Where did Santa Claus come from?

One historian claims that "In the mid 19th century American illustrator, political cartoonist and Morristown resident Thomas Nast (1840-1902) was responsible for creating the Victorian image of Santa Claus that we still use today."

Who is this man, Thomas Nast? He was an editorial cartoonist for during the latter half of the 19th century, working principally for Harper's Weekly. 

His work was noted for its biting satire and no hold's barred attacks on political corruption. He was especially hard on the Tammany Hall  in New York, its leader, Boss Tweed.

Nast is also credited with devising the symbol for today's Republican Party, in a cartoon he published during the Congressional Elections of 1874. 

But what concerns us during this holiday season are his drawings which seems to have given us our modern image of Santa Claus. He did illustrations for Professor Clement Clark Moore's poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas (or The Night Before Christmas) Moore wrote the poem in the early nineteenth century, intending it to be a story for his children. It was published in 1823, and it is this poem, accompanied by Thomas Nast’s iconic illustrations, that created the modern Santa. Though Nast’s St. Nick wore a onesy with a hood — not a red suit with a cap.

Who's naughty and who's nice? Nast can show us that, too, in 1871.

Nast continued to depict Santa Claus over the years. Perhaps the best known was done in Harper's Weekly in 1873.

Or Another in 1874.

Updated in 1876.

Or yet another in 1879.

There was for a long time the story that the word nasty derived from Nast's name and his cartoon style. Research shows, however, that the word existed long before Nast was working. It did make an interesting coincidence when people looked at his work.

Statistics can be fun?!

Demographics, the study of human populations can teach us far about history than what we usually think of historical knowledge. Just by looking at population charts we can see many things in history that we might otherwise overlook.

Take for example a population chart of Germany in 1910.

This is what we call a normal population chart. You will see, naturally, that there are slightly fewer people in each age group as you ascend in age. Makes sense. Unless something drastic happens, no age group can have more people than the previous one, because people die. Also note that in any normal population, there are slightly more boys born than girls, but by the 20's that is changing and that women gradually come to outnumber men in each age group. Women live longer than men. This is true of any population that you study, no matter where or when.

Now look at Germany twenty years earlier, in 1890.

Also a pretty normal chart, except that the 0 - 4 age group is much elevated over the 5 - 9 group. What is going on we ask? Where do we look for answers? We could begin by examining medical advances in those twenty years in childhood medicine. What we find is that infant mortality has been greatly reduced between 1890 and 1910. Simple enough?

But what if great anomalies are seen in a chart. For example, Germany in 1925.

Your first reaction, is holy cow, what happened. Looking back we find, surprise, World War I. How does a war affect a population? Let's count the ways. 

         Take any age group and subtract it from 1925. That will give you the years in which that group was born. 10 - 14, for example, were children born between 1911 and 1915. They are well below the next age group. These are obviously pre-war babies, who probably suffered from wartime deprivations. But the 5 - 9 group is most out of synch. Children born between 1916 and 1920, the war babies, and shortly thereafter. Few births during the war and after. We find that, for some reason, when you take a large group of young men away from their homes, births drop.

       As seen in the 0 - 4, the first years after the war. An increase (sort of a mini baby boom) but still not rising to the level of the normal curve. You can find what the normal curve should look like by drawing a line on the 15 - 19 and 20 - 24 group. These were children too young to fight in the war, but not affected as much by the war itself.  

        Then check the 25 - 29 and 30 - 34 groups. Prime soldier age. Note the great disparity between men and women. The woman part of the chart stays normal, the male does not. This also accounts for the drop in the 0 - 4 age group, which does not return to normal. Dead young men do not produce babies.

          When you get to the 45 - 49 age group, those too old to fight, the chart returns to a semblance of normal.

And how long does this effect of the war last in Germany? Especially if you add another war. Here is West Germany in 1961.

We are a long ways from normal here, in any part of the chart. You can still see the dearth of births in the first world war in the 40 - 44 age group, those born between 1917 and 1921. Note, however, that women now greatly outnumber men in this group. These young men were prime age to fight in the next war, World War II. As were the next groups after them. 

        One interesting bar, the 20 - 24 age group which stands far above the rest. What is going on there? These are children born between 1937 and 1941. They are the children produced by Hitler's program to radically increase the German population though drastic means, including setting up camps where young soldiers were allowed to impregnate as many young German women as possible.The program obviously worked. 

         The chart is beginning to normalize somewhat in the first two age groups, but for a long time there are going to be a large surplus of women in Germany. Think of the implications for marriage, birth rates, women working, etc. When I was in Germany in 1988 I noticed right away lots of little old ladies, and not many little old men on the streets. No wonder.

    East Germany looks pretty much the same in 1964.

Note, however, the lack of younger people. This represents the young people who managed to get out of East Germany before things closed down in the early 60's. Another thing to note is the bulge of older people, mostly women in the older age groups. This is going to cause a problem in the next 20 years as these people reach pension age. Not enough young people working behind them to pay the pensions. (This is similar to what we have happening in this country now with our baby boomers reaching retirement age.) East Germany, however, came up with a brilliant solution. East Germans were not allowed to leave their country, thus the Wall, etc. Except that when you turned 65 and went on a pension, the East German government gave you a visa to go to the west. Ingenious. Wonder if we could come up with the same solution here!!?

         Still think statistics are boring? 

The 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified and went into effect on August 18, 1920. It was a victory after many years of defeats and disappointments for women.

The amendment was originally drafted in 1872 by Susan B. Anthony assisted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It was first introduced into the Senate by Senator Aaron A. Sargent of California, a friend of Stanton’s in 1878. The bill sat in committee until it was finally voted down by the Senate in 1887, by a vote of 16 to 34. And you think it takes Congress a long time to do things today!!

Ms Anthony even got arrested during those years for trying to vote. She cast a ballot in the 1872 presidential election and two later was arrested and fined $100, which she refused to pay. The government never tried to collect.

But the women kept trying.

Another bill was not brought up until January 12, 1915, when the House voted it down 204 to 174. In the intervening years, however, many states, mostly in the west had been granting voting rights to women. Wyoming was first in 1869. Utah followed the next year.
By the time the 19th amendment was ratified the entire west didn’t need it. It was sort of an afterthought.

Why the West? Probably because our west men and women worked equally hard. It was a tough life and the job had to be shared equally. The feeling was that if women were contributing so much, they should vote. Or as someone said. “The West. Where men are men... and so are the women!”

Who was the real "New Dealer"?

Our history books tell us that the modern age of governmental regulations and guarantees against economic hardships began with FDR during the 1930's and his "New Deal". Programs like social security, for example, to name one of many.

FDR's  program was a product of the Great Depression. Imagine, however, if there had been no great depression. Would we still have the many social programs proposed by Franklin Roosevelt?
I argue that without World War 1, which caused the Great Depression, we would probably have had many of those programs much earlier, possibly by as early as 1920. Why do I say that?
        In a speech  in Osawatomie, Kansas.on August 31, 1910, FDR's distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt presented what he called his New Nationalism. He was in the process of expounding on what was then called Progressivism, a program carried on by Woodrow Wilson. Without the intervention of war, this is what we might have had.

The central issue he argued was government protection of human welfare and property rights, but he also argued that human welfare was more important than property rights. He insisted that only a powerful federal government could regulate the economy and guarantee social justice, and that a President can only succeed in making his economic agenda successful if he makes the protection of human welfare his highest priority. Roosevelt believed that the concentration in industry was a natural part of the economy. He wanted executive agencies (not the courts) to regulate business. The federal government should be used to protect the laboring men, women and children from exploitation. In terms of policy, Roosevelt's platform included a broad range of social and political reforms advocated by progressives.
In the social sphere the platform called for:

A National Health Service to include all existing government medical agencies
Social insurance, to provide for the elderly, the unemployed, and the disabled.
Limited injunctions in strikes.
A minimum wage law for women.
An eight hour workday.
A federal securities commission.
Farm relief.
Workers' compensation for work-related injuries.
An inheritance tax.
A Constitutional amendment to allow a Federal income tax.

The political reforms proposed included:
Women's suffrage.
Direct election of Senators.
Primary elections for state and federal nominations.
However, the main theme of the platform was an attack on the domination of politics by business interests, which allegedly controlled both established parties. The platform asserted that:
To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.

To that end, the platform called for:
Strict limits and disclosure requirements on political campaign contributions.
Registration of lobbyists.
Recording and publication of Congressional committee proceedings.

Sound familiar?

Say it ain't so!

One of the most disappointing things about studying history are the things you find out that aren’t true, which you have always believed. As Will Rogers once said, “Our problem ain’t that we don’t know anything. Our problem is that we know too much that ain’t so.”

How about Betsy Ross designing the first flag. This account of the creation of our first flag was first brought to light in 1870 by one of her grandsons, William J. Canby, at a meeting of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. This took place 94 years after the event supposedly took place! Mr. Canby was a boy of eleven years when Mrs. Ross died in his home.
We all know the picture, but what is wrong with it. First of all, the supposedly took place in June 1776, when Washington asked Ms. Ross to design the flag. If you look, this flag has the traditional circle of 13 stars. Unfortunately, this flag design was only approved by the Continental Congress on June 14, 1777 (flag day). There is no historical evidence at all that discusses Ross and the flag. It seems that the story was concocted to draw attention to the Ross house in Philadelphia so that it could be made a historical monument.

What about Paul Revere’s Ride. In January 1861, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published a poem about Revere’s ride. We all know it. “Listen my children and you shall hear...” Funny thing, but before that poem appeared, most Americans had never heard of Paul Revere except as a silversmith. Not a single mention of him appears in any compendium of Revolutionary figures before 1863. I checked myself in a book about the Revolution published in 1854. No Paul Revere at all. We do find mention of William Dawes, who actually made the ride. The poem, however, made Revere a national hero in the latter part of the 19th century.        (Somewhere, I have a wonderful cartoon that I can’t find. It shows Longfellow sitting at his desk, thinking. “Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of William Dawes... William Dawes.” He turns to his wife and asks, “Dear, what was the name of that other fellow who rode that night?”

Speaking of Revere. His famous painting of the Boston Massacre is filled with inaccuracies, all on purpose. The painting was done to inflame Bostonians against the British, not to depict history. The British didn’t fire as a group. And Captain Preston was not in front directing fire. As came out in the trial at which John Adams got the British acquitted, Preston did not give an order to fire.

Is this the “little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” So said Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe when she visited the White House in 1863. Probably was never said. The earliest printed source for a similar version of the quote–“Is this the little woman who made the great war?”–appeared in the Atlantic Monthly  version of Annie Fields’s biography, entitled “Days with Mrs. Stowe” and published in August 1896, nearly contemporaneous with Stowe’s death on 1 July. Lincoln scholars hesitate to validate the quote.

Lincoln stories are always great in lectures. When told that his General Ulysses Grant had a drinking problem Lincoln is reputed to have said, “If I knew what brand he used, I send every General a barrel.” A great quote, but he never said it. In fact, Lincoln denied ever saying it.

One of my favorite scenes from history is General John Pershing striding off the boat in France in 1917 and saying, “Lafayette, we are here.” So dramatic a line to tell the French we are repaying them for the American Revolution. He didn’t say it. One of his aides said it at a dinner the next day. When asked, Pershing said that he wished he had said it.

Even our Independence Day is muddled when you look at history. American independence from England was voted and passed by the Continental Congress on July 2, 1776. John Adams wrote to Abigail on July 3, “from this date on the Second of July, 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.” We celebrate the 4th now because Jefferson’s Declaration was ratified that day and dated July 4th.

So what can we believe? It was Napoleon who said "History is myth agreed upon." To really know our history, we need to separate the myth from reality, even if the myths are so much more fun.

A hero for gun control folks.

If the gun control people need a hero, here he is. None other than Wyatt Earp.

He took no prisoners. And no guff.

A typical city ordinance in the old west.

In Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell, for the years from 1870 to 1885, there were only 45 total homicides.  This equates to a rate of approximately 1 murder per 100,000 residents per year. Something was working.

War on Germany, or war on booze?

Why did this never occur to me before? Perhaps too blatant. On December 18, 1917 the United States Congress passed the 18th amendment to the Constitution and sent it to the states for ratification. This is generally known as the prohibition amendment. That date never dawned on me before. There had been a prohibitionist movement for over 60 years before this but it had only been enacted in a couple of states by 1917. Why that year?

         I was watching Ken Burn's video on prohibition and suddenly I saw it. Do the names of these big brewers at the beginning of the war sound vaguely similar: Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser, Pabst, Schlitz, Schmidt's, Berghof? Sound somewhat Germanic. They are. They often came over during the wave of German immigration in the late 19th century.
         We have all heard about the extreme anti-Germanism that happened during World War I; not allowing German to taught in schools, German newspapers closed, etc. Then it occurred to me; beer is the national German drink and the breweries here often had ties to over there. Budweis, for example, is a brewing town in Austria. It seems that the prohibition movement used that to their great advantage. Suddenly beer became not just an evil drink, but an enemy drink.

By banning alcohol, and especially beer, we were fighting the foreign foe. Interesting how one set of events can trigger another that seems unrelated. And how historians need to learn to look at big pictures and connections to truly understand the world.

Do we Americans know our own history?

I haven't been here for a while, but today's editorial cartoon in the Fort Collins Coloradoan really set me off.

I wrote the following letter to editor.

How little we Americans know of our own history. The editorial cartoon in Sunday's paper is a perfect example, comparing our current Congress unfavorably to the Founding Fathers writing the Constitution. Our own mythology tells of a group of giants, gathering in Philadelphia, sitting down together and writing a document for the ages. Reality is a much different story. In many ways, the members of the Constitutional Convention acted exactly like our present Congress, fighting over issues, arguing about procedures, yelling at each other, threatening to go home. The Convention itself lasted from May through September. The number of issues that raised not just debate, but tempers, are too numerous to list here, but include things like how to elect Senators, the Electoral College (which we are still arguing about today), representation in the House , and perhaps most bitter, the debate over how slaves should be counted towards representation. They finally agreed to count each slave as three-fifths of a person. The cartoon suggests that the Founding Fathers did not defer difficult decision until later. They let a lot of thorny issues slide by in order to get the Document passed. After the document was written, several states refused to ratify because there was no Bill of Rights included in the original. Only the promise of, originally twelve, but finally ten amendments guaranteeing personal freedoms got the Constitution ratified. And still, many issues were not solved, as the Presidential election of 1800 showed so well. Twenty seven amendments later, we still aren't happy. And interestingly, amendment 27, was originally proposed in 1789 and only finally ratified in 1992. The subject of that amendment? Limiting the manner in which Congressmen get paid.

Here is our image.

Napoleon once said, "History is myth agreed upon." So much for the writing of our Constitution.

I haven't been on here for a while, due to a heavy course load which is taking lots of my time. But as I was researching the Middle East in World War I, I came across a photo of T.E. Lawrence, better known to us as Lawrence of Arabia. I kept having a vague notion of having seen this man somewhere before. So I will ask you, does Lawrence of Arabia, shown here

Bear a striking resemblance to the actor Matthew Modine

Or is it just my imagination?

Bicycling

We think of bicycling as something relatively new. I rode a wonderful Schwinn when I was a kid, but my folks never talked about doing it themselves. What we don't often realize is that the bike is a development of the late 19th century and there was a bike craze in the 1890's that would match anything today.
         The first bikes were really awkward things and very hard to ride.

They were fairly popular and sometimes there were clubs of them.

It didn't take long, however, before somebody figured out that it worked better if you were closer to the ground (not as far to fall) and the wheels were parallel.

What is very interesting, though, is that the bicycle was not seen as only men's recreation. Women very early began riding.

There was a problem, however, with Victorian fashion. Women's dresses were usually ankle length and that made it difficult to straddle the center bar, modestly. It could be done., but it wasn't easy.

Until a woman magazine editor saw a fashion magazine picture and came up with an idea. Her name?

Amelia Bloomer.

Why not put pants on women, even if under the skirts?

Voila,  problem solved.

One historian said of this,  "What is surprising about the bicycle craze of the 1890's is the profound effect it had on the women's liberation movement. Cycling opened up a new world of freedom for upper- and middle-class women, who had been largely confined to the home. The so-called New Woman who rode bicycles and wore cycling costumes became a symbol of gender equality and redefined femininity going into the 20 century." This was not always popular with the menfolk!!

But they soon discovered that they could do this new fad together.

Sometimes in the most bizarre contraptions. (Didn't need bloomers here!)

One surprising spin off of the bicycle craze was the next consumer fad... the quadricycle. Hard to peddle but very stable.

The quadricycle gave another young man of the time a brilliant idea.

Why couldn't we attach one of these new-fangled gasoline engines to the quadricycle and not have to peddle, asked Henry Ford in 1896? The rest is history!