Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 11

Dorothea Lange^{1, 2}

One of the weekends that I find I think of often…, is a weekend in April of 1934 or ‘5, I don’t remember which now, when I went down to Imperial Valley, California, to photograph the harvesting of one of the crops; as I remember now, it was the early peas or the early carrots. The assignment was the beginning of the migration, of the migratory workers as they start there in the early part of the season and then as they moved op. I was going to follow it through. The story of migratory labor in California is an old story. I had completed what I was going to do, and I started on the way home, driving up the main highway, which was right through the length of the state, and it was (a) very rainy afternoon. I stopped at a gas station to get some gas, and there was a car full of people, a family there at that gas station. I waited while they were getting there gas, and they looked very woebegone to me. They were American whites. I looked at the license plate on the car, and it was Oklahoma. I got out of the car, and I approached them and asked something about which way they were going, were they looking for work, I’ve forgotten what the question was at the time, And they said, “We’ve been blown out.” I questioned what they meant, and then they old me about the dust storm. They were the first arrivals that I saw. There were the people who got up that day quick and left. They saw they had no crop back there. They had to get out. All of that day, driving for the next maybe two hundred miles—no, three or four hundred miles—I saw these people. And I couldn’t wait. I photographed it. I had those first ones. That was the beginning of the first day of the landslide that cut this continent and it’s still going on. Don’t mean that people haven’t migrated before, but this shaking off of people from their own roots started with those big storms and it was like a movement of the earth, you see, and that rainy afternoon I remember, because I made the discovery. It was up to that time unobserved. There are books and books and books on that subject now.

1. Doud, Richard K. “Oral History Interview with Dorothea Lange, 1964 May 22.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://www.aaa.si.edu/…dorothea-lange…transcript.
2. Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was a photographer in California. Lange worked on FSA photograph project during the Depression.

I’ve got a sore throat, feel feverish and, at times, actually have a slight fever.

These are my usual symptoms for a mild cold that occurs, for me, maybe a couple of times a year—except for the last year and a half, when I’ve had none.

Many of the symptoms of the COVID delta variant are similar to a cold, allergies, or sinus infection.  Since we are going to be visiting family this weekend, I was getting a little concerned with the symptoms, though everyone that will be there is vaccinated, and thought I ought to find out for sure that it wasn’t COVID. Karen and I are both fully vaccinated, but no vaccine is 100% effective at preventing infection.¹

I had not previously had any reason to get tested for COVID.  Since this is the first time I’ve had any symptoms that could possibly indicate COVID, I was unsure where I might go to get tested.  There had been a COVID triage center set up in the area very early on in the pandemic, but that has long since closed.  I checked CVS and Walgreens online but they didn’t have any appointment openings for testing locally.  I didn’t know whether the clinic I normally go to did the tests, so I called to see if I could get one there or if they could tell me where I could get one.  They set me up for an appointment at 3:15 that day, Wednesday.

Amesh A. Adalja, MD, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, “recommends people with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 or a cold see their doctor for testing or consider taking a rapid antigen at-home test.”²

The clinic is in a small town near our rural home.  It wasn’t busy—no one in the waiting room when I got there and one lady departed from the examing area shortly after.  The young nurse who took the nasal sample is very experienced with it as she was one of those who staffed the triage center while it was open.³ When I asked, she told me that, because of volume, it could take a couple of days to get the test results to me.

I was only wanting to get tested so was a little surprised when she told me to wait for a couple of minutes and the doctor would be in.  He looked in my ears and throat and checked my breathing with a stethoscope—a mini-exam given my symptoms—and told me that everything looked clear. He told me that someone would call me with the results the next day.

Later, much later, that evening, just as I was getting ready for bed, I checked e-mail and found a message sent at 5 PM saying that the doctor “has posted your test results to your Patient Portal.”  The test had been completed at 3:19 and had a note saying: “This test result was sent to you as soon as it became available. Your provider may not have reviewed these results yet.”⁴

The test was a PCR test “intended for the qualitative detection of
nucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2.  It was negative.

They also tested for Type A and B influenza and RSV⁵. All three came back negative.

I guess it must just be a summer cold.

Just like I thought.

“If your test rules out COVID-19 and you’re left with a summer cold, Dr. Adalja says you can treat your symptoms with over-the-counter cough and cold remedies.”⁶

DayQuil, NightQuil, and Zicam—just like normal.  Ricola, too, for the sore throat.

1. Rogers, Kaleigh. “Still Unsure about Getting the Covid-19 Vaccine? Start Here.” FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight, August 11, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2021. https://fivethirtyeight.com/.
2. Brown, Maressa. “Summer Colds and Covid-19 Have Similar Symptoms-Here’s How to Know Which One You Might Have.” Health.com, August 12, 2021. Accessed September 2, 2021. https://www.health.com/…summer-cold-or-covid.
3. I am acquainted with her from outside her work.  We were both members of a gym that closed early in the pandemic.  The gym is owned by the local hospital system which decided a couple of months ago not to reopen it.
4. I did get a call the next day at 8:04 AM
5. Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), also called human respiratory syncytial virus and human orthopneumovirus, is a very common, contagious virus that causes infections of the respiratory tract.
6. Brown.

Dust, Drought, Depression, and War No. 10

“On my right, folks, we have nature’s imitation of the New York Skyline.”
Richard Decker, August 1935 Life¹

Richard Decker (May 6, 1907 – November 1, 1988) a cartoonist and illustrator, studied at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and became famous for his cartoons published in The New Yorker.²

Life was independently published… until 1936 as a general-interest and light entertainment magazine, heavy on illustrations, jokes, and social commentary. It featured some of the greatest writers, editors, illustrators and cartoonists of its time: Charles Dana Gibson, Norman Rockwell and Jacob Hartman Jr. Gibson became the editor and owner of the magazine after John Ames Mitchell died in 1918. During its later years, the magazine offered brief capsule reviews (similar to those in The New Yorker) of plays and movies currently running in New York City, but with the innovative touch of a colored typographic bullet resembling a traffic light, appended to each review: green for a positive review, red for a negative one, and amber for mixed notices.³

1. “Richard Decker – Life Magazine Cartoon – August 1935 – Cave Tour.” ComicArtFans. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://www.comicartfans.com…1640311.
2. “Richard Decker.” Wikipedia, last edit, April 21, 2021. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Decker.
3. “Life (Magazine).” Wikipedia, last edit, July 21, 2021. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_(magazine).

I recently retrieved this mid 19th-century image from an online commercial picture archive.  Its caption there reads, “CIVIL WAR: VOLUNTEERS, 1861. Confederate volunteers posing for a Richmond photographer before the Battle of First Bull Run in 1861. Oil over a photograph.”

The caption is wrong.¹

The image is separated in both time and space from Bull Run by almost 600 days and 50 miles.

I share a lot of civil war images online.  When I came across this image and read its caption, I was pretty curious as there are very few images available online of groups of Confederate soldiers. I didn’t recall ever finding this one.

Of course, the image could be from a private collection and not widely available online.  That turns out to be the situation for the original ambrotype photograph from which this image was derived.

My search online found a black and white version at the Library of Congress.

The title is “Soldiers from Richmond Grays at execution of abolitionist John Brown in Charles Town, West Virginia.”^{2, 3}

Brown was executed December 2, 1859, 16 1/2 months before the civil war started.

The Library of Congress summary for this image says:

Photomechanical print from reproduction of sixth-plate ambrotype shows group portrait of soldiers at the execution of John Brown; most are from Richmond Grays (which became Company A, 1st Virginia Volunteers Regiment in 1861) including Robert Alexander Caskie, center with goatee; John Wilkes Booth⁴, left of Caskie’s shoulder; and Aylett Reins Woodson, bottom center; also Lieutenant Julian Alluisi of the Virginia Rifles in shako hat at top right. Tentatively identified are Louis F. Bossieux, center right; Cyrus Bossieux, top far left; Charles D. Clark, top right; David Garrick Wilson, bottom right; and William H. Caskie, behind Charles D. Clark. Photograph was previously thought to be of Confederate soldiers during the Civil War (Source: Angela Smythe, 2016).

John Wilkes Booth’s sister, Asia, likely saw a black and white print of this image. In her memoir, she writes⁵:

He acted continuously, traveled much, and accumulated a great deal of money. He bought land and speculated in oil wells. Success attended all his undertakings. He left Richmond and unsought enrolled himself as one of the party going to search for and capture John Brown. He was exposed to dangers and hardships. He was a scout, and I have been shown a picture of himself and others in their scout and sentinel dresses. He was a witness of the death of old John Brown. He acknowledged him a hero when he saw him die, and felt a throb of anguish as he beheld the old eyes straining their anxious sight for the multitude he vainly had thought would rise to rescue him.

In the summer of 2009, researcher Angela Smythe had recently finished reading the memoir and her curiosity was aroused by the single-line description of the picture.  She wondered if the photo still existed. “How could such a picture still exist and not have been already found in a field so heavily populated with established experts?” Smythe writes:⁶

I don’t remember how long I had been searching when one day I read a recollection of Booth at Charlestown left by 1859 Richmond Grays Private Philip Whitlock. Whitlock’s memoirs guided me to the above iconic photograph, which I call RG#1.  I was actually looking for Whitlock in RG#1, who as it turns out is not in there at all, when I saw John Wilkes Booth himself, standing “center rear.”

I had been trained as a fine arts artist and had supported myself as one, so I felt confident with what my trained and seasoned eye saw.  However, as an avid student of history, I said to myself, “No, not in that famous picture!  How could that be? With all the authorities on John Wilkes Booth, why had no one before me ever seen him in that picture?”

The answer was really quite simple.  As stated above, I am an artist, so Asia’s fleeting sixteen words about being shown a picture caught my attention, whereas most other researchers would gloss over them without thinking twice. Secondly, there is a difference between reading what Asia had to say about a brother she loved and scouring Asia’s manuscript for clues to support a narrative of Booth the Assassin.   Lastly, the picture’s iconic fame as a misidentified Civil War photograph obscured its true provenance and this led established researchers who had become so accustomed to seeing this famous photograph⁷ to simply run by it as a familiar object.

Booth, a supporting actor at the Richmond Theatre, had left with the Greys without informing the theatre manager, George Kunkel.  Booth had remarked to George Crutchfield, a member of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues, also mobilized during the John Brown episode, that “he didn‘t know and didn‘t care” how Kunkel would fare without him.  Absent 17 days, Booth was discharged by Kunkel upon his return. Smythe writes:⁸

Richmond Gray Edward M. Alfriend, whom fellow Gray John O. Taylor observed leaving the theater with Booth to catch the outbound train for Charles Town, would recall 40 years later that Kunkel had a change of heart when a large contingent of the Virginia regiment (doubtless still in uniform) marched to the theater and demanded their comrade be reinstated.

Militia members, city newspapers, and influential citizens pressured employers over rumors that clerks and other workers would be discharged for their absence.  Like other employers, given the public and private pressure, Kunkel had little choice but to acquiesce to reinstate Booth as a concession to patriotic southern duty.

_______________

Earlier I wrote that I didn’t ever recall finding this image online.  However, I’m relatively certain that I’ve seen the image.

A little over 15 years ago, I came across Francis Trevelyan Miller’s 10 volume set, The Photographic History of the Civil War, in the Arkansas Tech University library.  I envisioned scanning in all of the images and sharing them online and actually started a project doing so, starting with Volume 7.  I started  there “simply because it was the one I was interested in when I decided to publish.”

I had checked out several of the volumes, including, I believe, Volume 1, which includes a copy of the Richmond Greys image on page 145.⁹

Interestingly, my project ended with a page that includes an image of an older John Wilkes Booth as well as images of the others implicated in the conspiracy.

1. I submitted a comment concerning the error to the commercial picture archive and included links to the correct information.
2. “Soldiers from Richmond Grays at Execution of Abolitionist John Brown in Charles Town, West Virginia.” Library of Congress. Accessed August 31, 2021. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016650150/.
3. This title is also wrong. At the time, Charles Town was in Virginia.
4. For those who might not be familiar with American and or Civil War history, John Wikes Booth was the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
5. Clarke, Asia Booth, and Terry Alford. John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir. University of Mississippi, 1999.
6. Smythe, Angela. “John Wilkes Booth’s Time in Richmond before the Civil War.” Antebellum Richmond, November 2020. http://www.antebellumrichmond.com.
7. Miller, Francis Trevelyan. The Photographic History of the Civil War, Volume 1: The Opening Battles. 1. Vol. 1. 10 vols. p. 145. New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1911.
   Young Southerners at Richmond Making Light of War.
   Skylarking before the lens of the Confederate photographer, we see the Boys in Gray just before Bull Run had taught them the meaning of a battle and elated them with the conviction of their own prowess. The young and confident troops on both sides approached this first severe lesson of the war in the same jocular spirit. There is not a serious face in the picture. The man flourishing the sword bayonet and the one with the drawn dagger are marking with mock heroics their bravado toward the coming struggle, while the one with the musket stands debonair as a comic-opera soldier. The pipe-clay cross bell and breast plate, the cock plumes in the “shapo” of the officer, indicate that the group is of a uniformed military organization already in existence at the beginning of the war. There was no such paraphernalia in the outfit of Southern troops organized later, when simplicity was the order of the day in camp.
8. Smythe, Angela. “Chasing Shadows 150 Years Old, Part II, Conversations Through the Glass.” Antebellum Richmond, May 10, 2014. http://antebellumrichmond.com/conversations.html.
9. Miller

No one expected someone who needed an iron lung to live this long.

In July 1952, a six-year-old Dallas, Texas, boy named Paul Alexander was infected with polio. Believing he had a better chance of recovering at home, the family doctor advised his parents not to take him to the hospital as there were just too many polio patients there. After five days, when he couldn’t hold a crayon, speak, swallow, or cough, his parents took him to Parkland Hospital. Though the staff there was well trained, with a dedicated polio ward, the hospital was overwhelmed, with sick people everywhere, and nowhere to treat them all.  When a doctor finally saw him, Paul’s mother was told there was nothing that could be done and he was left on a gurney in a hallway, barely breathing.  Another doctor decided to examine him, rushed him to the operating room, and performed an emergency tracheotomy to suction out the congestion in his lungs his paralyzed body couldn’t deal with.²

Three days later, Paul woke up. His body was encased in a machine that wheezed and sighed. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t cough. He couldn’t see through the fogged windows of the steam tent – a vinyl hood that kept the air around his head moist and the mucus in his lungs loose. He thought he was dead.

When the tent was eventually removed, all he could see were the heads of other children, their bodies encased in metal canisters, nurses in starched white uniforms and caps floating between them. “As far as you can see, rows and rows of iron lungs. Full of children,” he recalled recently.³

In 2017, Jennings Brown, writing for Gizmodo, met three polio survivors still dependent on iron lungs.  “They are among the last few, possibly the last three in the US.”⁴

Poliomyelitis is a highly contagious disease that can cause paralysis of legs, arms, and respiratory muscles. “The polio virus is a silver bullet designed to kill specific parts of the brain,” Richard Bruno, a clinical psychophysiologist, and director of the International Centre for Polio Education said. “But parents today have no idea what polio was like, so it’s hard to convince somebody that lives are at risk if they don’t vaccinate.”

When (Martha) Lillard was a child, polio was every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst polio outbreak year in US history took place in 1952, a year before Lillard was infected. There were about 58,000 reported cases. Out of all the cases, 21,269 were paralyzed and 3,145 died. “They closed theaters, swimming pools, families would keep their kids away from other kids because of the fear of transmission,” Bruno said.

In May 2008, Dianne Odell died after a power failure due to storms shut off electricity to her residence near Jackson, Tennessee.  Odell had lived almost 60 years inside her 750-pound iron lung.  An emergency generator that was supposed to autostart didn’t and family members weren’t able to get it working. They tried operating the iron lung with a lever attached to the machine, but it wasn’t enough.⁵

1. “The Last Few Polio Survivors – Last of the Iron Lungs | Gizmodo.” YouTube, November 20, 2017. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gplA6pq9cOs.
2. McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. “The Man in the Iron Lung.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, May 26, 2020. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/…polio-coronavirus
3. ibid
4. Brown, Jennings. “The Last of the Iron Lungs.” Gizmodo, November 20, 2017. Accessed August 25, 2021. https://gizmodo.com/the-last-of-the-iron-lungs….
5. Baird, Woody. “Dead at 61 after Life in Iron Lung.” The Seattle Times, May 28, 2008. https://www.seattletimes.com…iron-lung/.

October 26, 2018

Sometimes it’s hard not to engage.

Both—no, make that ALL—sides of every issue seem to have some people overly emotional these days.

Sometimes, I take time to write what seems to me to be a reasoned response for some of what I read on blogs and/or social media.

More often than not, I delete my response.

Engaging in the discourse, no matter how reasoned, is not going to make any difference, is not going to change any minds. In the final days leading into the first midterm election of the next president, all of this will be history.

“This too shall pass.¹”

1. “Adage reflecting on the temporary nature, or ephemerality, of the human condition. The general sentiment is often expressed in wisdom literature throughout history and across cultures, although the specific phrase seems to have originated in the writings of the medieval Persian Sufi poets.” (Wikipedia)

FiveThirtyEight¹

Since before the vaccines were even available, experts have warned that they wouldn’t be 100 percent effective at preventing infection. Luckily, the vaccines that we ended up with were actually much more effective than what early predictions suggested — Moderna and Pfizer are both better than 90 percent, and Johnson & Johnson is around 72 percent effective against the original strain of COVID-19 in the U.S. — but since they aren’t 100 percent, that means some vaccinated people can still get COVID-19. Early studies show the vaccines are less effective against the delta variant, with both Pfizer and Moderna around 90 percent effective against infection, and J&J up to 71 percent effective against hospitalization. And we’re seeing more breakthrough infections as the delta variant spreads.

Nevertheless, study after study shows that your risk of getting COVID-19 is much lower if you’re vaccinated than if you’re unvaccinated. In a study published last week that followed over 98,000 people in England from late-June to mid-July, vaccinated individuals were three times less likely to contract COVID-19 than unvaccinated individuals, even as the delta variant dominated cases. In fact, even if you do get infected after vaccination, your risks of getting seriously ill, needing to go in the hospital, needing to go in the intensive care unit or dying are reduced even further. Vaccinated Americans have accounted for less than 0.06 percent of hospitalizations, according to a review from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which looked at states that report breakthrough cases. Of the more than 166 million Americans who have been vaccinated, 1,507 have died after contracting COVID-19 — a rate of 0.0009 percent.

1. Rogers, Kaleigh. “Still Unsure about Getting the Covid-19 Vaccine? Start Here.” FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight, August 11, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2021. https://fivethirtyeight.com/.

“It’s true that compared to something like a tetanus shot, which has been in use for nearly a century, COVID-19 vaccines have a much shorter record of safety. But there are a few things to consider. One is that, due to the pandemic, billions of people have received these vaccines. Collecting data on how a medical intervention impacts billions of people would take decades in any other scenario, but we’ve been able to get it in just a few months. And because these vaccines are new, they are being carefully monitored. It’s how experts were able to identify that the AstraZeneca vaccine carries a small risk of a rare blood clot condition called thrombocytopenia syndrome. The risk is less than 10 in 1 million, yet researchers were able to identify it quickly due to intensive monitoring and the sheer number of people getting their shots.”¹

1. Rogers, Kaleigh. “Still Unsure about Getting the Covid-19 Vaccine? Start Here.” FiveThirtyEight. FiveThirtyEight, August 11, 2021. Accessed August 29, 2021. https://fivethirtyeight.com/.

Civil War Era Photographic Portraiture No. 2
Originally Published in American Civil War Chronicles

Half-plate ambrotype of Confederate officer Captain William F. McRorie of Co. A, 4th North Carolina Infantry Regiment, Richmond, Virginia.—C. R. Rees & Co.

Cased images by Rees included in the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs at the Library of Congress show a studio setting identical to this ambrotype.

According to the Gorgas Library at the University of Alabama, “Born to German immigrants in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Rees first established a photographic studio in Richmond, Virginia in 1851. After a brief attempt in the mid-1850s to open a gallery in New York City, Rees and his family returned to the area and established themselves as fixtures in Richmond and nearby Petersburg. After his studio burned in April 1865 along with the rest of Richmond, Rees reopened and continued working in the area until at least 1880.”

Recently sold at auction at Swann Galleries for $13,000 with–A Confederate States America Twenty Dollar bill, with the handwritten number 38392. Circa 1862.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9795989/william-f-mcrorie