The Epilogue by John Sedgwick

On Politics [not the sentimental view]

Removal is often seen today as the Cherokee Holocaust, an unspeakable tragedy that will define the tribe forever as one consigned to the Trail of Tears. Sadly, that is only too true, but it overlooks the fact that removal was probably inevitable. Twenty-one thousand people were never going to be able to hold on to their territory in the face of mass expansion by a dynamic burgeoning nation that dramatically outnumbered them, possessed military power that had twice defeated the greatest empire on earth, was backed by an economy that was the envy of the world, was convinced it should rule from the Atlantic to the Pacific as its manifest destiny, and completely surrounded them. Whether the Cherokee lands stretched over their original 125,000 square miles or the 78 million acres they were ceded in Oklahoma, the Cherokee Nation was never going to survive as an independent, sovereign nation within America’s borders.

The tribe, at its height surely the most dynamic in America, was a glory that deserved far better. Jackson’s implacable demand for removal was heartless, and Georgia’s straight-out land theft by means of a lottery was criminal, but the Cherokee Nation was in no position to resist either. And with the Civil War looming, the American government was never going to help, whatever the Supreme Court ruled.

It was lamentable, but the Cherokee Nation had no future in the east, and probably none anywhere. The only question was what would become of its people. Jackson demanded removal, but presidents before had held out the offer of assimilation, making the Cherokee Americans like anyone else. As an indigenous people the Cherokee were foreign nationals who were determined to remain independent despite the forces of integration that rose up everywhere around them. That was understandable, but hopeless. Rather than face the facts, the Cherokee took refuge in varying degrees of denial, always a temptation when the future appears dire.

In this, they were not well served by either of the two preeminent Cherokee leaders of the day, John Ross and Major Ridge. Their views were diametrically opposed, but similarly detached from reality. The three leading Ridges held to their belief so tightly that they were willing to die for it, and Ross clung to his so fiercely that he seemed to have been complicit in the killings. Their competing attitudes drew on the divisions of class, race, power and money, but at bottom, they may simply have been personal, as befitted a diminutive Scot and an imposing Cherokee who literally did not speak each other’s language. The remarkable evolution of Cherokee society might have united the two men in pride over the nation’s progress and heritage, but it did the opposite, as Major Ridge identified with the prosperous mixed-bloods and Ross with the full-bloods who had been left behind. The rub between them created a national friction that would ultimately explode in flames.

But it didn’t have to, and that was the tragedy. Ross and Ridge had created the modern Cherokee government together and they served it together as its top officials. The had thought as one, but they split over Jackson’s demand for removal, and the gulf  only widened over time. It is the work of politics to resolve such conflicts peacefully, but Cherokee politics was not up to the job. For a society that always operated by consensus, there was little tradition of compromise. The marvelous balance of opposites in the Cherokee cosmology left few means for humans to make adjustments when things went off. Prioritizing stability, society was too threatened by instability to address it meaningfully. The warrior culture offered few gradations between war and peace, all or nothing. When the medicine men proved powerless against smallpox, the Cherokee did not revise their system of medicine, but abandoned it in despair. When the settlers demanded land, the Cherokee blithely ceded it or fought to the death, leaving themselves worse off either way. When the modern ways of the settlers were considered superior to the traditional ones, the traditional ones were either clung to defiantly or discarded like old clothes.

The issue of removal was so stark as to be existential, and seemed to offer only two, mutually exclusive positions. Stay or go. But there were plenty of gentler variations available. If Ross had been wiling to listen, he would have realized that staying was untenable, made plans to leave sooner, sold his people on those plans, greatly reducing hardships when removal was thrust upon them. For their part the Ridges might have seen that the west was hardly a panacea, acknowledged that resistance was legitimate, and worked to make removal more attractive. Few Cherokee could start over as easily  as the Ridges. It didn’t help that Ross was principal; chief for life, insulated from legitimate opposition, or that he responded to the dissent of Major Ridge and his son John by removing them from the government. Rather than try to understand the Ridges, and work with them, Ross declared them traitors who should be shot on sight, ending any discussion. The Ridges too easily turned to outraged indignation when Ross failed to share their point of view. Once the government split into two parties on the issue, only Sequoyah was left to speak for the nation, and his voce was too weak to carry any message of unity. And so politics shifted to that ‘other means’ of General Clausewitz – to war. While Jackson’s removal killed too many Cherokee, their own ensuing civil war, and their attacks on each other in the greater American Civil War, killed far more. . . .the Trail  of Tears had proved to be a long one.

 

Phil Jordan in Petrograd 1917 by Helen Rappaport

These are just a few of so many forgotten stories; the last echoes of a generation of lost voices. But if I had to single any one, there is one voice above all the others that strikes a nerve in its own inimitable way: the utterly truthful, ingenuous voice an obscure African American, Phil Jordan. An unlettered man and political innocent, and a loyal servant of US diplomacy, who lived to tell the tale. His glorious letters, written in his vivid vernacular style, and reflecting an enduring sense of being ‘a stranger in a strange land’, remain the only known published account of the revolution by an African American. They provider us with an unforgettable sense of exactly what it was like to be caught, in Petrograd, in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

 

The new American Ambassador to Petrograd in 1916 was a genial Democrat from Kentucky, David Rowland Francis, a self-made millionaire who had made his money in St. Louis from grain-dealing and investments in railway companies. He had served as the governor of Missouri (1889-93) and had lobbied for St. Louis to stage the highly successful Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 –better known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. – as well as the summer Olympics later that same year. His ambassadorial experience was, however, nil, although in 1914 he had been offered and had declined an ambassadorship in Buenos Aires. Nevertheless, the choice of Francis for Petrograd seemed logical: he was a man of proven business acumen, whose primary goal would be to renegotiate the US trade treaty with Russia that had been broken off in December 1912 in response to the tsarist government’s anti-Semitic policies. Russia, as Francis well knew, was eager to buy US grain, cotton and armaments.

On 21 April 1916 Francis sailed from Hoboken in New Jersey on a Swedish steamship Oscar II with his private secretary, Arthur Daily, and his devoted black valet-cum-chauffeur, Philip Jordan. His wife Jane stayed home in St. Louis in the care of the couple’s six sons, due to her poor health and her dread of facing thhe legendary freezing Russian winters; Francis had not insisted on her accompanying him, knowing full well that his wife ‘would not like it’ in Petrograd. In her absence, and reticent about embracing the social life of the city (like his British counterpart Buchanan, he spoke no Russian), Francis relied very heavily on the protective ‘Phil’, as he like to call him: a man he respected as ‘loyal, honest and efficient and intelligent withal.’

Jordan, whose African American origins are unclear, was a small, wiry man who had grown up in Hog Alley – a squalid slum district of Jefferson, Missouri, notorious (much like New York’s Bowery) as a haunt of thieves, prostitutes and drunks. His early life had been spent as a hard drinker and gang member, regulary caught up in  street fights. Later he worked on riverboats along the Missouri, before, in 1889 – and now ostensibly a reformed character- he had been recommended to Francis, the newly elected governor of Missouri. After a brief period working for the subsequent governor, Jordan returned to the Francis family’s grand mansion in St. Louis’s prosperous West End in 1902, serving as valet or, as American’s then termed it, ‘body servant.’ Here he had seen four US presidents – Cleveland, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson- come and go as visitors, and had been taught to read and write by Mrs. Francis, who was considerably more tolerant than her husband of Jordan’s occasion lapses into heavy drinking, and to whom Jordan became devoted.

The culture shock awaiting Francis and Jordan- freshly arrived from the balmy American South to cold, wartime Petrograd was enormous. During their crossing Francis’s  Russian interpreter, a young Slavist named Samuel Harper, had done his best to give the inexperienced ambassador ‘a crash course on what he might expect in Russia.’ Harper came to the conclusion that Francis was a ‘very blunt, outspoken American, who believed in speaking his mind regardless of the rules of diplomacy.’ The contrast with the buttoned-up and immaculately school Sir George Buchanan could not have been clearer; the two ambassadors were to have little in common.

As others in the diplomatic community put it; ‘Old Francis was  a hick from St. Louis with no understanding of Russian politics who did not know a Left Social Revolutionary from a potato’, ‘an old fool, a stuffed shirt and a dumb head.’ But to the Russians, who saw in America the prospect of lucrative and much needed commercial relations, the new ambassador was ‘easily the most popular diplomat in Petrograd. Francis, moreover, was socially engaging in away that his British counterpart was not. He made no bones about his enjoyment of the finest Kentucky bourbon and fat cigars; he chewed plugs of tobacco and was able to ‘ring’ the spittoon at a distance of several feet. Unlike the dithering Buchanan at his games of bridge, Francis’s amiable simplicity did not extend to cards; he was ‘no child at poker’, regularly cleaning his opponents out.

[The situation in Petrograd, as can be imagined, was desperate.  Though the productive capacities of the Russian economy we certainly adequate even in times of war, administration and transport were a mess, leading to severe and chronic shortages in Petrograd]

The resourceful Phil Jordan, soon armed with pidgin Russian, rapidly became ‘invaluable’ in all matters relating to the day-to-day running of the embassy; fearless about roaming the streets and haggling at markets, mixing in with the multicultural, polyglot crowd. An embassy official Fred Dearing noted in his diary: ‘One sees in an instant that Phil is somebody. No one could be less obtrusive, but definitely somebody.’ Jordan was close at hand, for example, to assist Francis when, to celebrate the Fourth of July, Francis had bravely mounted a successful reception for over one hundred guests. ‘I engaged a first class orchestra of nine pieces,’ he told Jane, and thanks to Phil we had a delicious punch in addition to the tea served from the samovar which we had recently bought. We had caviar sandwiches, tomato sandwiches and what appeared to be unknown to the Russians, we had delicious ices’. Florence Harper recalled that the only time she saw good food during her nine months in Russia was when she was invited to a reception at the US embassy on Furshtatskaya ,’when I had real white bread and real ice cream,’ both, no doubt, obtained thanks to the persistence and scheming of the wily Phil Jordan.

In the beginning, Ambassador Francis and his aide J.Butler Wright were optimistic about Russia’s post-revolutionary future, but an incident on the night of 9 April confirmed how volatile the Petrograd mobs still were. Francis had been entertaining guests that Sunday evening when Phil Jordan hurried in with a message warning that a mob waving black anarchist flags was on its way to attack the ‘American imperialists’ at the embassy. They had apparently been incited to do so in protest at the recent conviction and sentence to death of the American trade-union organizer and political activist Thomas J. Mooney, at  a rigged trial in which he had been accused of involvement in a bomb plot during a San Francisco labor rally. In Phil Jordan’s vernacular ( later ‘sanitized’ for publication):

‘ebery night th ambassador takes a walk with only me, I tol’ him he oughtn’t do it. To-night we had some guests still here when de militia telephone. Jes’ think if we’d been a-walking and dose fellas wid de black flag had come along. Ambassador Francis only knows two words in Russian ‘Amerikanski Posol’[America Ambassador].If dose fellas as’ed him anything he’s have said ‘Amerikanski posol’. Wouldn’t they ‘a’ rubbed their han’s an’ said, Look wa’at de good Lord has gone and brought us.’

That night, preparing for his own dramatic Last Stand, Francis immediately instructed Jordan to load his revolver and bring it to his as he waited for a detachment of government militia to come and defend him. Francis vowed to shoot anyone who tried to get into the embassy, but as things turned out, the mob never got that far and was dispersed soon after setting off. Exaggerated stories were later circulated that Francis had single-handedly seen them off, which amused him greatly: ‘Everyone seemed to prefer the more sensational story so I suppose I will have to resign myself to this heroic role,’ He later wrote. Phil was intensely relieved: the ambassador ‘had never fired a gun in his life, so far as I know, and I knew if he fired at that crowd, it would probably be the end of us both.’

As for the numbers killed and wounded during July, official figures published by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets talked of four hundred, central first-aid services estimated in excess of seven hundred and on 90 July Novoe vremya claimed that more than one thousand were killed during the riots of 2 and 3 July alone. The evening of 6 July ‘we went to bed wondering what would happen next,’ wrote Lady Georgina Buchanan to her family in England ‘All night there was shooting so sleep was nearly impossible.’ She was grateful to be safely tucked in bed, but over at the American embassy, when the guns and cannons had begun roaring again around midnight, the irrepressible Phil Jordan had ‘jumped out of bed and rushed to the Winter Palace Bridge to see what was going on:

The Bolscheviks had Started to come on this Side of town and the Soldiers was waiting for them at the foot of the bridge. Just as they was about the middle of the bridge the soldiers opened fired with machine guns and cannon. it was one grand Sight. The Sky was full of the prettiest fire works you Ever saw. You know during a Revolution or any kind of fighting every body has to lay flat on your Stomach. I as lying flat behind the man that was pumping the machine Gun.

Later, when Francis was dictating his own version of events in a letter to Jane (Phil’s accounts were also in letters to Jane), musing when he might return home, he observed that Phil rather hoped they would not leave too soon, as he had told him, ‘we are having so many revolutions here now that it is too interesting for us to think of leaving.’

Ten days after the July fighting was over , a day of mourning was set aside for the lavish funeral rites of seven of the twenty Cossacks killed in the street fighting. In stark contrast to the secular funerals for the victims of the February Revolution, the ceremonial on 15 July was an intensely Orthodox one designed to rebuke to the socialist groups that had organized the Field of Mars burials without any religious ceremony . . .Never one to miss such a spectacle, Phil Jordan was always close by, awestruck by the immensity of the occasion: ‘the press SAID  OVER one million people . . .think of such a larger crowd and all frightened half to death. Every time the man would strike his base drum the crowd would Shiver.

On 17 November, Phil Jordan sat down to write one of his long anecdotal letters describing recent events. It had been a harrowing time; the Bolsheviks, he told Mrs. Francis’s cousin Annie Pulliam, had ‘shot Petrograd to pieces. We are all seting on a bomb Just waiting for someone to touch a match to it,’ he added with his usual vivid sense of drama. ‘If the Ambassador gets out of this Mess with our life we will be lucky’. For once the redoubtable Phil was anxious: ‘These crazy people are Killing each other Just like we Swat flies at home .Even the boss was admitting to his son Perry, ‘I never knew of  a place where human life is as cheap as it is now in Russia.’ But sad to say, murder and robbery and acts of violent retribution were now so commonplace that he found himself becoming ‘accustomed’ to it. Wrote Phil Jordan:

Streets are full of all the cut throats and robbers that  are in Russia, you can hear the machine guns and cannons roaring all night and day. Thousands are beng killed. why we are alive I can not tell .they break into private homes and rob and kill all the people. In a house not very far from the embassy they killed a little girl and 12 rifle baynets found struck through her body. Sights that have to be seen . . .I have fond out the best thing to do right now is to keep your mouth shut and look as much like an American as you can . . .All the thugs that have been turned out of prison was armed with a rifle . . .we cant tell what minute the Germans will take Petrograd. If they come right at this time I don’t know what we would do because we cant get out. we are like a rat in a trap. the Bolsheviks have torn up all the railroads. I cant tell but this Ford might be a life Saver. All the business houses and banks are closed. The city is pitch dark. At times we only have tallow candles for light, the plants have no coal and Very little wood. The Banks are in charge of the Boshevicks and escaped convicts and thieves are on guard with machine guns and rifles, the food question is growing worse every day. . .the Ambassador told me two days ago to be packed with as little as possible because we might have to go and leave it all behind.

Phil Jordan had constantly risked his safety going out in the ambassador’s Ford to distant street markets and outlying villages to try and find food. ‘After living in a wild country like this for 18 months it makes you feel like there are only two decent places to live, one is heaven the other is America’. Just recently, while out shopping, he had been gathering up his purchases ready to leave when ‘about three hundred Bulsheviks rushed into the market with cocked rifles.’ One of them tol him no one was allowed to buy anything in the market any more because ‘we are going to take it all for our friends. You get out of here and be am quick about it. I Said I will not leave this place until my money is returned. He then tol the Clerk to give me my money. they then began . . .shootin to frighten the people and took everything in the market.

One night Phil had heard an ‘awful thumping’ and breaking of glass three doors down from the embassy, and went to discover that eight or nine soldiers had battered their way into a wine store and had ‘all got drunk as they could’. The temperature was 18-20 degrees below zero, and yet ‘the next morning the Street for one block was full of drunken Soldiers Some Sleeping in the Snow Just as you could in bed,. And Mrs. Francis think’ he added, ‘No law not a policeman or any one to say Stop.’

On 26 February 1918 the American diplomats left Petrograd by special train for Vologda. Here Francis and Phil settled in surprisingly happily, making themselves at home in a simple but ‘dandy’ two-story wooden house on the main high street where, for the next five months, visitors could enjoy the informal ‘clubhouse atmosphere’ and the stranded diplomats spent their evenings playing poker and smoking cigars. They drank bourbon when they could get it or otherwise ‘plumped for vodka’ They had taken the good old Model T Ford with them and Francis used to drive it around seeking potential sites for a golf course in the area. But in 1918, with the civil war raging in Russia, Francis fell ill with a severe infection of the gall bladder and had to be evacuated by US cruiser from Murmansk. Phil nursed him through a high fever during an extremely stormy sea crossing.

After recovering at a naval hospital in Scotland, Francis was transferred to London. Shortly after Christmas 1918 the proud Phil Jordan accompanied him as valet to a dinner with King George and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace. When they finally returned to the States in February 1919, Phil was again accorded the ultimate accolade – an invitation to the White House. ‘I was born in Hog Alley,’ he later remarked, ‘and I think you know that a kangaroo can jump further than any other animal, but I don’t believe he could jump from Hog Alley to the White House –that was some jump.’

In 1922 Francis suffered a stroke and never really recovered his health. He died in St. Louis in January 1927, having ensured that his sons would take care of the ever-present Phil, who was provided with rent free accommodation and a small trust fund until his death from cancer in Santa Barbara in 1941.

 

The Weimar Revue by Peteer Jelavich

In the 1920s Berlin was still very concerned with maintaining its world city image. Before the war it could lay claim to this distinction by touting its own qualifications as a capital of modernity, a global leader in industry, commerce and consumerism. The disasters of the war and the inflation deprived the city of this distinction, and popular entertainment was forced to reformulate its metropolitan image. In the Weimar era the revues demonstrated their cosmopolitan allures not by touting Berlin, but rather by presenting an array of foreign numbers. This accounted for the major difference between pre-war and postwar revues. In both Wilhelmine and the Weimar eras, the revue form was deemed appropriate to the hectic and ever-changing nature of Berlin life. In terms of content, however, post war revues could no longer turn to Berlin itself for positive thematic images of modernity. They had to look abroad for such icons, and more often than not they turned to the United States. What Berlin claimed to be before the war, New York seemed to be thereafter: a hectic and mighty metropolis, a global center of production, finance, commerce, and consumerism.

The 1920s witnessed an Americanization of popular entertainment in Berlin. The music of the prewar revues had derived from waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, folk songs, and marches. Only occasionally would the tango, the Boston, the two-step, the cakewalk, or ragtime be added as exotic interludes. Paul Lincke, for example, wrote an ‘American Cake-Walk’ with the unfortunate title, ‘Coon’s Birthday  (1903), and it will be recalled that ‘Niggersongs” were performed at the Hungry Pegasus in 1901. Such works were inspired by the occasional appearance of black American troupes in Berlin variety shows at the turn of the century. After  the war, however, American music flooded the stages. The specifically Central European musical elements receded, and the melodies of revues came to be dominated increasingly by fox trot and jazz rhythms. Even successful popular composers like Nelson had to adopt the new idiom. An observer noted in 1926: ‘Just a operetta is defined musically by the three-quarter time of the waltz, the revue is characterized by two-quarter time, and more precisely by syncopation. A revue without syncopation seems almost unthinkable to us today.”

Although musical purists might dispute the degree to which Germany produced any true jazz, the shift in popular musical style was radically apparent. A reactionary composer like Hans Pfitzner contended that the ‘jazz-fox flood’ represented ‘the American tanks in the spiritual assault against European culture.” The shrill sound of the clarinet and the trumpet, the wailing of the saxophone, and the syncopated rhythms of the drums, banjo, and piano all seemed to portend a breakdown in the cultural order. The apparent wantonness of the dances that came with such music –the shimmy in the early twenties, the Charleston later in the decade – threatened to destroy the moral order as well. Yet what appalled the conservatives garnered applause from other circles. Writing in the Weltbuhne in 1921, Hans Siemsen applauded jazz for being ‘so completely undignified. It knocks down every hint of dignity, correct posture, and starched collars. Whoever fears making himself laughable cannot dance to it. The German high school teacher cannot dance it. The Prussian reserve officer cannot dance it.’ Given the ability of jazz dance to promote humanity, kindness, and humor and to destroy ‘stupidity, haughtiness, and dignity,’ Siemsen wanted to prescribe it for all public officials. Indeed, had it been introduced earlier, it might have saved Germany from war: ‘If only the Kaiser had danced jazz- then all of that would never have come to pass!’

For enthusiasts of jazz, and of American couture in general, blacks became symbols of a radically new cultural sensitivity. Although various forms of jazz and pseudo –jazz had been herd in dance halls and on records since the end of the war, Berliners had few opportunities to experience live performances by Americans until after 1924, since their was no financial incentive to perform in Germany until its currency had been stabilized. Two revues featuring American blacks made an especially big impression. The “Chocolate Kiddies’ troupe, featuring Sam Wooding playing music by Duke Ellington, appeared at Haller’s Admiralspalast in May 1925. Josephine Baker and Louis Douglas staged a show at Nelson’s theater the following January. The critical reception of these performances reflected the prevailing view that the United States was both the most modern and the most primitive of nations. Modernity was embodied in its technology; primitiveness was incorporated in its black population. Many reviewers  did not regard the latter supposition as insulting, since they imputed to blacks a vital energy lacking in decadent war-weary Europeans. Nevertheless, the discourse of writers putatively sympathetic to blacks was full of racial prejudices.

 

Since the turn of the century, it had been common for Germans to refer to American blacks as ‘coons’ and ‘niggers’. Even the Dadaist verse of George Grosz and Walter Mehring was replete with those words, albeit apparently without any ill intent, since the terms were used in contexts that approved of blacks and their culture. Not only were seemingly well-meaning Germans insensitive to the denigration and abuse embedded in those words; they also failed to note the more fundamental problems in their disquisitions on the “Africanness’ of American blacks. Many liberal German observers  attributed a primitive spontaneity to lacks, whose blood supposedly boiled from the heat of the ancestral jungle. A reviewer for the Berliner Tageblatt, who applauded the ‘victory of negroid dance culture over the Viennese waltz,’ said Josephine Baker: ‘In her the wildness of her forefathers, who were transplanted from the Congo Basin to the Mississippi, is preserved most authentically; she breathes life, the power of nature, a wantonness that can hardly be contained.’ Oscar Bie, the respected dance critic of the Berliner Borsen-Courier, saw in her troupe ‘ the remains of genuine paganism, of idol worship, of grotesque orgies.’  He imputed a similar chthonic feeling to the Chocolate Kiddies, who expressed a ‘true joy of the earth drumming, shouting, dancing, singing, and jumping, totally devoid of message, just the earth itself.’ He considered their music ‘barbarically beautiful, full of primitive improvisations.’

At the same time that black entertainers were considered primevally primitive, they somehow seemed to be paradigmatically modern. Bie believed heir performances could serve as a model for the revitalization of Germany: ‘They have brought us our culture. Humanity has returned to its origins in the niggersteps, in the shaking and loosened bodies. Only that can help us, we who have become too erratic. It is the deepest expression of our innermost longing.” Such words echoed the works of the Expressionist artists a generation earlier, who had  displayed their desire for primitive authenticity by painting imaginary scenes of African dancers. While imputed  to blacks a vitality German’s lacked, Fred Hildenbrandt, a noted critic of the Berliner Tageblatt contended that their performances gave perfect expression to the actual condition of European civilization: ‘What is it other than the te\mpo of our times, these fast-paced wild times, whose symbol is truly embodied best of all in a rollicking negro theater.’ Hildenbrandt here echoes another cliché: that industrial and metropolitan civilization had stripped away cultural constraints and returned its citizens to a primitive wantonness. Count Harry Kessler, whose diaries provide one of the most perceptive accounts of Weimar Berlin, imagine a connection between ‘Africanness’ and modernity. After seeing Baker’s troupe at Nelson’s theater on February 17, 1926, he wrote:’ They are a cross between primeval forests and skyscrapers; likewise their music, jazz, its color and rhythms. Ultramodern and ultra-primitive.’

Josephine Baker was nonchalant about such verbiage. In her memoirs of 1928, she wrote: ‘In Berlin’s journals and newspapers they wrote that I was the embodiment of German ‘Expressionism” today, of German ‘Primitivism’ etc . . .Why not? And anyway, what is the meaning of all that?’ Despite such dismissive words, black entertainers were at least partially complicit in sustaining the belief that they represented primitive vitality. In the United States generations of black performers had been forced to conform to comic stereotypes expected by white audiences. When black troupes crossed the Atlantic, they had to take prevailing prejudices there into account. The Chocolate Kiddies and the Baker-Douglas revue were commercial ventures that toured Europe and presented clichés about America in general, and America blacks in particular. The shows staring Baker and Douglas, for example, featured scenes entitled ‘Steamboat Race on the Mississippi,’ ‘New York Skyscrapers,’ ‘Wedding in Charleston,’ ‘Florida Cabaret,’ ‘The Strutting Babies,’ and ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll’. The Cholate Kiddies also exhibited cliché-ridden scenes of black American life.

While the black performers my have reinforced some stereotypes about their race, at times they succeeded in subverting those same images. Iwan Goll, a talented Expressionist writer ,took note of the self-parody involved in Baker’s ‘African’ numbers. He believed that there was something intentionally ludicrous in the fact that an urban black woman performed a ‘Dance of Savages’ while wearing a loincloth. Baker’s most obvious send-up of African clichés was also her most famous number: the dance in a banana skirt, which she performed during an appearance at the Theater des Westens in 1928. At the same time that black entertainers exploded stereotyped images of Africa, they also parodied European society and culture. Douglas performed what he considered ‘German’ ways of talking and walking, to the delight of his audience. He also danced a  number that parodied Pavlova’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s dying swan. Such acts underscored the stiffness of Europeans and the artificiality of their culture.

Not all responses to black culture were sympathetic. Conservative defenders of European high culture like Pfitzner were horrified by Americanization in general and ‘negrification’ in particular. Right-wing hostility to blacks dated back to Imperial times, when the Reich had large colonial holdings in Africa. German rule was particularly harsh and provoked the Herero and Hottentot uprising in German Southwest Africa and the Maui-Maui revolt in German East Africa. Both were suppressed with tremendous bloodshed; tens of thousands of Hereros were massacred in what became the first instance of genocide in modern German history. Complaints in the Reichstag about such brutalities led to a furious parliamentary campaign in 1907, the so-called Hottentot election, in which Chancellor Bulow rallied nationalist support behind the colonial policies. It will be recalled that the popular soldiers’ song, ‘Annemarie,’ was written for the Metropol revue in the wake of the campaign.

The colonial experience generated a discourse on the necessity ofn protcting German culture from black barbarism. That ideology was resurrected in World War I, when German illustrated newspapers mocked the French use of black colonial troops. Photographs of African soldiers on the Western front were accompanied by captions implying that the French were importing barbarism onto European soil. After the war, hostility to these colonial; troops burst forth with a vengeance when the French station Senegalese and other black soldiers in the occupied Rhineland. Conservative Germans regarded that as an impossible humiliation, and spread rumors that African troops were systematically seducing, even raping, German women. This story, dubbed the ‘black outrage’, gained credence in many circles.

Rumors of ‘black outrage’ even affected the cabaret stage. In early 1922 the police banned two nude-show numbers involving  black men with white women. The Lola Bach Ballet, appearing in the Potpourri and Weisse Maus cabaet, included a dance duet with a black man and a white woman. Although police conceded that the number was not sexually indecent, they prohibited it because they feared it might provoke disturbances. The police took passing note of the private travails of the black dancer, who was born in Cameroon, married to a German woman, and father of a three-year-old girl: ‘In light of the conditions in the western part of the country, he has already been subjected to the most unpleasant molestations when he has taken his wife on trips and gone out with her. In Dresden he and his wife were literally spit upon, even by workers.’ The police also prohibited the performance of a dance entitle ‘Erotik’ by the Erna Offeney Ballet, because it involved a scene in which four black men forced a white woman to dance herself to death. Again this number was not banned because of obscenity, but because the police feared for ‘public order.’ Rather disingenuously, the lawyer for the troupe argue that the work should be permitted precisely because it presented ‘to the German people, in an eye-catching and frightening manner, the black outrage.’ The USPD’s  Freiheit called that assertion a piece of ‘imprudence,’ in as much as ‘well-known members of the bourgeois parties and doctors in the occupied territories have reported repeatedly in the press that one cannot speak of a black outrage.’

Against such a background, it is understandable why opinion was so polarized over the spread of jazz and the appearance of black revues in the capital. For the right-wing mindset, black arts (or what passed for black arts) became a primary symbol of cultural degeneration. When Wilhelm Frick became the Thuringian minister of education in 1930- the first time a Nazi was appointed to a state cabinet- he promulgated a law entitled ‘Against Negro Culture,’ which was used to suppress all forms of avant-garde art. Likewise, when the Nazis mounted a ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition in 1938, the poster featured a caricature of a black saxophonist sporting a star of David. Paradoxically, however, the Nazis who equated ‘Negro Art’; with degeneration shared some of the assumptions of liberal and avant-garde artists, who envisioned black culture as a form of healthy primitivism. Both the Nazis and their opponents made ideological statements about black culture, and in both cases, blackness was equated with barbarism – a racially degenerate and corrupt barbarism for the Nazis, a humane and liberating barbarism for the avant-garde.

The Invention of the Underworld by Dominique Kalifa

 

We will not seek traces of tangible experiences of poverty or crime in these tales of the underworld. Of course these realities arise incidentally because places and human stories may allow glimpses of the realities; some historians have endeavored to gather data from them, notably with respect to organized criminality. But the lower depths are essentially a representation in which are intermingled the fears, desires, and phantasms of all those who are interested in these places. “It is a confused heap of residual elements of all kinds and of all origins,’ wrote the Argentinian psychologist and criminologist Francisco de Veyga in 1903. It is an ‘imposture’ added Henry James in The American Scene in 1907: in his account of a trip along the Atlantic Coast of the United States, James lingers in New York City’s Lower East Side and criticizes stories that invent an artificial and sinister world. And that is how the underworld has to be taken, as ‘an aggregate of figures and scenes issuing from the urban imagination, a place where a thousand images are entangled: a thousand literary references, social inquiries, studies of public hygiene, news snippets, the moral and political sciences, songs, and films. Historians of culture have proved to be more interested in representations that express disquiet and anxieties among the elites, and substantial studies have been devoted to the consequent figures of repulsion, of crime, of danger, and to the practice of ‘slumming.’ However, no one has considered the lower depths as a whole to be a social imaginary that is subject to an overall reading, and this is what I intend to provide.

The notion of a social imaginary merits more precision at this stage, particularly because it has scarcely been a subject examined in detail,. And it also suffers from the strongly ahistoric dimension that philosophers and anthropologists have given to the imaginary. Here I define it, in accordance with work in historical anthropology, as a ‘coherent and dynamic system of representations of the social world,’ a sort of repertoire of collective figures and identities that every society assembles at given moments in its history. Social imaginaries describe the way in which societies perceive their components – groups, classes and categories- and hierarchize their divisions and elaborate their evolutions. Thus they produce and institute the social more than they reflect it. To do this, social imaginaries need to be incarnated in plots and recounted in stories so that they are heard, read and seen. The social imaginary is above all (as Pierre Popovic suggests) an ‘interactive ensemble of correlated representations, organized into latent fictions.’

Here, the lower depths and underworld offered for exploration arise from such a conception of the imaginary. Produced by troubled societies at times of crisis or turbulence, they offer at their margins a series of tales that aim to qualify or disqualify, so they speak of the intolerable as well as the tolerable in order to conceive and formulate possible lines of escape from the abyss. But no overseer has the upper hand in the elaboration of these tales; they are collective only by default and sometimes these tales take roads back. The plurality of their inspiration and especially of their uses accounts for their complexity as well as for their richness. .  .  .

These [imagery of] the lower depths were never immutable. Profound changes effect them too. However, they can be recognized as an incontestable transnational reality. Nothing resembles a Polish outcast more than an English vagabond or an Italian beggar. The iconography shows the same deformed bodies, the same grimacing faces, the same repugnant rags. At a time when the construction of national types was accelerating, poverty and crime proclaimed their transversal dimension. The circulation of texts, images, and motifs  (at least in the Western world) contributed strongly to this phenomena, to the point that we might consider the imaginary of the lower depths as the prime grand fact of cultural globalization. Thee fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were foundational, but the new sources of printing networks for spreading rumors, and an extended readership’s lively interest in these questions all increased the imaginary’s circulation, exchanges and transfers. Distinctions and nuances appeared but a Europe of gueuserie (roguery) indisputably emerged . . .

The distinction between ‘good’; and ‘bad’ poor people, which soon corresponded to a distinction between true and false poor, was one of the principal force lines that structured representations of the lower depths. The idea that countless indigents were fully responsible for a state they had chosen out of vice, laziness, or aptitude commanded a major share of the representations. By permitting a linkage of poverty with immorality, of indulgence with crime, this combination can be found at the very source of the phenomena. Until the thirteenth century (more or less)  the dominant opinion valorized poverty (even sometimes exalted it) as a sanctifying virtue . . .the decisive rupture took place between the end of the 12th  and the middle of the 13th centuries, dictated in part by economic and social evolution. Until then poverty had been collective and universal; precariousness was widespread and affected a large majority of the population, and it could be attenuated by charity from the village, the parish, the seigneury. But the context changed: demographic growth, transformations in agricultural structures, urban growth, and the spread of the money economy all tended to complicate and to stratify society.* The rising merchant capitalists did not want to be encumbered with people who were useless to the world’ and they insisted on the cardinal value of ‘work’. Poverty ceased to be a positive value and became the product of degradation. First in the Italian communes and then rapidly spreading throughout Christian Europe, the figure of the  ‘shameful poor’ emerged, someone who did not exhibit him- or herself and certainly did not beg. In counterpoint, this figure high-lighted the rise of another antithetical category, the ‘undeserving poor’, who were beginning to be described as ugly, dirty, infirm, nasty, ragged, contemptable, and rootless. This was the decisive moment. There at the beginning of the 14th century was born the category of the ‘dangerous classes . . .starting from this split, witness a continuous and irreversible decline of the ‘good poor,’ who became less and less numerous, in favor of the ‘bad poor’ who were more and more rejected. Reformation beliefs in predestination and the valorization of work accentuated these trends, Protestants no longer glorified poverty but instead wanted to eradicate it. . . .

One of the principal effects of these changing representations was to create an ample European library on ‘roguery’ whose motifs and themes would durably structure the imaginary of transgression. Texts that relied on lists of false beggars and people pretending to be poor dating back to end of the Middle Ages now gradually enlarged their nature and scope. There was a shift from inventories drawn up by magistrates or chancelleries to the literary treatise, from the judiciary to fiction and the imaginary, which was a sign of growing public interest in these descriptions . . .. the idea of a society below taking root as the inverted double of society above, in both its structuring and its hierarchies. “Beggars have their magnificence and delights, as well as do the rich, and, ‘tis said, their dignities and politics,’ noted Montaigne in his Essays. . . these texts, which dramatized transgressive acts or milieu, obeyed an obvious moralizing intention. Again, the normative design was paramount: it is always a question of reinforcing political authority, religious allegiance, familial and social hierarchies. But national or cultural nuances are also perceptible: the Germans and the Swiss concentrate on the victims, the English and French more on the criminals. Sometimes there is a search for contradictory sensations and ambivalent emotions that could arouse a paradoxical admiration for transgressors . . .**

This stigmatization of the ‘inferior classes’ was not limited to the discourse of conservative elites. At the same time, Marx and Engels were forging the concept of the Lumpenproletariat, the ragged proletariat, defining a fringe of impoverished workers composed of downgrade elements who were without class consciousness and were easily put to use by the bourgeoisie, for whom they served as a backup force. During his stay in Manchester, where he settled in 1841, Engels discovered the realities of a sub-proletariat that he often identified with the Irish, whom he defined as ‘excess’ and ‘superfluous’ people. In 1846 in a homage to the poet Karl Beck, Engels was the first to use the expression Lumpen to depict the milieu of beggars and thieves. In a passage from the Communist Manifesto, Marx similarly mentions ‘the passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layer of old society,’ and he sees this as one of the keys to the repression of the European revolutions from 1848-18950. The ‘Lumpenproletariat, this scum of the depraved elements of all classes, which established headquarters in the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. This rabble is absolutely venal and absolutely brazen.’ Engels again returns to them in the 1870 preface to The Peasant War in Germany: ‘Every leaders of the workers who uses these scoundrels as guards or relies on them for support proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.’ Marx, meanwhile, uses the expression in a slightly different sense to depict the declasses of all kinds who were found backing Napoleon III: ‘vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pick-pockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars- in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme.’ What is striking about this enumeration is it similarity to the ones filling the newspapers or the ‘physiologies of reprobates.’ It must be the sign of social reality in a mid-nineteenth century Europe that was in the full throes of an economic crisis and undergoing the effects of unfettered liberalism. But this sign also speaks to the force of dominant representations. In any case, we understand and why the advent of the underworld is inseparable from the fears  (or hopes) of a radical overthrow of the political order.

After changing religious views- the secularization of Hell as the Underworld-, the second phenomena was the emergence of a new cultural system based on the commodification and mass production of culture. Everything converged to make the decade from 1830 to 1840 that of the Underworld - and 1836 was ‘Year One of its Media Era.’ Newspapers, books, images, and stage shows were gradually absorbed into modes of production that tried to make them consumables destined to be sold at the highest number and at the lowest price. So, of course, the underworld lay at the heart of this mass culture enterprise. The revolution of serialized novels that many saw as a swamp favored texts that exploited the world of social outcasts. The extraordinary success- and more important, the seminal influence- of Les mysteries de Paris (serialized in 1842-43) remains undisputed . . .The Mysteries no doubt constituted the first great phenomena of cultural globalization. . .

The underworld was at the heart of mass culture as it arose in the nineteenth century and as it grew from there. The reasons for its centrality are numerous. Whatever the type of plot or narrative device, most ‘media stories’ love to dramatize a sociology of extremes that are strongly polarized. Opposite the pole of high society, aristocratic, and social elite figures who were traditionally the characters of fiction, the gangster and other inhabitants of the underworld appeared to play the obvious counterpoint role.  . .the underworld acquired a decisive function: to accentuate the social gap, but also to blur ordinary certainties by showing that pure as well as perverse beings existing both worlds, and to produce, by tales of fall and decline (or conversely of ascension), a strong fictional dynamic. . .a final reason relates to the need for ‘sensation’ - for horror, spine-tingling emotions, and thrills – which the media favors for both dramatic reasons and commercial. We know that the underworld – the ideal backdrop for incest, rape, murder, vice, material and moral filthy, obscenity and pornography – is  a reliable purveyor of these representations. This becomes even more valid as consumer’s standard of living rises above actual poverty, encouraging him or her to experience social fears as in the form of a spectacle. This explains why, despite long-standing criticism of the unhealthy exploitation of the audiences ‘base instincts’, the plunge into the  underbelly of society was – and remains- a major theme of the cultural industries. . .

* see:
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2020/05/social-disturbances-in-14th-century-by.html
https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2018/11/power-in-12th-century-by-thomas-n-bisson.html

** ‘. . . then here is the desire to lose yourself, to go to the limit of debauchery, to descend, to encounter the obscure part of yourself that you habitually try to elude; to face up to evil, the dirty, the perverse, the damned, which the gradual secularization of our society is pulling toward a secular hell and which at the same time becomes a powerful motif, even a cultural myth. The Victorians, confronted more than others by both the realities and the imaginary of the underworld, whose insidious presence disturbed any certainty about social progress, were particularly sensitive to this dimension. An exemplary incarnation of bourgeois respectability, the good Dr. Jekyll arouses from within himself his evil double . . .this is also what Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey was seeking . . .these desires, this attraction to the most sordid of social margins, appeared all the more powerful because for more than five centuries our cultural arrangements has constantly stimulated them. Just like its partner violence, the underworld sells well, and its gradual insertion into the channels of industrial and media culture has only multiplied the supply. . .The media have known all along how to manage it, to justify and reactivate it at will. And done so even more effectively because this theme excels at working in various registers – information, emotion, drama, suspense, horror, eroticism, poetry – just as it excels at migrating from one genre to another, from one medium to another . . . These undeniable qualities have enabled the underworld to prevail as a sort of total spectacle that is simultaneously moral and transgressive, serious and entertaining, ethnographic and stereotyped . . .’