politics

Monica Y. sent a collection of vintage ads and cartoons illustrating how soap and cleanliness has been used as a metaphor for colonization.  The first two ads show how soap manufacturers and colonialists alike colluded in suggesting that the colonized were unclean/uncivilized and needed to be cleansed/enlightened.

This first ad for Pears’ Soap reads:

The first step towards lightening The White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.  Pears’ Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place — it is the ideal toilet soap.

The phrase “White Man’s Burden” refers to the colonial-era idea that white men were burdened with bringing civilization to the uncivilized.  See our post on a modern-day Pamper’s commercial invoking a white woman’s burden for another example.

This ad for Ivory soap depicts Uncle Sam (I think) passing out soap to American Indians (in blankets, no less) (text transcribed below):

Text:

A NEW DEPARTURE
SAID Uncle Sam: “I will be wise,
And thus the Indian civilize:
Instead of guns, that kill a mile,
Tobacco, lead, and liquor vile,
Instead of serving out a meal,
Or sending Agents out to steal,
I’ll give, domestic arts to teach,
A cake of IVORY SOAP to each.
Before it flies the guilty stain,

The grease and dirt no more remain;
‘Twill change their nature day by day,
And wash their darkest blots away.
They’re turn their bows to fishing-rods,
And bury hatchets under sods,
In wisdom and in worth increase,
And ever smoke the pipe of peace;
For ignorance can never cope
With such a foe as IVORY SOAP.”

This political cartoon, circa 1886, uses the metaphor of washing to describe the cleansing of the Chinese from the U.S.  At the bottom it reads, “The Chinese must go.”

See also our set of vintage ads selling soap with depictions of African Americans as dirty.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Michael Kimmel forwarded me a blog post at Gallup updating their data on acceptance of homosexuality in the U.S.  In 2009, “morally acceptable” eeked out a win over “morally wrong” and, in 2010, it took a resounding lead:

Who is driving this increase in acceptance of homosexuality?  Other than young people, that is, and the move to the words “gay” and “lesbian.”

Gallup offers some really interesting answers to that question.

First, men are driving it.  Women are only marginally more supportive of homosexuality today compared to 2006.  But men, especially young men, but older men too, are significantly more supportive.  A full 14% of men have changed their mind in the last four years!  Women started out more supportive than men, but men have caught up.

Second, while members of all political parties and religions reported show increases in their level of acceptance of gays and lesbians, it is the politically moderate that are really pushing the percentages up.  Eleven percent of independents and 14% of moderates changed their mind about homosexuality between 2006 and 2010.  They are now as likely as democrats to endorse homosexuality (but still fall behind self-described liberals).  One in 20 Republicans and conservatives also changed their mind, though in overall acceptance rate they still fall far behind everyone else.

Finally, among religiously-affiliated Americans, Catholics were the most likely to change their mind to favor homosexuality.  They are as likely as political Democrats to support gays and lesbians.  Religious non-Christians and the non-religious, however, kick everybody’s asses with 84% and 85% of them saying that gay and lesbian relations are “morally acceptable.”

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

We previously posted Annie Leonard’s breakthrough video, The Story of Stuff, and a follow up, The Story of Bottled Water. Kraig H. sent along another by Leonard on how cap and trade will not stop climate change:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Washington Post recently posted a report called Top Secret America that looks at the proliferation of government organizations (many related to intelligence gathering) that require top-secret clearance and are largely unknown by the public and even many officials. Not surprisingly, the largest concentration is outside Washington, D.C.:

All of these places exist just outside Washington in what amounts to the capital of an alternative geography of the United States, one defined by the concentration of top-secret government organizations and the companies that do work for them. This Fort Meade cluster is the largest of a dozen such clusters across the United States that are the nerve centers of Top Secret America and its 854,000 workers.

…

Debate about the role of intelligence in protecting the country occurs only when something goes wrong and the government investigates, or when an unauthorized disclosure of classified information turns into news.

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don’t realize when they’re nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade’s, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals.

The site has an interactive map where you can see the locations of government (red) and associated private company (blue) locations:

You can also look at networks between agencies and companies working on different programs. Here’s some info on top-secret weapons development:

Types of work the CIA does:

There’s a database where you can look up contracted companies for each program or type of work, including location, who they work with, annual revenues, and more.

According to the editor, they spent two years on the investigation and each location is corroborated by at least two public records. They also talked to government officials about security concerns:

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.

We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies’ own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

I would think there would be ultra-super-mega top-secret locations that their investigation couldn’t uncover because there wouldn’t be public records about them.

Pew Research Center has released data suggesting an age gap in optimism for the future of American young adults.

When asked if their children will be better off or worse off than they are, less than half of U.S. parents say “better off” and a full 25 percent say “worse off.”  This is the most pessimistic we’ve seen parents in 16 years.

But their kids are more optimistic than anyone else, with 85% saying that they expect that their financial situation will improve next year:

Of course these data aren’t entirely compatible, but it’s an interesting comparison nonetheless.  The idealism of youth?  The pessimism that comes with bad backs and mortgage payments?  The possibility that 18-29-year-olds have nowhere to go but up?

Economix, via Karl Bakeman.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Sociologist Geographer David Harvey’s analysis of the current economic crisis is engagingly illustrated in this 11-minute video.  Harvey evaluates individual, institutional, ideological, cultural, and policy explanations for the recession.  He then explains Marx’s insights into the “internal contradictions of capital accumulation”:  capitalists want to pay low wages, but if they’re paying low wages, then no one can buy their stuff.  If both high wages and low wages translate into no profits, where does that leave capitalism?

From Cognitive Media via BoingBoing and Karl Bakeman.

Buy Harvey’s book, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dmitriy T.M. sent us a link to a story at Slate about (mostly European) “national personifications” — that is, human figures used to represent particular countries, their citizens, or ideas of the national character.  Personification is contentious in that it aims to represent a diverse society with a single person, often representing a simple idea.  Accordingly, we sometimes see divergent, or even conflicting, personifications.

Many personifications in Europe and areas once colonized by them connect the nation to noble ideas and values through the use of Latin-derived names and the use of robes, poses, and other elements of classic statues and paintings to adorn a female figure. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Britannia (an emblem that first emerged when Britain was still ruled by Rome) is a goddess-like figure wearing a Roman-style helmet who has, over time, come to represent the nation and the idea of liberty:

The U.S. has a similar figure, Columbia:

More popular characterizations also emerge, often representing the national character not through goddess-like imagery but as an Average Citizen.  For instance, much more familiar in the U.S. than Columbia is Uncle Sam. He differs from many other national personifications in that he doesn’t represent the U.S. citizenry or the idea of the nation in general; he specifically represents the U.S. government and is best known for wanting “you” to join the military, buy war bonds, and such:

And in addition to Brittania, the U.K. is also personified by John Bull:

According to the Slate article, John Bull presents the British people as middle-class, smart in a common-sense way, and also somewhat suspicious of authority — that is, John Bull is a personification that separates the citizenry from government (the source of authority) to some extent, and thus has been used in many political cartoons to question government policies (whereas Uncle Sam has often been used to advocate them, since he represents the government itself).

Going a step further, Portugal’s Zé Povinho, a working-class personification, actively mocks the powerful, including political elites:

Competing personifications may be used by different political factions. For instance, those in favor of and opposed to Irish independence used female emblems of Ireland. Opponents of Irish nationalism used the figure of Hibernia, represented as the younger sister of Brittania and in need of her sister’s protection from the brutish (male) nationalist forces:

Nationalists responded with Kathleen Ni Houlihan, “generally depicted as an old woman who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die to free Ireland from colonial rule, usually resulting in the young men becoming martyrs for this cause”:

The gender element in these competing personifications is interesting: in both cases Ireland is a woman in need of protection, but who see needs protected by (a stronger sister or men) and from (men in both cases) differs.

So here we have just a small handful of national personifications that may coexist fairly harmoniously while serving different purposes (say, Brittania and John Bull) or actively conflict (representations of Ireland). Various groups in a nation (political elites, different social classes, rebels, etc.) are unlikely to identify equally with a single personification; thus, the figures used to represent a country or its citizens can become sites of political or cultural contention, defining who has the most legitimate claim to being the backbone of the nation (the middle-class John Bull, the working-class Zé Povinho) or framing independence or other political movements.

Talking Points Memo posted a campaign ad for Rick Barber, a Tea Party-aligned Republican running for Congress in Alabama. In the ad, Barber first speaks briefly to George Washington about taxes. Then he turns to Abe Lincoln and makes a comparison between funding social services and slavery. The screen then flashes photographs of slaves, prisoners in Communist work camps, and Nazi concentration camps…because paying taxes and those historical events are all basically the same, you know:

Aside from the trivialization of some of the most horrendously cruel acts against humans in modern history, it’s rather ironic that Barber says, “We shed a lot of blood in the past to stop that, didn’t we?” I understand there were many conflicting allegiances in both the North and the South during the Civil War; I have ancestors who owned slaves and sided with the Confederacy and others who fought for the Union. You certainly can’t paint all Southerners with a broad brush. However, it still seems odd to have a guy running for office in a state that seceded from the nation, whose platform emphasizes opposition to social programs that disproportionately help non-Whites (that is, Whites are the majority of recipients, but non-Whites are represented at rates higher than their proportions in the U.S. population as a whole), co-opting the anti-slavery position, which certainly wasn’t a mainstream attitude among Southern conservatives at the time. [Note: I am not implying that opposing social programs is the same as slavery, but only that because the discourse around opposition to them is so often racialized — think the “welfare queen” stereotype — that it makes a jarring companion to associations with ending slavery.]

In another re-writing of history, the ad ignores the following (from the TPM post):

…Lincoln was a lifelong champion of the traditional Whig policies of “internal improvements” — that is levying taxes, usually through tariffs, to fund infrastructure projects throughout the country, and incorporating the principle of central banking. In addition to prosecuting the Civil War, Lincoln’s administration put all of those policies into effect, as his Republican Party’s political coalition was built upon the foundation of the northern Whigs.

Also, Lincoln was president when Congress passed the first income tax, implemented to raise money for the Civil War (U.S. Treasury):

When the Civil War erupted, the Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861, which restored earlier excises taxes and imposed a tax on personal incomes. The income tax was levied at 3 percent on all incomes higher than $800 a year.

Here’s a letter from the Treasury Secretary to President Lincoln recommending someone for the new position of Commissioner of Internal Revenue (Library of Congress):

It’s a great example of the re-writing of, or ignoring huge parts of, history (which certainly both Democrats and Republicans do) to suit current political positions. Lincoln is useful as a symbol, not as a complex figure whose policy positions (including ambivalence about ending slavery) actually matter.

Related posts: MTV PSAs reference Holocaust, PETA’s Holocaust on Your Plate ads, romanticizing picking cotton, different ways of remembering national tragedies, Mammie souvenirs, Black women tend to White women, and the corporate plantation.