March 2012 – Page 3 – The History Blog

Native club owned by Cook given to BC museum

March 21, 2012

A rare ceremonial yew-wood club given to Captain James Cook by the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Vancouver Island in 1778 during his third and final voyage has returned to Canada for good. Philanthropist Michael Audain donated it to the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology (MOA) where it was unveiled Tuesday. It was the last Canadian artifact from Cook’s personal collection still in private hands. They’re all in museums in London, Vienna and Berlin, so believe it or not, this is the only Cook artifact from Cook’s voyage to Canada actually in Canada. This is the first time it’s been home since Cook took it with him on his way back to Hawaii 234 years ago.

The artifact, a club in the shape of an arm and hand holding a sphere, was carved with stone tools or possibly mussel shells years before it was given to Captain Cook, probably around the mid-1700s. That puts it in the last generation of First Nations objects made before contact with Europeans. It is the oldest known club of its kind, and it’s the most finely executed. A symbolic mark of high status for whoever owned it, the club might also have been used as a weapon, although it’s in excellent condition so if it saw action it didn’t see much.

Cook’s third voyage of exploration on his trusty ship, HMS Resolution, took him from Plymouth around the Cape of Good Hope to New Zealand to Hawaii (1776–1777). He left Hawaii for parts north seeking the elusive Northwest Passage, landing at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island on March 28, 1778. Cook stayed in a Nootka Sound cove now called Resolution Cove for less than a month, trading with the Nuu-chah-nulth village in Yuquot. The Nuu-chah-nulth were cordial, but they drove a hard bargain, turning up their noses at the low value trinkets Cook was accustomed to fobbing off on First Nations he encountered during his voyages. In exchange for mast timber and the sea otter pelts Cook wanted, the Yuquot villagers wanted metal, and the quality of the metals he offered — lead, pewter and tin — left something to be desired.

On April 26th, Cook shipped out, heading north again. He mapped most of the northwest coast of North America on his way to the Bering Strait. He tried to navigate the strait several times but found it impassable. He turned around and headed back to Hawaii where on Valentine’s Day, 1779 tensions with the Hawaiians would erupt over the matter of a stolen boat. When Cook and his men attempted to take King Kalaniʻōpuʻu hostage to exchange him for the stolen boat, they were rebuffed by the King’s men. Cook was hit on the head and stabbed during the ensuing fracas and died.

His crew initially tried to complete the voyage, heading back to the Bering Strait. When Charles Clerke, the commander of the second main ship (HMS Discovery) died, they gave up the Northwest Passage and turned back for home. They finally got back in October of 1780.

Cook’s personal collection of objects acquired on his final voyage, including the club from Vancouver, was given to his widow Elizabeth. His family gave it to the Leverian Museum in London where it was on display along with other artifacts from Cook’s voyages. It was sold to a private buyer in 1806 and passed through another museum and various private hands for the next two centuries. In 1967 it made its way to New York, where last year Canadian dealer Donald Ellis bought it from the $40 million estate of antique dealer George Terasaki.

Well aware that there were no Cook artifacts in Canada, Ellis contacted Michael Audain, whose foundation has repatriated several important First Nations artifacts to Canada, offering him first crack at this unique and significant piece of Canadian history. Audain paid $827,000 for the club — its market value is an estimated $1.2 million — and donated it to the MOA.

Colossal Juno lowered by crane through museum roof

March 20, 2012

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

A colossal Roman statue of Juno was lowered through a dismantled skylight in the roof of the Italian Renaissance Gallery in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art (MFA) on Tuesday. She’s 13 feet tall including her plinth and weighs 13,000 pounds, making her the largest Classical marble statue in North America. She was purchased for the MFA by an anonymous donor last year, but her enormous size and delicate condition required a great deal of study before she could be moved.

Juno’s dating is uncertain. We know she’s from the early Imperial era, probably from the reign of Trajan or Hadrian in the early second century A.D. Her first appearance in the historical record is in the 1633 inventory of the famed Ludovisi Collection, an immense collection of art and antiquities collected by Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi and his uncle Alessandro Ludovisi, aka Pope Gregory XV. Some of the works they purchased, and others, some of the most famous, Cardinal Ludovisi found during construction of his stately pleasure dome.

In 1622 Cardinal Ludovisi bought some vineyards in what was then a suburb of Rome and built the Villa Ludovisi, various smaller buildings, and elaborate gardens on the grounds. Those vineyards turned out to have once been the Gardens of Sallust, a vast garden of renowned beauty built in the first century B.C. by Roman historian Sallust on property that once belonged to Julius Caesar. Subsequent emperors claimed the gardens which were maintained and open to the public until Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410 A.D. Workers building Ludovisi’s villa turned up an incredible bounty of ancient statuary, including the Dying Gaul.

Given Juno’s hugeness, it would make sense if she were one of the pieces discovered on the spot rather than one of the acquisitions. Then again, the obelisk in St. Peter’s Square was moved there in 1586 and that bugger is 83 feet tall and weighs 331 tons, so who knows? We do know that Juno remained on the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi where she was photographed in 1890.

A few years before that picture was taken, in 1885, Don Rodolfo Ludovisi, Prince of Piombino, heir to the Cardinal’s great patrimony, sold the villa and much of its property to real estate developers. They demolished everything, creating one of Rome’s toniest neighborhoods where the American Embassy now stands. (The embassy, btw, is housed in the Villa Margherita, built between 1886 and 1890 by that rat of a prince on a piece of Ludovisi land he hadn’t sold to developers. The costs of construction were so crippling that he couldn’t even afford to pay for it, so he ended up selling that villa too to the Italian state.)

By 1893, the Boncompagni Ludovisi family was in dire financial straits. The next thing to go was one of the world’s greatest art and antiquities collections. Thankfully much of it was purchased by the state and is in Roman museums today, but in 1897 Juno was bought by Charles Franklin Sprague and his wife, Mary, of Boston. The statue was shipped to Boston first, then in 1904 carted by a team of 12 oxen to the Sprague’s estate in Brookline. It was the centerpiece of their Italianate garden for the next 107 years until it was purchased for the MFA.

Living outdoors in Boston is very different from living outdoors in Rome, however, and that century plus of New England winters has been hard on Juno. Before she could be moved, conservators had to do an in-depth analysis of her condition using X-rays and ground penetrating radar to find her weaknesses. They also took samples of stone from various parts of her to determine which pieces are original to the statue and which were added in later restorations. A 3D laser scan of the entire statue helped conservators model the potential stresses of transportation.

In December of last year, the MFA team, including structural engineers, stone masons and steel manufacturers as well as conservators, moved her to a storage unit. Their studies showed that her ankles, waist and neck were the salient weak points. The waist has a deep crack and the arm was attached with an iron bracket at some point after its Renaissance rediscovery. The head was also attached to the statue using adhesives and a thick iron pin, and the neck is so thin that simple vibrations from movement could have snapped the head right off. So stone masons snapped it off first.

(It’s not quite as horrifying as it sounds. Stone analysis indicates that the head is not the same marble as the rest of the body, so it’s probably a later replacement, and anyway they cut through the adhesives, not the marble.)

The conservation team also constructed a custom protective steel cradle to keep her stable during the moves and storage. She’s too huge to haul through the front door and upstairs — nor is that the most ginger way to handle so delicate a giant — so yesterday, the crane hoisted Juno, still firmly encased in her metal armature, from the ground up to the wide open skylight above the second floor gallery. It then carefully lowered her to the gallery floor.

Next up: removal of the steel frame and in situ conservation to deal with surface issues and to reattach the head and arm. On April 9th, Juno will go on public display in the MFA’s new George D. and Margo Behrakis Wing for Art of the Ancient World, which will focus on Greek and Roman deities and heroes.

Here is some highly disturbing video of masons decapitating a 2000-year-old marble lady:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ewai2Tvtybc&w=430]

Here is some highly cool video of a crane airlifting a 2000-year-old marble lady to her new home:

For more about the conservation process, including lots of great pictures, see the MFA’s Conservation in Action pages.

Poignant Marilyn Monroe memento up for auction

March 19, 2012

Modern(ish), Treasures

Among the enormous quantities of movie and television memorabilia that will be sold at Julien’s Auctions’ Hollywood Legends sale on March 31st and April 1st will be a collection of Marilyn Monroe pictures, letters and objects from the estate of Allan “Whitey” Snyder, Marilyn’s long-time makeup artist.

Whitey met Marilyn, then still Norma Jeane Baker, when he was assigned to do Marilyn’s makeup for her first screen test for 20th Century Fox in 1946. They formed an immediate bond which would become a lifelong working and personal relationship. From 1952’s Monkey Business on, Snyder was Marilyn’s dedicated makeup artist for all of her movies and personal appearances. He took many pictures of her on set; apparently having her picture taken calmed her stage fright.

The photographs are getting a great deal of the press because most of them have never been published before and because not just the pictures themselves are for sale, but also the publishing rights to them. Marilyn’s estate makes $2 million a year just from the licensing fees for use of her name and image, so there’s big money at stake in publishing never-before-seen pictures of Marilyn on her most famous movie sets.

It’s Lot 521 that really caught my attention. Years before her death, Marilyn asked Whitey to promise her that he’d do her makeup for her funeral should she predecease him. He jokingly replied, “Sure, drop off the body while it’s still warm and I’ll do it.” Amused, Marilyn bought him a gold Tiffany money clip engraved: “Whitey Dear, While I’m still warm, Marilyn.”

Engraved gold Tiffany money clip, gift from Marilyn Monroe to Allan "Whitey" Snyder

Matt Lauer called it “gross” but I find it terribly sweet and sad. I hope against hope that someone not too creepy buys it.

When Marilyn died in 1962, her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio took care of the funeral arrangements. He reminded Whitey of his promise and Whitey, fortified with a flask of gin, kept it. He did her makeup one last time and was one of the pallbearers.

1940 Census to be released online for the first time

March 18, 2012

Modern(ish), Multimedia, Social policy

The United States has taken a census of the population every 10 years without fail since 1790. Census figures determine how many seats in the House of Representatives are allocated to each state. The first census takers were federal marshals who went door to door recording the name of the head of the household and the number of people in each household. Native Americans were not counted. Only three out of five slaves were counted.

(This is the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise, which stipulated that just three out of five slaves in every state would be counted for the purposes of determining population and thus the number of seats in the House. Slaveholding states wanted all their slaves to count so they could dominate the legislature; non-slaveholding states wanted no slaves counted since they didn’t have the vote, citizenship or even the right not to be sold like so much livestock, and would give the slave states disproportionate power in the House. James Madison suggested the three-fifths figure which was eventually adopted by the Constitutional Convention.)

Throughout the whole of the 19th century and half of the 20th, political districts were responsible for sending out census takers, called enumerators, armed with forms and pencils to canvass door to door. The enumerators would return completed forms to the precinct office where they’d be entered in ink in bound ledger books. This is why historical census records have all kinds of transcription errors and misspellings, not to mention many omissions particularly in rural areas where enumerators would have to travel for miles to find remote farms, many of whose inhabitants made themselves intentionally unreachable. Starting with the 1950 census, enumerators were replaced with forms mailed out to every address on file with the United States Post Office.

By law, all individual census records are sealed for 72 years. Summaries and statistical reports are released as soon as the data is tabulated, but the information about John Smith at 100 Maple Lane is kept under wraps for three score and 12. In the past, the population schedules were only made available on microfilm. With the rise of the Internet and the explosion of online genealogical research, many of those historical census records have been digitized, but researchers had to drag their cookies to a National Archives and Records Administration branch office and go through all the microfilm by hand.

The 1940 Census, its 72 years come round at last, slouches towards the Internet to be born. Now for the first time, census records will be released online. Bookmark this website: 1940 Census Archives, and return to it on April 2nd at 9:00 AM to see the 1940 Census in all its glory.

It really is glorious. This is the only census taken during Franklin Roosevelt’s many presidential administrations and the only one to tabulate the statistical realities of the Great Depression. It included new questions about employment, income, and home ownership vs. renting (see a PDF of a blank 1940 form here), which at the time caused some distrust of the census requiring a major media campaign to reassure Americans their answers would be kept in utmost confidence and framing the census as patriotic duty. Cesar Romero, the future Joker to Adam West’s Batman, pitched the census in a public service film. Pictures of FDR filling in the census form were publicized all over the country.

One not-so-small caveat: the data has not been name indexed yet. The census records are indexed by enumeration district — the geographic area a single census taker could cover in two weeks in an urban center, or in one month in a rural location. Commercial ancestry websites Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org have announced that they’ll create a name index (plus indexes of all the other fields too), but it’ll be some time before they’re done. (Ancestry.com is a pay service, but they’ll allow free access to their index and proprietary search tools through the end of 2013. FamilySearch.org is run by the Mormon church. Access is free and you can even help index the census.) If you want to locate a person using the government website, you’ll have to know where the person lived in order to track down his or her census information.

If you’d like to be ready to hit the records running, you can figure out which enumeration district the person you’re researching lived in. Go to the National Archives’ online public access search page and type “1940 enumeration district descriptions for [city or county]” (without the quotation marks). You’ll get any written descriptions of 1940 Census enumeration districts that include the place you searched for, plus any maps that include it. Track down the address and you’ll see a two part number separated by a hyphen labeling the area. That’s the enumeration district number.

I searched for the tiny town my father was born in just three years before the census and I got three written documents and two maps. I now have both of their enumeration district numbers good to go so I can look up my adorable toddling parents on April 2nd. :boogie:

If you’re daunted by the prospect, check your local public library for resources. This Michigan public library, for instance, is offering a workshop on locating your family members on the census two days after the release.

For a three minute period overview of the census, see this film created as part of the training for enumerators. Notice the strong emphasis on the confidentiality of the data and on how a full and honest response is the duty of all patriotic citizens.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cImIlPSuyR8&w=430]

The National Archives YouTube channel has three other videos from this film that go into further detail on the census-taking process. They’re a tad on the dry side, but fascinating for genealogists, statisticians, social historians, archivists and other assorted nerdly species.

Poster collection stolen by Nazis to be returned to collector’s son

March 17, 2012

Modern(ish), Museums

In a rare instance of a court ruling in the interests of justice rather than on the precise merits of the law, Germany’s top federal appeals court has decided that the German Historical Museum must return a collection of 4,529 rare late 19th, early 20th century posters to Peter Sachs, the son of the original collector.

Hans Josef Sachs’ lifelong passion for graphic art began when he was a teenager in the late 1890s. His roommate at the Breslau Gymnasium had posters plastered all over the walls and Hans was enchanted. The early focus of his collection was Parisian posters designed by the likes of Art Nouveau master Alphonse Mucha. As German artists in Berlin and Munich began to modernize the form, Sachs’ collection embraced them. His taste was impeccable. Posters in his collection advertised food, movies, theatrical performances, political propaganda, museum exhibitions, every one of them rare, printed in very small original runs.

By the time he was 24 years old in 1905, he had the largest private collection of posters in Germany. That year, he and five other poster lovers founded the Verein der Plakat Freunde (the Society for Friends of the Poster). In 1910, Hans founded Das Plakat (“The Poster”), a journal about posters which is considered a highly influential watershed in the history of graphic art. (See some of the amazingly gorgeous cover art on this blog.) The society and journal gave him access to even more posters for his collection. He ran the magazine, writing much of its copy, until it folded in 1921.

After an attic fire that threatened but thankfully did not damage his collection, Sachs began to work on finding a way to display the posters so that the public could see them. In 1926 he had an addition built to house his collection. He dubbed it the Museum of Applied Arts and opened it to the public.

A dentist by profession, Sachs continued to practice until 1935 when his Jewish heritage ran afoul of the Nuremberg Laws. To protect his collection, he transferred technical ownership of it to banker Richard Lenz who was not Jewish. In the summer of 1938, before Lenz could take possession, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels confiscated the entire collection, which had grown to an astounding 12,500 individual pieces. He wanted to install the collection — doubtless purged of all modernism — in a museum of his own.

On November 9, 1938, Hans Sachs was arrested during Kristallnacht and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside of Berlin. He was released 20 days later and wasted no time collecting his wife Felicia and his one-year-old son Peter and getting the hell out of Germany. They fled to London and thence to New York.

After the war was over, Hans assumed the collection had been destroyed, so he applied for reparations under the Federal Republic of Germany’s refund policy. In March 1961, the West German government paid him about $50,000 (225,000 German marks) as compensation for his loss. It seems a small amount now, but at the time it was a generous offer that everyone advised Hans accept. He did.

In 1966, Sachs discovered that about 8,000 posters from his collection had survived the war and were in an East Berlin museum. He wrote to the East German authorities not even asking for the posters back, but just offering to meet museum officials to offer his expertise. He also wanted to ascertain if the collection were on public display. The East German government replied to him in July of 1966 rejecting his offer because discriminatory West German legislation made collaboration between their experts impossible.

Hans Josef Sachs died in 1974 never having laid eyes on his collection again. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the poster collection, now mysteriously reduced to fewer than 5,000 pieces, was transferred to the German Historical Museum in Berlin where it remained mainly in storage, with just a handful of posters on display at any given time.

Hans’ son Peter had no idea the collection still existed until 2005. As soon as he found out, he tried to get it back. He offered to repay the 1961 compensation at their 2005 value of 600,000 euros, but the estimated market value of the posters had skyrocketed well into the millions (it’s assessed at $6 – $21 million now), and the museum did not want to lose such an irreplaceable and important collection. He took the case before the Advisory Committee for the Return of Nazi-confiscated Art in 2007, but since the government had paid reparations, the letter of the law was not on his side.

Peter Sachs took the case to district court, but in 2009 they agreed with the decision of the Advisory Committee. He kept appealing to higher courts, and now the Federal Court of Justice has ruled that Peter Sachs is the rightful owner of his father’s poster collection. The decision notes that although Peter did not file for restitution by the deadline and although his father had received legal compensation, for the posters not to be returned “would perpetuate Nazi injustice.” Since the intent of restitution laws was to reinstate the property rights stripped from the victims of Nazi terror, keeping the posters would contravene the entire point of the law.

The museum has accepted the ruling with good grace, even though they’re bummed because the collection is of course a huge resource for scholars. Peter Sachs, now 74 years old, wants to fulfill his father’s dream of seeing the posters on public display, so his top priority is to find a museum where the entire collection can be showcased in all its glory.