, young Charles Darwin intended to become a minister of the Church of England but wanted to see the world and investigate the wonders of nature before settling down. After graduating from Cambridge, he was offered the chance of a lifetime: a berth on a ship planning to circumnavigate the globe. His position would be unofficial, meaning he would have to pay his way; fortunately, his father eventually consented to underwrite the costs and Charles set sail with the HMS Beagle on December 27, 1831.
The ship's mission was to chart waters for the British Admiralty, obviously a vital concern for an empire built on its mastery of the oceans. The Beagle traversed the Atlantic Ocean, sailed down the coast of South America and back up the Pacific side to Ecuador. It then crossed the Pacific to Australia, navigated the Indian Ocean to Africa, and rounded the Cape of Good Hope where it darted across to Brazil before returning home to England in 1836.
Although the mission was a nautical one, England at the time was in the midst of a scientific revolution, with new studies, new research and new theories seeming to burst forth every day. Darwin was expected to act as a naturalist on the voyage, observing plants, animals, fossils and human cultures and collecting specimens at every stop to add to the knowledge of science.
He faithfully executed his assigned task, taking copious notes that were published even before the Beagle returned home. A few years after his return, his journals of his experience were published, undergoing several edits and name changes over the decades until arriving at the name and edition we know today as The Voyage of the Beagle.
Darwin wrote numerous other articles and papers as well over the years and many show a steady progress toward the world-shaking theory that would be his legacy: that natural forces cause organisms to adapt and change through hereditary means, as selected traits enhance the survival and reproduction of individuals.
Although many observations led Darwin to this conclusion, the most compelling for him and the best known to us was his survey of the differences between finches on three of the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Noting the small but important differences between the isolated populations of the birds, he was able to deduce that each had transformed itself into a new species as a result of specific local conditions. They had evolved to adapt to their environment.
That idea may not seem to startling to us now but at that time it was the final blow to religious philosophical structures which had been based on an eternal and unchangeable nature that was divinely created. It implied that the world had not been whisked into being in a few brief cosmic moments but that natural processes had shaped and created all of the plants and creatures around us, including Man himself. It shook the Church, in all of its sundry denominations, to its very core.
Today, most Christian churches have long accepted Darwin's theory of evolution, seeing it as evidence of some kind of 'long game' by God and viewing the book of Genesis as allegory rather than scientific fact. Of course, not all believers have been willing to move ahead and thus we still fight the same battle that John Scopes faced in the famous Monkey Trial, the effort to impose religious dogma as science in the classroom and the textbook.
As for Darwin himself, the erstwhile parson-in-waiting, he struggled against his long held beliefs in the divine but ultimately adopted an attitude of modest disbelief:
I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. – I think that generally ... an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.
The science is clear and now we simply wait for religion to adapt and evolve to catch up with it.
November 27 - Miss Chiquita calls in the marines (1909)
The singing and dancing señorita with a tropical fruit sombrero may appear innocent enough—but Miss Chiquita has more in common with the Wicked Witch than with Dorothy Gale.
In 1884, Minor Cooper Keith was granted 800,000 acres by the Costa Rican government to settle a debt. He hoped to build and operate a railroad to service the burgeoning export coffee trade of the country but the project was a bust. However, all of that land was soon put to profitable use.
It turns out that it was excellent for growing bananas, one of the world's favorite fruits. Keith soon dominated Costa Rica's export banana market and quickly expanded his operations into nearby nations such as Panama and Colombia.
In 1899, Keith merged his business with the dominant grower and trader of the Caribbean market, forming the United Fruit Company. The resulting giant was able to freely buy or pressure its way into the purchase of 14 of its much smaller rivals and soon had a virtual monopoly on bananas.
As highly profitable as the banana trade was, the company's owners would expand even more over the next decade, branching out to not only purchase dominant positions in other tropical crops like sugar cane and tobacco but also to new ventures like national railways and telegraph and telephone systems. With its vast land holdings, shipping fleet and rigid control of the export markets, United Fruit held tremendous power over the governments of most Central American nations. In some ways, countries like Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua could almost be considered wholly-owned subsidiaries of the international corporation.
Corruption in Central America was hardly unknown previously. But as United Fruit grew larger and more powerful, becoming the largest employer in the entire region, subornation of elected officials became endemic. The company received not only lucrative contracts for its many services but was often granted tax-free lands and favored treatment of its activities and holdings. Those extensive lands, the best in the nations, reduced the peasants to eking out crops on marginal lands or becoming laborers for United Fruit; either way, their lot was a bare living at best.
Its reputation as a heartless employer whose workers toiled in abject poverty didn't seem to lose it any friends in Washington, DC. America was still in its expansionist phase, having successfully brandished its big stick in the Spanish-American war and winning itself the Philippines as a colony. The United States was dedicated to imperialism and business and United Fruit was as big a business as there was.
In 1909 Nicaragua's president was a progressive, José Santos Zelaya. Among other liberal ideas and policies which he tried to implement, Zelaya worked toward a federated nation encompassing all of the countries of Central America. Needless to say, such a plan alarmed the United Fruit Company as well as officials in Washington who feared it might threaten U.S. control of the Panama Canal.
The United States funnelled money and covert support to Zelaya's opponent, Juan José Estrada, the governor of Bluefields, a city on the Caribbean coast and the hub of United Fruit's operations. As open rebellion broke out, two Americans were captured laying mines for the rebels. The Zelaya government indicted, tried and executed them, setting off the chain of events that led to his overthrow.
The U.S. severed relations with Nicaragua's elected government and threw its full support to the rebel faction. Warships were dispatched to the area to embargo and blockade the country and, on this day in 1909, U.S. Marines landed at Bluefields to assist Governor Estrada in seizing control of the nation.
The United States would periodically occupy Nicaragua and other Central American countries for the next 25 years, ensuring their obedience to U.S. policies and their continued abasement to United Fruit. One of the key military figures during another occupation in 1912 was Major Smedley Butler, later to be General Butler.
His experiences serving as the enforcement arm of imperialism soured him on the idea of using the military to fight wars on behalf of private enterprises. He wrote:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
After Franklin Roosevelt became president, the retired General Butler came forward and revealed the Business Plot, a conspiracy of businessmen and industrialists to overthrow the president and install a fascist dictatorship; unsurprisingly, all of the named conspirators walked away unscathed and unindicted.
The Banana Wars—fought to maintain the holdings, coercive labor policies and corrupt business practices of United Fruit—would keep the United States Marines and Navy busy for nearly three decades; President Franklin Roosevelt finally ended American suzerainty in the region in 1934. Propping up dictators, putting down peasant revolts and overthrowing elected governments kept United Fruit in power and profits but it badly tainted America's reputation. Central America never had much opportunity to develop democratic institutions, going from the autocratic rule of Spanish kings to the iron grip of American crony capitalists. The despotic dictatorships, mass slaughters and endemic civil wars of the last half of the 20th century in the region are direct results of the bitter rule of United Fruit for decades. Miss Chiquita's cheery rumba is a dance over the graves of those who made her fame and fortune possible.
The company, now Chiquita Brands International, barely acknowledges its checkered past but says it now tries to be a good global citizen:
Although Chiquita’s history includes storied moments in its past, the company now proudly focuses on extending labor rights, protecting our environment and investing in the communities in which we live and work.
Not everyone agrees.
And that's the news for this week in history. Goodnight, and have a pleasant Thanksgiving.