In the first video, it’s interesting that the ladies who are knitting are wearing up-to-date fashionable hats.
Interesting; I was unaware of that. I was thinking more of the European developments circa 1800, give or take a couple of decades.
It’s always interesting to talk to the olds. I saw a very informative documentary about 1920s Indiana, and I brought it to the attention of my wife’s grandmother, who told me it was complete nonsense and fabrication, and went on to talk about growing up in a privileged household in a time when horsecarts brought fresh milk into the city every morning from the countryside. I still don’t know if that documentary was fake, or if Nana’s memories were polished too smooth to remember any of the Klan ugliness.
My grandfather was born in the 19th century, and I remember him quite clearly.
He used to tell this joke:
A man went before a judge and wanted to legally change his name. The judge said “What is your name now, citizen?” and the man replied “It’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt Stinkpot Jones.” The judge said “and how would you like to change it?” and the man said “I’d prefer to be just plain Stinkpot Jones, your honor, if I could.”
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Having spent 26 years of my life there (not anymore thankfully) I always pronounce is Missery.
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And more delightful, too.
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Indiana was most definitely dominated by the KKK in the 1920s - there is a deep historiography on the KKK at the time.
It’s not at all unusual for our memories to be rose tinted, just in general, doubly so when one was not the primary target of certain kinds of violence. I’d guess that Nana’s memories are most certainly polished.
Was your grandfather not a FDR fan?
My theory is both that time has obscured a lot, and also that Nana’s position insulated her from a lot - she was an upper-middle class white girl who taught upper middle class white children, and people of her social class would not dream of telling her about the Oberholtzer case. There was no global access to information like today, and salacious newspapers were a male province - women in her class read poetry and literature (of which we inherited a fair bit). But I really don’t know.
Granddad had very mixed feelings about FDR. He was a battleship sailor in the Navy in WWI and a chaplain in WWII; he was a fairly complex man, the source of dozens of family stories. The joke was something he’d pull out to remind people that political divisiveness focused on personalities is nothing new in the USA.
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That makes sense.
A good joke then! Thanks for sharing.
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Movietone sound footage, like the film featured in this video, was recorded onsite in camera. The variable density optical sound audio was exposed onto the side of the same film on which the image was exposed. The Movietone newsreel system used an AEO-light tube to expose that track. Because the natural sound and the original image are contained on the same negative, these negatives have enormous value as historical records (nothing has been fudged or fixed). The University of South Carolina, the original source for this video, houses over seven million feet of original Fox newsreel nitrate negatives. The University’s film archive (MIRC) has over 10,000 Fox newsreel stories (silent and Movietone sound) available for free to watch: https://mirc.sc.edu/
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Whoa! I didn’t think that capability was there at that point. That’s incredible. Thanks for helping me learn something new!!!
How times have changed. We’ve gone from printing the news 2 days after it happened to a day before it happened to even if it never happened.
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And it still goes on… My great grandfather (who I never knew) being the town pastor was head of the local ‘boys club’ and oddly sent money back to the IRA (how is that for fucked up in the Klan and supporting the Catholics in the homeland).
Anyway my grandfather eventually had to buy a firearm to greet the local ‘boys club’ reps at the door for the 3rd time to say NO, and next time he will shoot first when he moved back the hometown. I never understood why my moms parents moved back to that state, well other than family was there. Of course I didn’t understand how via retelling from my mom how they could say such racist shit (well when my brother and I were not around they were good about that at least) after spending so much time in various parts of the world.
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I’m not sure that I will ever understand the use of cracker self-identified or slurred.
It derives from the middling or lower class of whites, who provided the “security” labor on plantations in the antebellum south - overseers and slave patrols, primarily. Cracker of the whip.
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