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The “Big Three” and AMC
Before I was born, my mom had a poor AMC Spirit that she ran into an even poorer bull, totaling both the car and the animal in one fell swoop. She told it to me as a horror story with the moral of “why you don’t go too fast” just before I got my license. When she first regaled me with a far gorier version than I relayed to you, I didn’t realize what an absolute piece of history she had violently combined with beef. AMC Spirits (or, really, any AMCs) are now either cult collector items or actual trash. The picture below is of a car very similar to the one she owned.
Whether the vehicles really are trash or treasure, the creation and eventual fall of American Motors Corporation (AMC) is a bizarre and very American story. Buckle up, buckaroos!
It All Began With Refrigerators
Well, it began with refrigerators… sort of.
Back before the great depression, there were lots of car manufacturers. If you think about Grapes of Wrath (my Goodreads review is linked), you’ll remember they drove a Studebaker. You’ll remember things like Hudsons. So where did they all go?
The Great Depression ate the small car companies. The “Big Three” (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) survived because… well, because they had the most cushion to ride out on when the depression hit. They had the best ability to deal with the new union requirements, and they had the most extensive dealership networks.
Three companies, however, made it through in a creative way. In 1937, Nash and Kelvinator merged – and only one of them made cars. Kelvinator made refrigerators, and they bought Nash. Though it was a risk, given all the other dead car companies, it turned out to be a pretty good deal since the motor company’s survival meant it could churn out vehicles for the government during WWII. In 1954, the now-struggling Nash Motors part of Kelvinator also merged with Hudson Motor Car Company. This new car compilation became American Motors Corporation, or AMC. From 1954 until “the fated end”, AMC was destined to struggle, with fewer resources at their disposal, against The Big Three.
They gave ’em hell.
Mitt George Romney
Upon the merger of Hudson and Nash, there needed to be a new leader of the new AMC. That turned out to be George Romney. And yes, indeed, he’s the dad of that other, slightly more famous Romney.
Romney was at least wise enough to realize that two flagging car companies weren’t set up to compete directly with The Big Three, and he had to find a niche market. As cars were getting bigger and chugging more gas in the 50’s and 60’s, Romney realized there was a market for people who didn’t need a big car and perhaps didn’t have the money for a land yacht. He pushed the new AMC toward a focus on small cars, basing the design and decision on one of Nash Motors’s extant models: the Nash Rambler. The Rambler was the first car in the US to qualify as “compact” (though it wouldn’t qualify under today’s standards), and it was well-known as a reliable but cheap vehicle. It didn’t just takeover the compact market: the Rambler created the market.
In 1962, Romney decided to enter politics and stepped down from AMC so he could accomplish his new goals. Given that he eventually rose to be HUD secretary, he evidently did well.
But that doesn’t really matter to us, because we’re just here for the cars. The problem with Romney stepping down was that someone else, someone who didn’t share the same vision, stepped up to the plate. Abernathy, Romney’s successor, decided he needed to take AMC from the “cheap car” image and blasted non-existent capital at things like the Ambassador line. Though the car sold, development costs churned through the small company’s resources, and some point to this need to save face was the beginning of the end. Others, however, think Romney was wrong to shove the company into a “cheap” hole – who knows, at this point?
The Invention of the Crossover
I desperately wanted to talk about the Gremlin, which happened in the 70’s, but that’s not had the lasting impact of one desperately innovative vehicle: the AMC Eagle. The first true crossover.
That’s right: AMC invented the crossover. They invented the thing that’s only now dominating markets, even if they didn’t have the term “crossover” yet to depend on. It was way ahead of its time, and yet the Eagle came out too late to save the company. After changing direction so many times, the company’s budgets were spent and there was nothing they could do. They flailed around a bit doing things like selling out to French manufacturer Renault. While the merger seemed beneficial, both ended up losing in the end.
While the financial side of the market just tanked, the Eagle just absolutely stunned in terms of influencing markets. The Eagle was borne of a last-ditch death throe to take the best of 4-wheel drive and off-road Jeep capabilities with what was still AMC’s best category: the economy car. They added things like front suspension to keep the ride smooth and feel like an ordinary sedan. The car did well in the rally scene, as well.
The Eagle still enjoys a cult following, despite the 1988 end of manufacturing. Some say it was a decade ahead of its time, others 3 decades. Regardless, the car was influential to designers and buyers everywhere. It definitely spurred the direction of the automobile market, even through today.
Why There are Jeeple (“Jeep People”)
1970 the company CEO Roy Chapin decided to buy Kaiser Jeep (Kaiser Jeep was, like Nash and Hudson, a conglomeration of smaller car companies that survived the depression). They took control of Jeep and looked forward to government contracting, which Jeep specialized in at the time. Though AMC had control of Jeep, they let the cars develop almost independently in terms of technology. While AMC itself struggled for capital, Jeep continued to run with its solid axle format and used its original military design, giving it the distinctive look and feel we know today. The Jeep Wrangler, started in 1986, was a big success.
1986, however, was too late to save the company. In 1987, Chrysler purchased and put out to slaughter the AMC brand. It kept, however, the nameplate and distinctive designs of Jeep.
That makes Jeep, though a subsidiary of Chrysler, the last descendant of the small car companies. There’s all sorts of loyalty from Ford and Chevy people to their chosen brand, and there was surely loyalists of Nash, Hudson, Kaiser, and Willys-Overland (Jeep) that carried in to AMC. There were probably AMC fans in and of themselves. Now, there’s only one outlet for that love to go. Some Jeeple (“Jeep People”) may not even realize that their devotion to the cars may stem from a parent’s unrewarded loyalties.
Sometimes, I like to fantasize about what could have saved the company, but there’s only one real answer: the end was fated from the very beginning.
For More Information
I’ll be honest: while I searched around the internet for various nonsense about this topic, nothing I looked up was truly surprising. If you want a super-deep-dive version of this alongside crude jokes and way, way more reading and research, I suggest this YouTube video from Regular Car Reviews. It’s 2.5 hours long, so you’ll probably need more than one sitting, but believe me that it’s great.
About the Author: H.R.R. Gorman is a PhD chemical engineer with expertise in biotechnology and making drugs. Following science, Dr. G’s greatest passions are writing and history. If you want to know more about this white-trash-turned-excessively-bourgeois maniac, you can go to https://hrrgorman.wordpress.com/.
Mighty Real: The True Story of Sylvester
When choosing what to write for the “Into the Past” column this month, I felt conflicted. With Juneteenth so close to the writing date and Pride month ongoing throughout June, I didn’t know what I should focus on.
I decided I wasn’t going to skimp on either Black history or on LGBTQ+ history: there’s plenty that clearly fits into both categories. I chose one of my favorites.
Also, up front: I’m going to apologize for the lack of pictures, but I had difficulty finding royalty-free images for this.
Why Should I Care About Sylvester James?
The first time I finished listening to the seminal disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and saw the accompanying music video, I turned to my husband and said, “That may have been the gayest thing I’ve ever witnessed.” So we watched it again, just to confirm. (Warning: the video tends to be on the loud side).
And I wasn’t wrong. It turns out that “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” has an enduring legacy in Pride month, and Sylvester was a gender-defying person who embodied a whole gamut of LGBTQ+ experiences. One of Sylvester’s friends, when trying to describe the singer, couldn’t put him in a box. His song, while not sexually explicit, still clearly describes a gay relationship as satisfying. He inspired many LGBTQ+ people to acknowledge the ways they “feel real” through “You Make Me Feel”, and he contributed to the long process toward LGBTQ+ liberation and normalcy.
When interviewing with NPR about Sylvester’s legacy, historian Joshua Gamson said:
“Embracing who you are, celebrating who you are, being as fabulous as you could possibly be, I think that’s the message that he’s preaching in the song. And I could’ve used a dose of that as a teenager.”
–Joshua Gamson, for NPR
Even if you want to ignore the Pride elements of the song, the sound itself was revolutionary and inspiring. The electronic, synthesized sound and rapid beat were popular in dance music and – along with Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and Hot Butter’s “Popcorn Song” – could have been seen as the inspiration and start of electric music overall.
It Wasn’t All Dancing and Stardom
Sylvester James was born in Watts in 1947. Though Watts has been considered an impoverished area of the Los Angeles metropolitan area since the 60’s, in the 1940’s it was an area where working class black people were allowed to live. Until the 60’s, L.A.’s laws limited what property you could buy depending on your skin color, not just the size of your bank account.
Sylvester gained his love of singing the same way many American singers do: through church choir. Unfortunately, churches contain people, and many times people don’t necessarily treat LGBTQ+ folks right. Though we often conflate black and LGBTQ+ issues today due to the way party politics have aligned, churchgoing black folks often have the same misgivings churchgoing white folks do. Sylvester eventually left the church. Unfortunately, too, is the fact that parents are people, and people don’t necessarily treat their children – especially LGBTQ+ children – right. Sylvester left home at 15, living instead with his grandmother or friends until he moved to San Francisco in the late 60’s.
Though Sylvester had several experiences in niche, LGBTQ+ bands like the Disquotays and the Cockettes, neither of these bands made the mainstream. He sang soul and what was, at the time, considered “Black Music” (what is now known as the R&B/Hip-Hop chart was known as “Hot Black Singles” from 1982 to 1990, and at one point was called the somehow even worse “Race Records”). According to a profile in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the music industry at the time wasn’t interested in selling “black music” to white people or “gay music” to black people. Sylvester and his music failed to fit into the industry’s pre-defined labels, and his bands floundered in what could have been eternal obscurity.
Then: Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” happened. Electronic music with Black vocals was viable.
Becoming Fabulous
Disco was all the rage. Sensing that he needed a hit, Sylvester worked with James Wirrick, who wrote the start of an R&B song called “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”. Sylvester decided it needed to be disco-fied, so he took it to Patrick Cowley who introduced the electric elements inspired by “I Feel Love”. Despite any of the R&B band’s misgivings, the song became a smash.
After “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)”, Sylvester continued to stick around with other modest dance hits, all without sacrificing who he really was. It was a pretty big deal to manage that in the 70’s and 80’s as a black, genderqueer person, and yet he did. He even managed to land a spot on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand (American Bandstand was a TV show and the white version of Soul Train) and an interview with Joan Rivers in the 80’s. (I found this video through the aforementioned NPR article).
But being fabulous, openly gay, and sexually active in San Francisco during the late 70’s and early 80’s came with a terrible, unknowable, unpredictable risk: HIV had just appeared on the scene. Despite many early warnings and cries for help, the government, several doctors, and many other important people who could have otherwise done something failed to protect the people most at risk. At his shows, he encouraged safe sex practices and brought awareness to the HIV/AIDS crisis.
Yet, it wasn’t enough to escape.
Death and Legacy
On December 16th, 1988, Sylvester died from complications due to AIDS. He was buried as requested, in a red kimono and a pearl-colored casket. His estate’s future earnings would go to help the AIDS Emergency Fund and Project Open Hand.
Despite making hit dance music and doing so much for the LGBTQ+ community and combatting HIV/AIDS, Sylvester only got a small obit in the New York Times. If you click on this link, the NYT will ask you to subscribe and get a better image, but you don’t need it. Right above the tiny block announcing Sylvester’s death at 41 is a bigger block and a picture for a white football player, and right below is an ad saying “buy more NYT” or something equally stupid.
Only as LGBTQ+ issues have become more mainstream has Sylvester been remembered more fully, more fondly, and more accurately.
About the Author: H.R.R. Gorman is a PhD chemical engineer with expertise in biotechnology and making drugs. Following science, Dr. G’s greatest passions are writing and history. If you want to know more about this white-trash-turned-excessively-bourgeois maniac, you can go to https://hrrgorman.wordpress.com/.
More than an Apparition: A Little Intro to Our Lady of Guadalupe
One day, back when we lived in California, I went to Catholic church with my spouse (I’m Baptist, so I have an excuse not to go all the time). As soon as I walked in the first door, I detected that sweet and yet overpowering scent of roses. Upon entering the second door, the freshness of greenery hit me – even over the scent of the incense – and my eyes feasted upon a mountain of flowers unlike anything I’d ever seen before (and I’ve been to true Southern funerals!). The mountain flowed from the bottom of a painting of the Virgin Mary. From beneath a statue of the Lady’s feet spilled another mountain of lush blooms, and the floral collection tumbled all the way across the dais on which the altar sat.
Being the shocked protestant I was, I leaned over to my husband and asked, “What is THAT?”
“It’s the Feast of Guadalupe. It’s very popular in Mexico.”
From that, I’ve learned a bit more about the feast and the story behind it. So pull up a chair, smell the flowers, and let’s dig in.
A Quick Rundown on Mary, Mariology, and Marian Apparitions
Mary: Mother of God.
If you ask me, that’s a pretty big job, and that should make Mary pretty important to religious folks. There’s not many details about Mary, however, present in the Bible. How do we study someone who, other than the details presented mostly in Luke, has mostly been erased?
The study of Mary is known as “Mariology”. Catholics and Orthodox parishioners include things such as Sacred Tradition and other, post-biblical doctrines as part of the information to be studied as part of Mariology. From this, aspects of Mary and her life have been more fully derived and defined for the faithful. As a protestant, I was most surprised to find out about the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which is part of Catholic tradition.
Other sources of information are something called Marian Apparitions. These are times that Mary has allegedly appeared to people and sometimes given them help or direction. Through Mary’s continued actions, thoughts on what she supports have also built. These apparitions are often named “Our Lady of [Insert Location Apparition Was Seen Here]”. Our Lady of Fatima, for instance, was seen in Fatima, Spain.
And, most importantly, Our Lady of Guadalupe was seen in Guadalupe, a suburb of Mexico City.
Juan Diego Builds a Church
Our Lady of Guadalupe is based on a series of five apparitions, four to Juan Diego and one to his uncle, Juan Bernadino.
On December 9th, 1531, Juan Diego followed a call coming from Tepeyac hill. Once he reached the site, he discovered a radiant Indian woman dressed in Aztec finery. There the visage told him she was the Mother of God and all humanity, and she ordered him to build a house for her on the site. In order to fulfill her demands, he needed to ask the Bishop for help.
Juan Diego asked Bishop Juan de Zumárraga to build the temple, but he was dismissed. There are a few religious speculations as to why, but what I’ve seen points to a bishop that is ultimately blameless (if wrong). I think it likely that the bishop didn’t pay attention to a poor convert. As a Spanish conquerer, it makes sense the bishop would have (racistly and wrongly) ignored an Indian peasant. The humility, origins, and economic station of Juan Diego makes his story all the more important.
After having failed to obtain Bishop Juan de Zumárraga’s blessing and help, Juan Diego returned to the hill where the Lady told him to try a second time the next day. At the second telling, the Bishop found him bold and wondered why the man insisted a second Marian Apparition has appeared. He demanded a sign that Juan Diego is telling the truth.
Later that night, Juan Diego returned home to find his only family – uncle Juan Bernadino – so sick and ailing that he was surely dying. Juan Diego remained at his uncle’s bedside, caring for him for two days, but the man did not recover. He tells his uncle that he must leave to get a priest to prepare for death.
On his way, he runs into the Lady again. She rebuked him for not having the faith to return to her, but Juan Diego bravely asked her to give him the sign requested by the bishop. She told him to return to Tepeyac hill and pick flowers.
Juan Diego was confused because of the wintery season, but he followed through. At the top of the hill, the Lady of Guadalupe helped him pick the miracle flowers and placed them in his tilma. She told him to bring the flowers to the Bishop.
Upon giving the tilma to the bishop, the flowers tumbled out and reveal the image of the virgin.
At the same time that Juan Diego showed his faith to the Lady, she appeared to the uncle Juan Bernadino and healed him. After her church is built, it became known for its healing properties.
This last apparition, on December 12th, marks the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
A Travel Destination and Symbol of Mexico
The tilma (cloak) of Juan Diego was only supposed to last for a short time, but preservation of the image and a combination of miracles means that you can still visit it. While 2020 was of course an aberration due to the pandemic, the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe is otherwise one of the most visited religious sites on the planet (only behind the Meiji temple or the Kashi Vishwanath temple). People travel to this site for healing, to inspect the miraculous cloak, and to celebrate the December 12th feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The tilma and apparition has come to represent much more than a single set of events that took place during Spanish colonialism. It has come to represent Mexican heritage, social justice, healing, and hope for the poor and indigenous. As Mary appeared to a poor Indian, dressed in both clothes and skin of an Aztec, even the Church has declared her the patron saint of Mexico (even if there was controversy surrounding the authenticity of the story).
In addition to being a symbol for the downtrodden, she has become a symbol, rallying point, and part of Mexico itself. Starting with the war for Mexican independence from Spain, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla encouraged untrained peasants and common people to throw off the Spanish colonists. Because Mary, as the Lady of Guadalupe, symbolized hope and belief in the downtrodden, this helped in his rallying call and brought her image into politics as well as religion.
Since then, people of Mexican heritage have carried her image and importance all across the globe. She has seen Mexico through civil wars, popular uprisings, and battles concerning the separation of church and state. White, protestant Americans may not know much about the Lady of Guadalupe beyond her symbolism of Mexico, but she is important throughout all of the Americas and is an essential part of the world.
For More Information
I hope you enjoyed reading this – it ended up WAY longer than I’d intended! I also worry that people probably know more about this than I realize. I did, after all, grow up in a super-sheltered fundamentalist protestant household.
As I was reading up on this, I found that many sites included several details about the story that others did not. The main story in the “Juan Diego Builds a Church” section was my summary that took information from all of these sources. Be careful and discerning – a lot of sources are religious, so they have a certain agenda to fulfill.
From the Franciscan order of Catholics
Where my spouse looks up really obscure Catholic things
A blog/article/essay about someone’s personal experiences
And, of course, Wikipedia has a great summary.
About the Author: H.R.R. Gorman is a PhD chemical engineer with expertise in biotechnology and making drugs. Following science, Dr. G’s greatest passions are writing and history. If you want to know more about this white-trash-turned-excessively-bourgeois maniac, you can go to https://hrrgorman.wordpress.com/.
Dreams and Deathtraps: The History of Submarines
Imagine you’re at Disneyland, 2015. You go in, and the first attraction you see is the Finding Nemo ride. You don’t know what the ride is about, so you get in line. Once you’re through the long wait, you see it: a small submarine. You get in anyway, because you waited so long.
But then they shut you in.
And then you feel like you sink.
And then you definitely don’t scream, unbuckle, stand up, and try to get out. You don’t frighten employees, and you definitely don’t run away and cry in Star Wars Land while the people you came to Disneyland with are confused. And you definitely don’t suspect the author of this column did any of these things.
If you’ve ever ridden the civilian death-trap known as the Finding Nemo ride, you’ve benefited from hundreds (or perhaps thousands!) of years of dreaming about underwater adventure. The first underwater adventurers were divers who breathed through reeds, and during the middle ages Europeans took this idea a smidge further: what if you could be in an underwater box? An entire ship, unseen, under the water?
With Middle Age tech, this was going to be a hard beast to figure out. In addition to finding the right buoyancy so the underwater boat would neither sink nor float, there were issues of how to propel it, how to navigate, and this little thing called “how to breathe”. One of the first plausible attempts to answer these questions was made by William Bourne, who was a British Navy guy (of course) and mathematician. The diagrams of his planned submarine were published in the 1578 book Inventions or Devises. These drawings still exist, but the leather-and-wood craft was never built. The buoyancy problem was solved by including leather compartments that could be pulled inside the ship to sink and pushed outward to rise.
This idea solved one of the four major problems: buoyancy. In the early modern period, similar ideas were devised and attempted. The first “successful” submarine ever built was made by Dutchman Cornelis Drebbel for (of course) the British Navy. These boats were oar powered. King James VI/I was interested in these submarines and, apparently, rode in one of these boats as part of an exposition. These boats weren’t useful for much more than show, and it wasn’t for many years that a “useful” one appeared.
That’s because an oar-powered submarine is a joke. It’s not easy to steer, and it’s definitely not easy to row while entirely underwater. You have to fight against the drag all the time. American inventor David Bushnell added the first screw propeller to a submarine, which solved a large problem of the earlier craft: propulsion. With this addition, he was able to design and build a one man craft known as the Turtle. It’s at this point that we must ask the question, “Why did he build it?”
Honestly, it was because he built underwater mines and thought a submarine would be the best way to use them. Yes, the man invented a ship as a ‘side project’ to go along with his bombs. To use against the British, because of course the British would be involved here.
In 1776 during the blockade of New York Harbor, Ezra Lee piloted Bushnell’s craft and tried to attach a mine to the HMS Eagle. He was unsuccessful because the currents were too strong for his single-man craft, and Bushnell was the only one who really knew how to navigate it. Bushnell was frail, however, and couldn’t keep the man-powered-screw propellers going for long.
At this point, it’s clear why navies wanted this invention: to blow things up. The French soon built one, Americans kept trying, British kept trying, and the Russians kept trying, but they still had the problems of steering well and, you know, breathing. The American Civil War saw a lot of development toward solving these problems.
Though it was lost in North Carolina’s Graveyard of the Atlantic and never found, the most famous of the Union submarines was the USS Alligator. It was French-designed (Brits, you’re letting me down!) and American built. Alligator was the first submarine to solve the breathing problem by using compressed air. It didn’t help anyone, though, when it was sunk in tow during a storm. They still haven’t found it.
The Confederate ship CSS Hunley added navigability, control, and greater man-powered propulsion to the list of submarine advancements. (You probably want to be careful clicking that link, not because it’s virusy, but because it’s CLEARLY full of Confederate propaganda and will put you on a list. It’s too late for me, so save yourselves.) The Hunley was the first submarine to sink another ship (the USS Housatonic) in battle. Shortly after it sent the signal that it had succeeded in its mission, however, it sank for unknown reasons. Even after the submarine was found off the coast near Charleston, it’s unclear why she sank. This battle was the sign of things to come.
The next phase of submarine history is more well known. Inspired by recent advancements, the latent dreams of underwater discovery from ancient times, and Verne’s 10,000 Leagues under the Sea, inventors pushed toward perfection of the boats. Metallurgy, engines, chemistry, and more continued to improve all sorts of vehicles – including boats and subs. It wasn’t long before people of many nations were using compressed air, screws, and metal hulls to make underwater boats capable of great destruction. Unrestricted submarine warfare on the part of Germans during WWI made the U-boats (“unterseaboot”) infamous. Continued advancements that came along with many other naval inventions led to the diesel-powered beasts of WWII.
Note the great weakness of the above paragraph: diesel powered. Diesel-cycle engines burn oxygen, and even with compressed air, breathing is still a problem in a submarine. The diesel-powered submarines could go about as far as an ordinary ship, but they couldn’t stay underwater for long and they couldn’t support many sailors.
Enter the deeply controversial Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, so-called “father of the nuclear navy.” He pushed the invention of the pressurized water reactor, or PWR, a nuclear reactor capable of use on a naval vessel. The PWR powered the first nuclear submarine: USS Nautilus, as named after Verne’s fictional submarine. In 1955, Mamie Eisenhower christened her and sent her off on the first of many record-breaking voyages. Nuclear power doesn’t create carbon emissions and doesn’t require oxygen, so a submarine with scrubbers and compressed air can stay underwater an almost infinite amount of time. The (American, anyway – Soviets were kind of crazy) nuclear submarines were safe and effective despite this author’s horrible fear of deathtraps submarines. Aside from additional improvements in navigation and communication from computers, nuclear submarines are the current technologies we have today.
(The nuclear engineer spouse reading over my shoulder wants me to remind you that Rickover’s push for PWRs scrapped development of sodium fast reactors, for which he blames the Admiral – not that anyone reading this probably cares).
About the Author: H.R.R. Gorman is a PhD chemical engineer with expertise in biotechnology and making drugs. Following science, Dr. G’s greatest passions are writing and history. Dr. G has never cried at Disneyland and will vehemently deny it if you try to push the matter. If you want to know more about this white-trash-turned-excessively-bourgeois maniac, you can go to https://hrrgorman.wordpress.com/.
Wu Zetian’s (bloody?) Image Through the Ages
When Americans like me think of famous female rulers, we tend to imagine the queens of England: either of the Elizabeths, perhaps Victoria. Elizabeth I, especially, holds a place in people’s hearts because of her speech to the soldiers when facing the Spanish Armada.
Of similar hardcoreness, though for very different reasons, is a female monarch from a world and a millennia away: Wu Zetian (武则天) (or other names such as Wu Hou, depending on what time period of her life you’re talking about). Empress Wu was the only female ruler of China in the recorded 3000 years of its dynasties, from the first Emporer Qin to Emperor Puyi. Sure, some women were powers behind the throne and used puppet Emporers to perform their schemes, but Wu was the only one to do it outright.
And, if the non-contemporary tales about her are to be believed, she did it with a trail of blood. Writers said she killed her infant daughter in a ploy to gain leverage over the previous empress and have her executed. They claimed she poisoned people, some of them her own family members, and had many people executed in order to have her way. By a combination of scheming, murder, and religion, Wu Zetian took the throne for herself.
That trail of blood story, however, is a little strange. Some scholars, as mentioned in this Smithsonian article, mention the suspiciously similar tales between Wu Zetian’s rise to the throne and what a genuinely horrible woman did many years earlier. There are no contemporary records of the murders, but no one can say whether it was because Wu had them all destroyed or (my personal opinion) they were fabricated later.
Why make up these lies, though? After Wu Zetian’s son, the “true heir” as son of the last male emperor, rose to the throne, it became important for him to quash chances of rebellion. In order to prevent rebellion, emperors and their bureaucrats would need to malign any usurpers, of which Wu Zetian obviously was one.
Not only that, but life in China’s royal courts was already volatile at best. With empresses, concubines, eunuchs, brothers, uncles, and other schemers skulking about, the emperor had to be vigilant. Backstabbing was the norm, and executions to stay in power or gain power were commonplace. Emperors not only quashed rebellion by stifling positive memories of Wu Zetian, they reduced the chances of women “stealing” power from the man they considered the rightful ruler.
Whether for good or ill, recent interest in Wu Zetian has prompted research into her reign and a new look at who she was and what she accomplished. These efforts, of course, are told through a modern lens and can see Wu Zetian without the lens of monarchical maintenance getting in the way. One of her most lasting contributions was her establishment of China’s famous meritocracy, wherein especially talented people – even those not of the noble class – could take an examination and rise high within the power structure. This test, or at least one similar to it, was used to recruit bureaucrats and ministers until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912.
Wu Zetian peacefully (on a large scale if not on the small, imperial family scale) held together a huge nation, passed policies to increase agricultural output, and contributed to the arts by commissioning works such as biographies of famous women and books of poetry. It is possible that these biographies and poetry were intended to compliment her order that children lament the deaths of their mothers just as they lament the deaths of their fathers. While it could be seen as a move against sexism, others have seen these efforts as ways to legitimize her reign, since women were considered deontologically incapable of reign prior to her.
It’s quite possible we’ll never be able to really know whether or not Wu Zetian floated to the throne on a veritable river of blood, or if she used her pen and quick wit to get there. The records of her time period are plentiful enough that she couldn’t be erased, but sparse enough that exactitude cannot be expected. In all likelihood, it was a combination of the two. However it happened, Wu Zetian has something on that aforementioned Queen Elizabeth I: she didn’t just fall into power on accident.
She owned it.
For more information, there are several articles available online. Here’s a few free-to-access articles I found interesting and on semi-trustworthy sites.
Smithsonian Article – Caution: this site has a ton of pics, so it loads SLOW
BBC Article – Short, but interesting
China Culture – A random site out there, but it fits a lot of what I already know about Wu Zetian
About the Author: H.R.R. Gorman is a PhD chemical engineer with expertise in biotechnology and making drugs. Following science, H’s greatest passions are writing and history. 他也正在学习中文. If you want to know more about this white-trash-turned-excessively-bourgeois maniac, you can go to https://hrrgorman.wordpress.com/.
Sequoyah: Power through the Pen and Press
The English language: we all know our writing system isn’t perfect because, if it were, I wouldn’t have to spell “rhythm” so many different ways before spellcheck finally tells me it’s right. It takes a child years to learn to read and write English for this very reason. And all of this effort, wasted on the young, is because the English alphabet was borrowed from the Romans, and the Romans never toyed with the foolish idea of an alphabet for anything other than Latin (for which their alphabet was pretty much perfect).
That’s right. No English person invented their own writing system. We just stole a different system that was very much imperfect for a language with a ton of different vowel sounds. Then we proceeded to invent things like “dumb” with a b on the end because… just because we needed to make it worse.
Very few pre-literate societies are able to come up with their own writing systems, and those that do often rely on logograms (where one symbol is one word). Foreigners, usually missionaries, have invented writing systems for previously illiterate societies.
And one of the main inspirations for missionaries to invent writing systems for other languages is the efforts of one Cherokee silversmith: Sequoyah.
Sequoyah was born in the 1770’s (though some believe it was earlier) to a Cherokee woman and a white father, theoretically Nathaniel Gist, a fur trader. His name, Sequoya, means “pig’s foot,” which led some historians to believe he had a physical disability, perhaps a club foot. As a result, he learned to be a silversmith, which wouldn’t require him to leave his native town of Tuskigi.
Sequoyah sold his silver to people of many diverse backgrounds, and one day a white man admired his work and said, “I’d like you to sign this.”
But Sequoyah didn’t know how. He went on a journey to get someone to show him a way to spell his name, and he thought the “talking leaves” of the white Americans were interesting. He didn’t understand how the Latin alphabet worked, and he couldn’t read – he just knew it was interesting.
Then, when he participated in the War of 1812 for the Americans, he noticed that the white men could send and receive letters from home. His people, unable to do so, were missing a vital element that boosted the morale of the English-speakers. He wanted to communicate with those back home.
And so he set his mind to inventing a Cherokee writing system despite being completely illiterate, no one having ever studied the nuances of Cherokee speech, and not understanding the basics of how different alphabets, logographic systems, or syllabaries worked. He experimented with logograms, but quickly realized that a one-symbol-one-word system would take him forever to invent, learn, and teach, and it would likely never be complete.
Then – and remember, he couldn’t read, didn’t even know that English writing was based on sounds – he invented a script based off the sounds in his language. By himself, and against people burning his work because they thought it was witchcraft, he created a complete system by which his language could be written. After proving the system wasn’t witchcraft (and that his young daughter, Ayoka, wasn’t a witch for being able to read), Sequoyah then proved the usefulness of a writing system to the tribal council.
And boy did they pick it up.
Unlike English, the Cherokee syllabary actually matched their language and did not need to be slaved at for years in order to understand the mind-boggling mess of spelling. It took Cherokee mere weeks to learn to read their language rather than the years it takes us. Before long, the Cherokee literacy rate matched and surpassed that of the white Americans. They established the first Indian* writing system on their own, without foreign intervention, from scratch.
Because American missionaries saw the use of a written language and translations of the bible into a people’s native tongue, many people went to foreign lands or started making syllabaries and alphabets for other people. Though Sequoyah probably isn’t well known outside of America, his genius reaches to the far corners of the earth and has made the world a better place.
So, take a moment, today, to think about your English writing system. Even though it’s not perfect, it’s yours, and you put in the effort to learn and use it. We can be thankful for our form of communication and appreciate the struggle of creating a written system at all.
For more information on the Cherokee Syllabary, there’s plenty of online resources. Several travel and museum sites have detailed information (Northern Georgia travel site, Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, Cherokee NC museum) in addition to those sites mentioned in the image blocks.
I discovered a book during my research (Seqoyah: The Cherokee Genius), but I’ll admit it was very expensive and I didn’t want to purchase it because I didn’t have $70 lying around to buy a copy from a reliable seller.
Wikipedia is very helpful for white people who want to know how the syllabary works.
*I use the term Indian here because many – if not most – native works indicate that Indian is the preferred term for their people. The term “Native American” or “Native” seems to have been invented by whites and implemented as PC without consulting the people they’re referring to. Check out this article and this YouTube video to learn more about why I made this choice.
About the Author: H.R.R. Gorman is a PhD chemical engineer with expertise in biotechnology and making drugs. Following science, H’s greatest passions are writing and history (especially the Age of Jackson – which, coincidentally, is relevant to this article). If you want to know more about this white-trash-turned-excessively-bourgeois maniac, you can go to https://hrrgorman.wordpress.com/.
Into the Past: The Not-so-Spanish Spanish Flu
With Coronavirus/Covid-19 currently raging across the globe, many people are looking to the past for comparisons. Since recurrent diseases such as yellow fever, smallpox, and others feel too far in the past to really compare with, many have chosen a deadly pandemic for inspiration:
The century-old outbreak of the Spanish Flu.
The Spanish Flu, like most strains of influenza, tended to attack the respiratory system and often made the body vulnerable to pneumonia which only further complicated a patient’s prognosis. With no ventilators (the first negative pressure ventilator used on humans – the “iron lung” – wasn’t tested until 1928), no antivirals such as Tamiflu (generic name oseltamivir phosphate; look for “vir” at the end of drugs to identify an antiviral), and widespread misinformation campaigns, those who lived in 1918 were facing a grimmer outlook than we can expect here in 2020. But, lo, did I mention above “misinformation campaigns”? How could this possibly be in the glorious past?!
The news industry in the 1910s was quickly learning from the skillbook of Nelly Bly, who pioneered investigative journalism. These new techniques, wherein journalists dove into the action, led to exposes on corrupt politicians, business owners, and social issues, but they were not the only types of journalists out there. Sensationalist journalism, perfected by Hearst and Pulitzer at the turn of the century, was about to be hijacked for clearly nationalistic causes. Benito Mussolini of World War II fame, for example, honed his political ideologies espousing extreme authoritarianism and an Italian ethno-state.
More broadly, however, nations found themselves in the need of propaganda when facing the meat grinder of World War I. If you were German, your newspapers needed to be pro-German, otherwise the kaiser wouldn’t be able to recruit enough fresh bodies to turn into corpses. If you’re English, the stories need to be pro-England, otherwise Parliament couldn’t shame enough boys into accepting destruction in the trenches.
And, in America, President Woodrow Wilson needed you to shut up about the flu.
Patient zero of the 1918 Flu Pandemic was a farmer in Kansas. The flu spread in the small town of Haskell and later, due to sons being called to the draft and going to large training camps, military installations such as Camp Funston in Kansas. The flu rampaged through the camp, but luckily the doctors realized something was afoot and did their best to quarantine the sick. Though they eventually calmed the virus in the camp using isolation measures, it wasn’t completely effective, and the sick were shipped off to fight in Europe where the virus spread.
At the same time, Wilson was apprised of the situation. He knew there was a virulent strain of flu – or something else just as devastating – destroying lives in Kansas. With his war efforts finally underway, he worried the risk of squelching American morale with news of a rapidly-spreading plague would dampen draft and training enthusiasm or compliance. The nation had been deeply divided about joining the war just a year ago, and now (Wilson believed) was not the time to make the populace back out of supporting the war efforts.
So he straight up banned reporting on the virus.
Once in Europe, the virus quickly spread among the ranks of both sides of the fight. Most European nations’ journalism was similarly stunted as America’s had been, what with the need to recruit more people to die. Despite the toll of the disease eventually matching or and eclipsing the number of deaths caused by the war itself, nations such as Britain, Germany, and France all refused to admit the virus was spreading in their ranks. They covered it up.
The only Western nation that didn’t inhibit coverage of the pandemic was Spain.
And boy, did American news latch the heck onto that. With the ability to point to Spanish newspapers as the first publications about the flu, and thus by calling it “Spanish Flu,” American newspapers were finally able to report as the second wave of the virus ravaged places like Camp Devens near Boston, followed soon after by east-coast metropolises. Politicians and military men still tried to downplay the fatality of the virus, which led to the mayor of Philadelphia allowing a massive parade that caused an enormous spread of death and destruction throughout the US, just as the virus – now permanently deemed “Spanish Flu” thanks to misinformation campaigns – continued to rage throughout Europe and Asia.
But misinformation didn’t stop those people who could be called the heroes of the Spanish Flu. In the effort to stop the flu, many doctors found difficulties in isolating the pathogen and, thus, determining a method to develop a vaccine against the disease. Because of the weakened immune systems of the sick, secondary illnesses such as bacterial pneumonia complicated this search. The haste to find a cure often led to sloppy lab work, and many worried that quarantine would be the only effective measure.
Though this did, sadly, end up being the case since the flu mutated into a less pathogenic form by the next year (as flu tends to do), some doctors did amazing work to discover the flu as a “filterable virus”. Anna Williams, one of the few women in the medical research field at the time, was the first to make this distinction while many others insisted the disease was a resurgence of the bubonic plague. Her efforts with the 1918 flu pandemic eventually led to better understanding and our ability to combat the flu and other viral diseases. Other doctors, especially military doctors at camps, were the first to prove the disease could be limited by quarantine.
All of them, however, were instrumental in establishing public health departments and efforts across the nation.
And, here in 2020, someone will be a new hero we should appreciate. Already, Chinese doctors (many of whom sadly fell to the disease) could be considered heroes for their efforts to sound the whistle and treat early patients. Smaller heroes, such as bloggers like us, can make sure to provide only accurate information while others (resisting… urge… to… start internet fights) may spread misinformation.
Into the Past Prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about people who tell the truth in the face of many lies. Don’t feel constricted to coronavirus or the 1918 flu pandemic, but feel free to use any of the information presented here.
There won’t be a roundup, but you are encouraged to share your work in the comments.
For more information on the Spanish Flu, I encourage you to read The Great Influenza by John M. Barry. You can find a quicker overview posted by the CDC. If you’re into podcasts, the American History Tellers episode “What We Learned from Fighting the Spanish Flu” can be found on Stitcher or on your favorite podcast app (I use Podcast Republic, available on Google Play).
About the Author: H.R.R. Gorman is a PhD chemical engineer with expertise in biotechnology and making drugs. Following science, H’s greatest passions are writing and history (especially the Age of Jackson). If you want to know more about this white-trash-turned-excessively-bourgeois maniac, you can go to https://hrrgorman.wordpress.com/.