September 8, 2017 The Lives of Others Roaring Girl: London’s Sharp-Elbowed, Loudmouthed Mary Frith By Edward White How Mary Frith’s reputation changed from bawdy rogue to defender of the patriarchy. Moll CutPurse smoking. When James VI of Scotland took the English crown in 1603, it was heralded as a blessed return to normality. For the previous forty-one years, the natural order had been put on its head by the reign of Elizabeth I, a woman performing the ultimate male duty. Elizabeth’s reign had necessarily been an act of political transvestism. She presented herself as the Virgin Queen, the chaste goddess, but also as the guardian of divinely ordained power; she wore dresses from the neck down, but the crown upon her head remained inherently male. “I have the body of a woman,” she famously reminded her people, “but the heart and stomach of a king.” Read More
August 4, 2017 The Lives of Others What Insanity Is This, Dr. Euclides? By Edward White After his best seller about the War of Canudos swept through Brazil, Euclides da Cunha went to Amazonia. It nearly killed him. Joricramos, Euclides da Cunha. There’s an argument that 1922 was the moment modernism took flight. It saw breakthrough works by a slew of writers including Joyce, Eliot, and Fitzgerald; Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus while Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago; Hitchcock directed his first movie as Disney made his first animations; Mussolini’s Fascists took hold of Italy, and Einstein got his hands on the Nobel Prize. Less known than those canonical events is the modernist happening that struck São Paulo, where a festival of exhibitions and lectures gave many Brazilians their first exposure to modern art, unveiling young, homegrown creative talents with a radical vision: to ditch the long-burning obsession with emulating European civilization, and instead glory at the beauty beneath their own feet. In the nineteenth century, this would have sounded absurd to educated Brazilians, Eurocentric to the core. But the 1922 generation was the first to have grown up with Os Sertões (“The Backlands”), a classic of Brazilian literature largely unknown to the outside world. Published in 1902, the book is a unique, genre-defying exploration of the country’s arid northeast and the calamity that befell it in 1897, when, in the name of the Brazilian national motto “order and progress,” the federal government flattened the town of Canudos and butchered as much of its population as it could get its hands on. It was written by Euclides da Cunha, a young civil engineer whose experience of the so-called War of Canudos turned him from a zealous government propagandist to the anguished voice of the Brazilian conscience. Read More
June 2, 2017 The Lives of Others A Girl Full of Smartness By Edward White As an entrepreneur, civil-rights activist, and benefactor, Mary Ellen Pleasant made a name and a fortune for herself in Gold Rush–era San Francisco, shattering racial taboos. Pleasant in her later years Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. They did things differently in the Old West. On the morning of August 14, 1889, Stephen J. Field, a justice of the Supreme Court, was eating breakfast at a café in Lathrop, California, when David S. Terry, a former bench colleague, stopped by Field’s table and slapped him twice across the face. This was not unprecedented behavior. Despite having risen to the rank of chief justice of the Supreme Court of California, Terry was described by one contemporary as an “evil genius” with an “irrepressible temper,” who once stabbed a man for being an abolitionist and killed a Congressman wedded to the Free Soil movement. His gripe with Stephen Field, however, had nothing to do with slavery. In 1883, Terry’s wife had filed a lawsuit (Sharon vs. Sharon) against the multimillionaire U.S. Senator William Sharon, claiming she had been married to him in secret some years ago and that, having been callously discarded by the womanizing senator, she was owed a divorce settlement. After five years the case ended up at a federal circuit court, where Field found in favor of William Sharon; there would be no divorce settlement. Terry was livid and promised to exact revenge. Read More
May 5, 2017 The Lives of Others Unspeakable Affections By Edward White Brilliant Chang and the Sinophobia that birthed a moral panic in early twentieth-century London. Brilliant Chang Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Four years after The Birth of a Nation, his love letter to the Ku Klux Klan, D. W. Griffith created what’s probably American cinema’s first-ever depiction of an interracial love affair. His 1919 movie Broken Blossoms centers on the relationship between a white woman and a Chinese man, a virtuous, loving couple driven apart by injustice, intolerance, and enervating poverty. The film was set in Limehouse, the notorious slum on the docks of the River Thames that was home to London’s Chinatown, and a synonym across the English-speaking world for the so-called Yellow Peril. Griffith’s portrayal of Chinese London was more positive than most. From the late nineteenth century, Limehouse attracted Britain’s most famous authors, usually on the subject of opium dens and criminal intrigue. Dickens was one of the first with Edwin Drood; twenty years later Oscar Wilde used it as a backdrop to Dorian Gray’s debauchery, and Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes there to infiltrate the capital’s underworld. But the writers most responsible for cementing Limehouse’s infamy were Thomas Burke, a British author inspired by Jack London’s take on the incipient danger of Chinese immigrants, and the pulp novelist Sax Rohmer. The latter created Fu Manchu, the evil Chinese genius bent on destroying white civilization, who became one of the most enduring literary characters of the twentieth century, inspiring a thousand and one inscrutable, amoral, and fiendishly brilliant Chinese baddies, including Dr. No and Ming the Merciless. Ridiculous caricature though he was, Fu Manchu tapped into genuine fears that white people on both sides of the Atlantic had about globalization and the Chinese diaspora. In 1922, less than a decade after the publication of the first Fu Manchu novel, Londoners were horrified to discover that a real-life Chinese supervillain lived among them in the form of Brilliant Chang, a dealer of opium and cocaine, who briefly acquired a reputation as the biggest threat to the empire since Kaiser Bill. At the time, one of the reasons Chang terrified the British public was that—in keeping with the racist stereotypes—he seemed so mysterious; nobody quite knew who he was or where he came from, though in a sense London had spent the past two hundred years inventing him. Read More
April 14, 2017 The Lives of Others Otto the Strange By Edward White Otto Peltzer—gay, androgynous, intellectual, and modern—represented a new model of male perfection in Weimar Germany. Otto Peltzer training at Georgetown University, while on a visit to the United States, 1927. Courtesy Library of Congress. From the start of the Enlightenment to the end of World War II, there was hardly a strand of German culture that didn’t look to Ancient Greece for guidance and inspiration. Winckelmann, Goethe, and Wagner were all enchanted by the spell of Hellenism; Hitler contended that Greek civilization had actually been built by a band of wandering Germans back in the mystical depths of Iron Age prehistory. What else, ran his illogic, other than Germanic heritage could have been responsible for the Spartans’ pioneering eugenics, the majesty of golden-age Athens, and Alexander’s epic feats of conquest? To gather proof, he established archaeological digs in Crete, Corinth, Argos, Athens, and several other locations. Unsurprisingly, the excavations turned up little, but the Nazis had other ways of spelling out the Führer’s theory—chief among which were the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Ever since Baron de Coubertin had launched the modern Olympics in 1896, German participation had been highly controversial. Many abroad deemed the nation’s militarism and nationalism contrary to the spirit of the movement, and plenty of Germans considered the Olympics an internationalist carnival of wet liberalism, a corruption of an admirable Greek tradition rather than its resuscitation. Hitler described the Los Angeles games of ’32 as a “plot of Freemasons and Jews.” Four years later, though, he’d recognized the Olympics’ potential as a propaganda tool. Preceded by a torch relay that stretched from Olympia to Berlin, the ’36 games provided an emphatic symbolic message about the supposed genetic thread that connected the original Olympians with the people of the Third Reich. Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary of the event communicated that the Greek veneration of strength, discipline, and physical beauty was inherently Germanic, and vice versa. When Discobolus comes to life as a young German, toned, muscular, and vigorous, Riefenstahl is telling us that her compatriots had beaten the competition before the starting pistol had been fired: the Germans alone were the inheritors of the minds and bodies that had allowed Greece to soar. Read More
March 3, 2017 The Lives of Others Cooking for the Pope By Edward White Bartolomeo Scappi, the Renaissance’s most innovative chef, revolutionized the culinary arts. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus (detail), 1590–1591, oil on panel, 28″ x 23″. Edward White’s The Lives of Others is a series about unusual, largely forgotten figures from history. Daniele da Volterra’s most lasting mark on the world was a commission of dubious honor: retouching—or defacing, depending on one’s point of view—a fresco inside the Sistine Chapel created by his late mentor, Michelangelo. Artists had hailed The Last Judgment on its unveiling in 1541, but its depictions of a beardless Christ and wingless angels, all of them nude, outraged papal officials, who ordered that Biblical modesty be upheld by the addition of loincloths. Daniele was in his late fifties, with an illustrious career behind him; it would surely have pained him to know that four and a half centuries later he would still be known as Il Braghettone—“the trouser-maker”—the man whose job it had been to splodge moralizing graffiti over his friend’s masterpiece. Read More