The distance to the past

by Doctor Science

While I'm working on something longer and more solid, a few sidenotes on historical topics.

Yesterday's Metropolitan Museum Image of the Day was this picture:

The Met's page on the picture (where you can do all kinds of fancy zooming) gives the date only as "1940s", but in the spirit of Andrew Sullivan's View from Your Window Contest, I wondered if I could narrow it down much, much further.

The photo is by Weegee (Arthur Felig), and was probably taken on the Lower East Side in NYC. The buildings seem to be tenements with businesses on the first (ground) floor, apartments above. The middle building -- which has floors closer together than the ones on either side -- is at least 5 stories tall. From left to right, the businesses are: Shoe Repairing, Meat Market, [something with only war posters in the window], Cutlery Grinding. The Meat Market is #375, the possibly-empty shop is #377; the Cutlery Grinding shop claims to be "Est. 1848", and is also at #377. I don't know if that's enough info to pin down the street.

As for the date, I started looking at the many visible posters:

We Can't Win Without Them, War Manpower Commission, 1942.

Don't Let Him Down (Office for Emergency Management. Division of Information), 1941 and America's answer! Production (Office for Emergency Management. Division of Information), 1942.

Elsewhere in the picture, there's The Enemy is Listening (Emergency Management Office, Facts and Figures Office) 1942.

So mid-1942 at the earliest, and obviously no later than Spring 1945, I guess. But can we narrow it further? And what is going on, anyway?

Looking at the faces:

I'm going to guess that these women are Italian (or Italian-American): they all have dark hair and generally Italian features, and they also have pierced ears, which were quite uncommon among native-born American women at that time. Pierced ears may even speak to them being from southern Italy rather than the North, according to my very vague memories of the few women I saw with pierced ears before 1968.

But what is the occasion? There are a lot of flags, and the war banners Time Is Short and Every Minute Counts suggest that some kind of rally or announcement is taking place. People are looking out the windows, gathered on the fire escapes holding up their children -- but they don't seem happy or excited. Are they just bored because whatever they're waiting for hasn't happened yet? Or are they hearing something like news of the invasion of Sicily where they might reasonably have very mixed feelings?

I'm sure there are all kinds of signs and clues in this picture, but I don't know what they're clues *to*. Very few of the men are wearing hats, but the women front are wearing coats. Does that mean it's spring or fall? Or does it mean it was the weekend?

Is there any significance to this flag:

or is it just good old American bunting in red-white-and-blue? Were there always so many propaganda posters in shop windows, or would this reflect whatever special occasion was taking place?

My father was a teenager in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, at the time this picture was taken, and he may be able to just look at it and tell me immediately what's going on and why. But without talking to a native informant like that, I feel as though the meaning of the scene is blurring while the photo stays clear.

At a somewhat greater historical remove the feeling of distance can be abruptly startling. I'm in the middle of reading Steven Budiansky's Perilous Fight, a history of the naval War of 1812 that is also a ripping yarn. *Strongly* recommended for Patrick O'Brian fans and anyone interested in the Age of Sail.

So, I'm reading along, and on pp. 106-107 Budiansky is talking about Paul Hamilton, Secretary of the Navy. Hamilton, a South Carolina planter, was distracted by his personal debts:

"Nothing short of ruin can be the consequence to me," he wrote his son-in-law upon reading of "another sale of 22 of my Negroes"; "I do not now expect that shall be left a shelter for myself and family, or a Servant to hand them a cup of water."

[emphasis mine] Because *clearly* the sign of ruin and destitution is that your family will be homeless! (a reasonable thing to fear) And your wife will have to pour a cup of water for herself ... What?!?

I am staggered trying to imagine an America, less than 200 years ago, in which it seemed *reasonable* for someone to be afraid he'd have to get his own cup of water. Or to be afraid that his wife would have to, which has got to be what he's talking about. He's not talking about being afraid his wife will have to go to a well and haul water up with her own hands -- an arduous task, granted, but one that generally counted as "women's work". No, he's afraid she'll have to *pour her own drink*.

Mrs. Robert Donaldson (Susan Jane Gaston), by Southern artist George Cooke. So you know what a Lady looked like.

To worry that your family will be homeless is reasonable and understandable in any era. To worry that your family will have to reach for their own food and drink is *bizarre*, and makes me feel as though a gulf of understanding has opened up at my feet. And yet, it's less than 200 years, and not that far in space.

Comments

[jack lecou]

The "time is short" and "every minute counts" banners ("streamers") were, like the posters, standard items from the War Production Board catalog ca. 1942 (and later, presumably; source).

The streamers are pictured in the above as fixtures in factories, rallies exhorting production, etc. - so who knows what's going on in this street scene.

There also appear to be small flags (of various countries?) strung from balcony to balcony.

[The Raven]

Houses in those days did not have running water. If your house was well-sited, it might have a well inside. So someone had to draw the water, and perhaps carry it in. The storage vessel was probably a bucket.

[Mithras]

To worry that your family will have to reach for their own food and drink is *bizarre*, and makes me feel as though a gulf of understanding has opened up at my feet.

I think you're being overly literal. Pouring a cup of water is the least amount of labor Hamilton can think of. He's saying his family will lack all comforts, in the days when most comforts came as a result of another person directly providing them to you. They won't have someone to do as much as hand them a cup of water, much less chop wood, mend a fence, etc.

[Anthony Damiani]

MoMA dates it to 1942, but offers little else.

[Phil]

I am staggered trying to imagine an America, less than 200 years ago, in which it seemed *reasonable* for someone to be afraid he'd have to get his own cup of water.

We have those people *today*. They're called "celebrities," and they have something called "personal assistants" who do things like . . . fetch water.

[lightning]

"I never thought I would be so rich as to have my own motor car, nor so poor as I would not have my own servants." -- Agatha Christie

One of the major "social problems" of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was "the servant problem". With the expanding middle class and the movement of the working class into factories, how does one hire reliable servants? From reading literature of the time, work in a sweatshop was *a lot* more attractive than "service". (One was not expected to provide sexual services in a factory, for example.)

Yeah, it's a real mindwarp. It's as hard for me to imagine living with servants as it must have been for Mr. Hamilton (or Ms Christie) to imagine living without servants.

[Scott de B.]

Maybe they're Yankee fans and they're listening to the Cardinals beating New York in the 1942 World Series.

[Juliet B.]

I agree that the picture is of the lower east side, but it certainly doesn't have to be Italian-Americans pictured; those faces could belong to a variety of immigrant groups, including Gypsies and Jews from Romania and Galicia (which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though it is now located in southeast Poland and western Ukraine.) I would guess that the crowd was gathered for either a parade or a flag-raising, both of which were done regularly to honor the boys serving overseas. Both events would trigger mixed emotions, especially in 1942-43.

[Bloix]

Prior to the twentieth century, anyone with any pretensions to the middle class had to have at least one servant. In the absence of hot and cold runing water, gas and electricity, refrigeration, and machines like washers and vacuums, maintaining even the most modest lower-middle-class household took an enormous amount of work. A woman simply could not maintain a household and also maintain a middle-class appearance. Without a servant, you were a proletarian or a peasant.

There's a scene in the novel New Grub Street (1891) - about a young man of lower-middle-class origins who is trying and failing to succeed as a novelist - in which there is literally no food in the house and no money to buy any, and the hero is wracking his brains about how he will feed his wife, his son, AND THEIR SERVING GIRL.

If you dismissed your servant, you fell out of your social class. You would starve first.

[cycling shorts women]

To worry that your family will be homeless is reasonable and understandable in any era. To worry that your family will have to reach for their own food and drink is *bizarre*, and makes me feel as though a gulf of understanding has opened up at my feet. And yet, it's less than 200 years, and not that far in space.