IN MEMORY OF...ROBERT J. YOUNG, 1928-2009

LIBRARY OBJECT(S) OF THE WEEK

To commemorate the recent passing of Robert J. Young, (a long-time supporter of the museum and research center), this week’s featured items come from the physical culture collection he most generously donated to our library. Born in Enid, Oklahoma, Mr. Young served his country during the Korean War and remained a reserve officer until retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in 1988. Mr. Young earned a Master’s degree in biology from the University of Oklahoma and worked for thirty-two years for the U.S. government, joining the Environmental Protection Agency when that branch was created in 1971. After retiring from public service, Mr. Young moved first to Virginia Beach, Virginia and then down to Deland, Florida.

Robert J. Young was a life-long advocate of healthy living through sunbathing, attention to physical fitness and exercise, proper diet and nutrition, and abstinence from smoking. He was also a great admirer and collector of the publications of Bernarr Macfadden, a pioneer of the American physical culture movement, a body-builder, and a self-made millionaire. Macfadden used his publishing empire to distribute popular magazines and books that championed his crusade against Victorian prudery, exposed early twentieth-century medical establishment quackery, and advocated better living through physical fitness. Mr. Young's desire to see his physical culture collection preserved and made accessible to scholars and the general public inspired him to donate these materials to our rare books and special collections library. Mr. Young’s lively spirit and generosity will be deeply missed.

ROOSEVELT'S "BLUE EAGLE" CAMPAIGN AND ITS CRITICS ON THE LEFT

This fall semester I am teaching a history course at Florida International University in the evenings entitled, America & Movies: the Great Depression and New Deal Era in Film and History. Forty-five students are enrolled in the class which has been designed to get them to view Hollywood films with a more critical eye and to use other visual and non-literary primary source materials in their research projects. Half a dozen students have opted to work on a special curatorial project using the Wolfsonian's outstanding collection of New Deal era artifacts. The exibits they design will be made available via a link on this blog sometime in late November. Here is a teaser of some of the objects in our collection and the ideas and messages the students have taken from them.

LIBRARY OBJECT(S) OF THE WEEK

Within the first hundred days of taking the oath of office, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attempt to "jump-start" the moribund American economy back to life through the passage of the first of his "New Deal" programs: the National Industrial Recovery Act (1933) and the National Recovery Administration, (or NRA). The Roosevelt administration consciously promoted this program with patriotic symbols and colors. Charles T. Coiner designed the NRA's emblem, a "blue eagle." This "thunderbird" carried in its talons a cogwheel as the symbol of industry and lightning bolts representing the electrical power that would be generated through other New Deal programs like the REA (Rural Electrification Administration), and the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) tasked with building large hydroelectric dams. Although membership and compliance with NRA regulations was voluntary, businesses who refused to display the eagle were often subject to boycotts and in 1935 the conservative judges on the Supreme Court ruled the NRA unconstitutional.

But even before the NRA was challenged and defeated on constitutional grounds, the Left also criticized the program as a "businessman's dole" and a woefully inadequate and inappropriate response to the Great Depression. The Socialist Labor Party chose to attack the NRA in a pamphlet that lampooned its symbol by placing an elitist top hat on its head, and by having workers and industry helplessly suspended in its talons. The text also spoofs the NRA’s lightening bolt imagery, warning that "though an electric current may induce spasms resembling life even in a corpse–so it is utterly impossible to restore life to the corpse of capitalism.” The Communist Party of the United States was equally dismissive of the NRA's efforts on behalf of the working class, and on the cover of the October 1933 issue of the Labor Defender, they superimposed a swastika over, and filled in the hollow outline of the "thunderbird" emblem with sepia-toned photomontages of striking workers being beaten by police and soldiers.

For more information on the Wolfsonian Library's collection of New Deal materials, see:

http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/WPA/wpa.htm
http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/New%20Deal/NewDeal.htm
http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Great%20Depression/GD%20home.htm

DR. LAURENCE MILLER HELPS PROCESS AND CATALOG HIS COLLECTION

A little more than a year ago, I was invited to the home of retired director of libraries at Florida International University, Dr. Laurence Miller, where associate librarian Nicholas Blaga and I were graciously entertained with a delicious lunch prepared by his wife Carole. Before sitting down to eat, we had the opportunity to look over the incredible collection of cruise line industry promotional materials that Dr. Miller had amassed over the last fifty years. The Wolfsonian library’s own holdings of ocean liner materials for the interwar period are quite substantial, but we could not help but be impressed by the scope and breadth of Dr. Miller’s collection of post-war cruise materials. You can imagine our delight when he expressed his intent to donate the more than 10,000 items to our rare books and special collections library.

Now as we have begun the overwhelming job of processing and cataloging this incredible gift, we must once again acknowledge Dr. Miller’s generosity—this time with his expertise and time. This summer and fall, Dr. Miller has been coming to the library three days a week helping us to organize, catalog, and make this invaluable collection available to the public via our Web Opac. “It has been fun seeing again the deck plans, brochures, and menus that I have not handled in years,” notes Dr. Miller, “and I am pleased to know that digital images of the same will bring to a new generation of aficionados details of ships they have likely never seen.”


While it will take us some time to get the entire collection cataloged, Dr. Miller and our small but committed cadre of interns and volunteers have created records for a substantial portion of the promotional materials. Additionally, our digital library technician, David Almeida has scanned a few sample items from each of the shipping companies thus far cataloged in order to whet the appetite of the public and interested scholars. These can be viewed on our online catalog:


http://207.67.203.78/W10054


To access the collection, simply type in the keywords: “Laurence Miller promotional”