Valiada Snow was in the papers. Even when journalists didn’t have a scrap to write about her, pictures of her glowing, smiling, singing and generally being gorgeous would show up alongside unrelated articles in the entertainment section. She had sponsorships, showing up in newspaper ads for RC Cola and hair treatments. She traveled the nation and the world, acting, dancing, singing, and playing trumpet.
Snow’s fall from fame and memory has been blamed on the diversity of her talent. If she had only been a torch singer, we would’ve remembered her. If she had only been a dancer, she would’ve made history. If she had only been a trumpet player, modern audiences would know her as well as Louis Armstrong. But Valaida Snow was never only one thing or another. Even within a specialty, her talent was diverse. In one oft reported performance, Snow concluded a number on the trumpet with a dance number where, for each chorus, she danced in a different pair of shoes. “The dances and shoes to match were: soft-shoe, adagio shoes, tap shoes…, Dutch clogs, Chinese straw sandals, Turkish slippers, and the last pair, Russian boots” (Reitz, 1982). Her singing was comparably varied. In addition to torch songs and blues, she was one of the few black entertainers to sing Broadway tunes as well (Mosley, 2020).
The trumpet was Snow’s primary instrument, but she also played cello, bass, violin, guitar, banjo, mandolin, harp, accordion, clarinet, and saxophone (Charles, 1995). She conducted bands, produced shows, designed costumes, spoke seven languages (Cowans, 1943) and was reportedly a fine painter (“Valaida Snow Engagement at Orpheum,” 1946). She could write down music as it was being played (Reitz, 1982). She was also the master fabricator of her own story.
I’ve gushed over music maps before, and I adore hearing the groovy sounds and comparing how different countries did the same decade in time. Radiooooo gives you both. If you want to rock to 1970 Ethiopian music, 1920 Russian music, or listen to the original soundtrack to the Titanic, Radiooooo has you covered. No, this is not a paid advertisement. This is love.
My goal this year is to celebrate more holidays instead of just having them pass me by. Valentines hasn’t been very prominent in my life since school, but it can be with just a little dedicated watching and some special foods.
Valentines
My Bloody Valentine (1981): nothing says valentines quite like a coal mine.
Be My Valentine Charlie Brown (1975): I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Charlie Brown brings every holiday.
Hospital Massacre aka X-Ray (1982): old Valentine’s sins will ruin your holiday
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975): Australia, mystery, disappearance, possible historically inaccurate corset lacing. Yes, this is Valentines.
Lover’s Lane (2000): a man with a hook terrorizing teenagers at the local make-out point, just like that urban legend.
Group of women members of the Tampa Urban League. USF Libraries Digital Collections. https://digital.lib.usf.edu/?b29.14207 Blanche Armwood is top row, first on left
I’ve been enjoying digging through history to find people and stories that deserve a little more study than they tend to get. This month, my personal goal to seek out these amazing people coincided with a professional goal of promoting and providing context to my library’s digital collections. For this ‘Every Month is History Month’ post, and in honor of Black History Month, I am going to refer you away from the Bean to check out my post on Digital Dialogs: Celebrating Black History Month with a Portrait of Blanche Armwood.
Blanche Armwood [was] a prominent figure on the national stage, known for her dedication to education and social reform…[She] has been compared to Booker T. Washington, both by her contemporaries and by historians. Her seeming to accept the white power structure while at the same time working toward interracial cooperation on local issues would later gain her criticism for accommodating whites (Hooper, 2011). Yet, other contemporaries described her as a ‘rebel’ who demanded equal rights and did not ask for favors (Jones, 1999). It could be said that Armwood used the methods she deemed necessary to obtain her goals in any given situation.
The last time I did a clean-out of our spare closet, where all the sketchbooks and craft supplies are kept, I found my first attempt at creating a tarot deck of my own- filled with caricatures of my friends and family. I didn’t get very far, and I would do things so much different now, but these images still give me a chuckle.
The story of Liliuokalani’s reign as the first queen and last monarch of Hawaii is often told from an Anglo-Protestant, U.S. allied, perspective. This is the same perspective as the foreign Hawaiian residents who conspired to take her crown away. Sympathetic articles in U.S. newspapers during the shift of power in Hawaii and internet history articles of today gloss over the events that culminated in her removal and imprisonment, making it seem, in my opinion, as though Liliuokalani could be partially responsible in any way for the disintegration of the Hawaiian monarchy. Thankfully, Liliuokalani herself gave us a history from her own perspective that fills in gaps we wouldn’t have known were there.
Before we can truly make sense of the sequence of events that deposed Liliuokalani and helped make Hawaii part of the United States of America, we have to start before her reign with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, established in the U.S. in 1810, that was peopled with a group of young protestant descendants of the founding Puritan families. From this board the first Congregationalist mission to the Hawaiian Islands arrived in 1820, and began establishing an expatriate community, as was their modus operandi. There already existed in Hawaii an established European presence at this time which bolstered the protestant mission to preach, convert, and intrinsically change societal and cultural norms (Ward, 2019). This was the world in which Liliuokalani grew up. She attended a ‘Royal School,’ dedicated to educating children from royal families, high ranking chiefs, and those with claims to the throne, which was run by missionaries sent to the islands by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Liliuokalani, 1898).
Long before she would know for sure that she was in line for the throne, the islands had been temporarily taken by the British in a skirmish with the Americans, after which power was ‘restored’ to the Kamehameha Dynasty (Ward, 2019). The earliest constitution in Hawaii was delivered by the King in 1840 and revised in 1852 after the above interruption to royal power. Liliuokalani surmises that both constitution drafts were likely heavily influenced by the missionaries on the island, but both of these were delivered of the King’s own volition (Liliuokalani, 1898). The foreign residents of the islands were also becoming deeply embedded in the King’s cabinet, government, and were acting as advisers in several capacities. So it was remarkable, at least to Liliuokalani, that King Kamehameha V refused to take the oath to maintain the current constitution upon his ascendancy, abrogated the constitution of 1852 and, after an unsuccessful constitutional convention, wrote his own. This example of royal leadership seemed to have a deep impact on Liliuokalani, who wrote “it is presumable, therefore, that he understood the needs of his people better than those of foreign birth and alien affinities” (Liliuokalani, 1898). The new constitution served the Hawaiian people for twenty three years during a period of increasing prosperity where all the island residents seemed to live in harmony.
Liliuokalani in her book, Hawaii’s History by Hawaii’s Queen (1898), draws attention to how traditional Hawaiian culture was different to the culture of the foreign residents, and to the transforming culture of the islands during her life. She describes a system where the King and his people interacted through an exchange not unlike that of an extended family. The King, as the head of the family, had a house available to him in all parts of his domain and food for his table supplied by the people. The people, in return had their needs taken care of by the King through his retinue of overseers. There were no payments to the people for services to the King and no taxes on the people to support the state. All lands and property ruled by the King belonged to the King and were apportioned to those that needed it for the duration of need. This clashed with the ideals and values of the second generation white residents on the island, and has been pinpointed as an underlying reason that the American missionaries and plantation owners sought more governmental control (Ward, 2019). While Liliuokalani was abroad for Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebration, she and her party received word of a revolutionary movement against the King that would thereafter be known as the Bayonet Constitution. As Liliuokalani described it:
“For many years our sovereigns had welcomed the advice of, and given full representations in their government and councils to, American residents who had cast in their lot with our people, and established industries on the Islands. As they became wealthy, and acquired titles to lands through the simplicity of our people and their ignorance of values and of the new land laws, their greed and their love of power proportionately increased; and schemes for aggrandizing themselves still further, or for avoiding the obligations which they had incurred to us, began to occupy their minds.” [and] “without any provocation on the part of the king, having matured their plans in secret, the men of foreign birth rose one day en masse, called a public meeting, and forced the king, without any appeal to the suffrages of the people, to sign a constitution of their own preparation, a document which deprived the sovereign of all power, made him a mere tool in their hands, and practically took away the franchise from the Hawaiian race. This constitution was never in any way ratified, either by the people, or by their representatives.”
(Liliuokalani, 1898)
The Bayonet Constitution removed power from the monarchy and mandated that only people of certain ethnicities, literacy, and land ownership could vote, disenfranchising many Asian residents and Hawaiian citizens, while at the same time ensuring that only wealthy non-citizen residents (just 3% of the population) could stand for election to office (Hugo, 2017; Borch, 2014). When Liliuokalani inherited the throne, she received petitions from all over the islands to draft a new constitution, and, taking the example of King Kamehameha V, she announced that she intended a revision (Liliuokalani, 1898). A coterie of men lead by Sanford Dole, cousin to James Dole who would later start the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, formed a league to restore and maintain the ill-gotten constitutional government and, with the help of the American military, overthrew the monarchy (“Ex-Queen,” 1917; Hugo, 2017). Sanford Dole became president of this new Republic of Hawaii.
Not long after the provisional government was established, Hawaiians loyal to the Queen attempted a counter coup that inspired Dole to establish military law. All ‘royalists’ were rounded up and tried by a tribunal in ‘batches’ to save time. After thirty five days, 191 people had been tried, most found guilty, and some sentenced to hang (Borch, 2014). Liliuokalani acquiesced to pressure that she sign a formal abdication in order to bring an end to the trials, but the trials did not stop, and she was brought before the tribunal under charges of ‘misprision of treason.’ She was found guilty and imprisoned, though her sentence and those of other ‘royalists’ were commuted the next day by President Dole to lesser punishments. No hangings were ever carried out. Liliuokalani was confined to a small room in her former palace for eight months after which she was released to her private residence on house arrest for an additional year (Borch, 2014). Hawaii was annexed to the United States later, under President McKinley, the same year the U.S. gained control of Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.
In her book, Liliuokalani writes of her childhood and of Hawaiian culture and the succession of Kings, though most of the material seems aimed at providing a complete backstory to her reign and her perspective to the foreign greed and love of power that unmade her homeland. After she was allowed to travel freely, Liliuokalani, with Princess Ka’iulani, turned their efforts to obtaining voting rights for the Hawaiian people (Hulstrand, 2009). After Ka’iulani’s death, Liliuokalani withdrew from public life and lived quietly until her death at the age of 79 (“Liliuokalani,” 2009). In addition to her own history of her life, she wrote several songs, one of which remains well known to this day: “Aloha Oe,” translated as “Farewell to Thee” (Hugo, 2017).
REFERENCES
Borch, F. L. (2014). The Trial by Military Commission of Queen Liliuokalani. Army Lawyer, 2014(8), 1–3.
Ward, Christina. (2019) American Advertising Cookbooks: how corporations taught us to love spam, bananas, and jell-o. Process Media: Port Townsend, WA.
The long marbled bar of the Soda Fountain still stands sturdy beneath the elbows of the cool kids even if there aren’t quite as many around now as there used to be. It may still even be possible to order an egg cream, but I’m betting that none of my friends have ever tried one. In 1920s and 30s New York they were all the rage. People still debate over who invented the egg cream, but back in the day the real news was who controlled it.
Aerial view of interior of People’s Drug Store, 7th and E Streets, Washington, D.C., with soda fountain. 1909-1932. National Photo Company Collection. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001701732/
An egg cream was a cheap alternative to the ice cream most folks couldn’t afford during the the Great Depression. It has three main ingredients: milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer or effervescent soda. No eggs and no cream, in case you didn’t know. A man who could control one of those ingredients, like the syrup for instance, could make a fortune off the backs of the soda fountain owners. Harry Solomon Dolowich decided he was going to be that man.
Dolowich had grown up as the son of Russian Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side. His family’s initial poverty and hard times eventually turned around as both Harry and his brother obtained their law degrees and established their careers. Harry Dolowich was known for his silver tongue; he was mentioned in his year book as someone who could talk anyone into anything. He was also evidently good at making and keeping connections. One of the most important was obtained by marrying the niece of a large chocolate syrup manufacturer. Dolowich managed to talk his uncle into getting in on the ground level of an association that would divide up customers to control and improve profits while simultaneously cutting out competition. With connections in the Health Department and other big syrup companies signing on, Dolowich was setting himself up as the most powerful man in chocolate syrup.
At the time more than fifty industries in New York had been taken over by racketeers, including artichokes, fish, laundry, funeral parlors, movie theaters, grapes, and tailors. The idea was to organize control over an industry by creating an alliance of enough business owners to pressure other smaller outfits into falling in line. A business could either be a member or not have a business. Hard time befell the the businessman who tried to find a third option. Members would agree to inflated and fixed costs for their product, creating a no competition environment.
Dolowich followed this model, charging membership fees and truck fees, making sure non-compliant businesses received hefty fines and closure notices from the Department of Health, and sending out ‘dead wagons.’ Dolowich’s dead wagons were the final method of persuasion for errant chocolate syrup makers and distributors. Trucks loaded up with the same syrup at a fraction of the cost would flood the territory of the struggling business and steal all the custom.
Of course, Dolowich’s empire eventually crumbled under a lengthy and dramatic investigation. Dolowich served a short prison sentence and then moved states. So, the next time you grab that chocolate syrup for your milk or to drizzle over your ice cream, you can enjoy it knowing that it is no longer being used to crush small business owners.
Wills, Matthew (2016) The Egg Cream Mob: What’s in an egg cream? No eggs. No cream. And a dose of mafia history. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/egg-cream-mob/
We may be reeling from our Christmas watching and happy to finally be free to watch anything we want, but there are movies and specials that make the New Year at our house. Just like Thanksgiving, the pickings may be slimmer for this holiday, but it is more than enough to put us in the mood.
New Year
Terror Train (1980): I was never part of the fraternity and sorority scene in college so the idea of renting a train for a New Year’s party is both plausible and completely unbelievable to me. Hi David Copperfield!
New Year’s Evil (1980): A punk rock Pinky Tuscadero (wiki) terrorized during her TV special by a killer-stalker. The New Year’s countdown happens three times in this movie! What can be more celebratory?
Bloody New Year (1987): This is all kinds of holiday – kids running from thugs get caught in a time travel loop where a whole New Year’s eve party vanished decades ago? Still dressed up for Christmas because it is British.
Get Crazy (1983): Planning for a new year’s party by way of a massive concert overshadows the threat that a much loved theater will be bought out by sleep, punk developers. Hilarious hi-jinks included.
The Fifth Cord (1971): One of the finest examples of the giallo genre with an excellent cast, a great director, and a super cool soundtrack by the great Ennio Morricone. The entire opening sequence and a pivotal part of the plot both take place at a New Year’s Eve Party.
Martha’s New Year’s Celebration (2005): from the Martha’s Holidays collection again. We usually just curl up on the sofa and watch movies for New Year, but we can dream of throwing a fancy party.
While making my yearly Rock ‘n Rye infusion, I got the idea that a similar process would work to make J&B more enjoyable in my house (we find it very difficult). I cut out the horehound, but kept most everything else the same as I would for Rock ‘n Rye. The effect is much more cinnamon forward, and definitely improves the J&B flavor. I gave rough measurements, but you can put in as many or as few infusing agents as you like.
Ingredients:
J&B (one 750 ml bottle)
1 string Rock candy or about a 1/4 cup loose rock candy
1/2 to 1 full orange peel (dried)
2-3 dried apricots, sliced
3-4 dried cherries
3-4 dried mandarin slices
1 whole clove
1 cinnamon stick
Instructions:
In an empty wide mouth glass container (could be anything, jar, pitcher, etc with a lid) add J&B, dried fruit, dried peel, and cinnamon stick
Allow mixture to infuse in a cool dry place for 3 or 4 days
Add rock candy and clove
Allow mixture to infuse one or two more days based on taste
You can find amazing and terrible things in old newspapers. You can find old newspapers on Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. at the Library of Congress. Join me there. Whole days will pass before you know it.
Celebrating holidays in my house means media saturation. That is, leading up to Halloween we watch all the Halloween movies, and leading up to Christmas, we watch all the Christmas movies, specials, and television shows. But Halloween and Christmas aren’t the only holidays around which you can structure your movie viewing.
Garfield’s Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving
Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982): immensely enjoyable take on the legend of the Chicken Ranch. If Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds aren’t enough to sell it to you, then the in depth study in eighties lingerie should do it.
Madman (1982): horror film taking place in a strange alternate reality where kids are sent off to a woodland camp for Thanksgiving break.
Turkey Hollow (2015): broken family forcing themselves on a grudgingly hospitable distant relative? check. Sibling discord healed by adventure and danger? check. Monsters in the woods? check. Turkeys? check check check check check.
Charlie Brown Mayflower Voyagers (1988): part of the ‘This is America, Charlie Brown” series, but tacked on to the ‘Peanuts Holiday Collection’ without any other episodes.
Martha Stewart’s Classic Thanksgiving (2005): from the Martha’s Holidays collection, because it is necessary to have a couple of hours worth of instruction on making that turkey.
