Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 5

 

As I read or watch things, I often come across mentions of things that stimulate my interest, and I go down a short rabbit hole of research on my phone.  Follow me if you want.

1939 World's Fair

The book Twilight At The World of Tomorrow introduced me in detail to the 1939 New York World's Fair, and it's a very good account of the Fair's history, attractions, and impact.  The exhibits ran the whole gamut:  educational, entertaining, exciting, thrilling, and weird.  

The Fair was divided into several zones, and crowds were usually drawn to the Amusement Zone, due less to the amusements representing the theme of "The World of Tomorrow" and more to their lurid nature, with several exhibits featuring scantily clad or topless models.

Besides the rides, there was "Little Miracle Town" a community of dozens of Little People living their lives on view.  Other ethnic groups were on display wearing supposedly authentic garb and performing supposedly authentic dances and rituals.  Renowned animal collector Frank Buck displayed and performed with animals in his "Jungleland."  Artist Salvador Dali included nearly nude models in his "Dreams of Venus" pavilion.  "Billy Rose's Aquacade" featured aquatic shows starring female swimmers and Johnny Weissmuller (Tarzan).  When attendance at a replica of Buddhist temple in Manchuria started to lag, promoters added nude dancers.  The "Frozen Alive" stunt showcased a topless woman being encased in an ice block.  "The Sun Worshippers" pavilion featured women in skimpy bikini bottoms and see through shear tops (or topless) engaging in outdoor recreational activities. In other venues, there were apparently semi-nude "voodoo" dancers and topless women wrestling with "Oscar the Amorous Octopus" (a puppet maybe?  can't find much about that.

Gee, with all that going on, just in the Amusement Zone, I can't understand why the Fair lost millions of dollars.

1939 World's Fair, Part 2

The book Twilight At The World of Tomorrow introduced me in detail to the 1939 New York World's Fair, and it's a very good account of the Fair's history, attractions, and impact.  The exhibits ran the whole gamut:  educational, entertaining, exciting, thrilling, and weird.  

Of course, with the theme "The World of Tomorrow," one would expect technology to be front and center.  IBM displayed the most modern electric typewriters and an "electric calculator" that used punch cards.  AT&T displayed a voder, a new voice synthesizer.  An "Electrified Farm" and a "Town of Tomorrow" predicted how everyday life would be transformed by mechanization in the next fifty years or so.  The General Motors exhibit, called "Futurama," was a consistently big draw as visitors were strapped in for a simulated flight over a huge diorama of the future America.  Ford featured racecar drivers on a figure-8 roof-top track 24/7.  Westinghouse featured "Electro the Moto Man," a 7-foot tall robot that talked and answered questions, using current slang, differentiated colors, and smoked cigarettes.  New products introduced at the Fair included nylon, the Viewmaster, Scentovision, a streamlined pencil sharpener, Nimatron (the first fully constructed computer game), and the earliest television sets.  FDR became the first president ever to appear on television when his opening day speech was broadcast, although there were only a very small number of sets capable of receiving the transmission.

Afong Moy

We recently saw a production of a play called The Chinese Lady, based on the real-life story of the first known Chinese woman in America.  It was interesting.  However, as is too common these days, the playwright was much more interested in politically correct social commentary than in history or great storytelling.

Afong Moy was born around 1820 in Guanzhou China, Canton province, and she arrived in New York City in 1834.  Very few Chinese men were in the United States at the time, and she became the first known Chinese woman.  Her arrival was all a marketing ploy by brothers Nathaniel and Frederick Carne, businessmen specializing in Asian trade.  They likely purchased the teenager from her struggling parents and decided to make her the focal point of public relations campaign to advertise the imported goods that the Carnes wanted to sell to the American public.  They generated a fake backstory claiming that she was a high-born noble woman and created a set that supposedly reflected the strangely foreign and beautiful furnishings that she would have been accustomed too.  In reality, the fancy silks, vases, and furniture were just as foreign to Afong Moy as they were to the Average American.  Most of the goods were examples of the wonderous goods that the Carnes imported and sold.  Customers paid admission to enter the room and watch Afong Moy as she sat.  From time to time during a performance, she would eat using chopsticks, sing traditional songs, explain Chinese customs, or take small walks around her chair.  Walking was of particular interest because her feet had been bound from the time she was a small child.  It was traditional in parts of China until the 20th century for girls to have their feet repeatedly broken and bound in order to shape them and to make them as small as possible.

Thousands of people saw her performance, and she completed a successful tour of eastern cities including a meeting with President Andrew Jackson, but after a few years, the performances stopped, and she found herself in a New Jersey poorhouse for a few years.  In the late 1840s, P.T. Barnum once again put her on display in New York.  Her last public performance was April 1850, and she disappears from the public record after that.

How Did The Virgin Islands Get Their Name?

Another piece of trivia picked up on the British trivia comedy panel show "Q.I.":  The Virgin Islands were named Santa Úrsula y las Once Mil Vírgenes by Christopher Columbus in 1493 after the legend of Saint Ursula and the 11,000 virgins.  The name was later shortened to the Virgin Islands.

For those not familiar with the story of St. Ursula, the Roman Catholic Church officially labeled the story as "fabulous ( as in a fable)" in 1969, but there is still an Ursuline order of nuns and the Basilica of St. Ursuline in Cologne, Germany, and the story still appears in the Roman Martyrology.  

Ursula's legendary status comes from a medieval story in which she was a princess who, at the request of her father King Dionotus of Dumnonia in south-west Britain, set sail along with 11,000 virginal handmaidens to join her future husband, the pagan governor Conan Meriadoc of Armorica. After a miraculous storm brought them over the sea in a single day to a Gaulish (French) port, Ursula declared that before her marriage she would undertake a pan-European pilgrimage. She headed for Rome with her followers and persuaded the Pope, Cyriacus (unknown in the pontifical records, though from late 384 AD there was a Pope Siricius), and Sulpicius, bishop of Ravenna, to join them. After setting out for Cologne, which was being besieged by Huns, all the virgins were beheaded in a massacre. The Huns' leader fatally shot Ursula with an arrow in about 383 AD.  No supporting evidence of the event has ever been found.  The Basilica in Cologne claims to have the remains of Ursula and the Virgins as relics, but experts have found them to be a mix of bones, human and animal, young and old, perhaps from an ancient burial ground.

1st Galician Waffen SS

Otto Wachter (1901-1949) was a committed Austrian Nazi who rose to top positions within the SS, and he became one of the most important administrators of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, working closely with the German governor of Poland, Hans Frank, and reporting to the SS leader Heinrich Himmler.  The Ratline by Philippe Sands details his career and escape from Allied capture at the end of WWII.

While he was acting as Governor of Galicia, a region encompassing parts of modern day Poland and Ukraine, Wachter sought and gained permission form Himmler to take advantage of the deep anti-Soviet and anti-Semitic feeling of many Ukrainians to form Ukrainian regiments as part of the German SS.  In parts of eastern Europe, the Germans were seen as liberators from the Soviet threat, and many eastern Europeans joined the German cause.  Ukrainian men joined the 1st Galician and many other Ukrainian units and fought alongside German units against the Soviets; some served as guards at concentration camps and death camps.  

The 1st Galician was officially began recruiting in May 1943. Within three months 80,000 men had volunteered.  That number was whittled down to about 12,000 after selection and training.  The Galicians supported German and other Ukrainian forces in multiple battles and campaigns against Soviet forces and partisan guerillas.  Some elements of the division have been implicated as participants in the massacres of thousands of Polish civilians.

Recruitment poster

Andrey Vlasov

Andrey Vlasov (1901 - 1946) was a Soviet general mentioned in the Philippe Sands' book, The Ratline, Vlasov fought against the Germans in 1940 and 1941, distinguishing himself during the battle of Moscow, before being captured  during the siege of Leningrad.  While imprisoned, he became friends with an ethnic Baltic-German officer who sought to inspire an anti-Stalin movement within the USSR.  Vlasov quickly saw merits in the plan, and he defected to the Germans.  Upon his defection, he was transferred to Berlin and employed, with other Soviet officers, by the Wehrmacht (German Army) Propaganda Department.  Their mission was to create an anti-Stalin Russian army, and the Russian Liberation Army was born --- at least on paper.  While a few hundred pro-German Russians joined the German forces, Vlasov had no real command.  His job over the next year was to create propagandistic memos  and make occasional recruitment trips into occupied territory, with mixed results.    Finally, in 1944, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler gave Vlasov permission to form an actual Russian Liberation Army.  The ROA (Russian initials) only saw one notable battle against Soviet forces on February 11, 1945 on the Oder River.  After three days, the ROA was forced to retreat.  Following the German surrender to the Allies in May, Vlasov led his division west in an attempt to surrender to the Americans or British.  Instead, they were captured by the Soviets.  Vlasov and most of the other senior officers were tried for treason and executed.

Einstein Hated Socks

An often repeated story about Albert Einstein piqued my interest the other day.  Supposedly, Einstein's parents were worried about young Albert's cognitive development when he was a boy.  According to the story, he hardly spoke in complete sentences until age 5 (or 9 or 10 or 12 depending on who's telling the story) when he took a sip of his soup at dinner and said, "This soup is too cold (or hot, again depending)"  When his mother said, "But you've never complained before?", young Albert said, "Up until now, things have been pretty good."  Shockingly,  there is no evidence that this is anything but fiction.  (And, by the way, Einstein never failed a math class either.)

In researching the accuracy of the soup story, though, I stumbled upon another quirk that is well documented.  Albert Einstein refused to wear socks, even when meeting presidents and royalty. His footwear of choice was often sandals.

Why did he eschew shoes with socks? Well, one reason is that he had really bad feet, even in childhood.  As a child, his big toes often poked through  his socks, and he found it quite irritating, prompting him to give up socks.  Later, he was rejected for Swiss military service at age 22 because he had varicose veins and flat and sweaty feet.  As he aged and became more famous, his aversion to socks became just another element of his famously disheveled, rumpled, and absent-minded professor persona - part of what made Einstein Einstein.

Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild

I'd heard about Walter Rothschild, the 2nd Baron Rothschild, (1868-1937) in the past, but I was reminded of him when recently watching an episode of the British TV show "Horrible Histories."  Rothschild was one of the most famous zoologists and naturalists in British history.  He was of that Rothschild family, the wealthy Jewish banking family, and his father had been the first Jewish Peer (Lord) in British history.  Walter was an active politician and Zionist, instrumental in the drafting of the Balfour Declaration, outlining British policy in Palestine in regards to a Jewish state.  However, he was as well known, if not more, for his lifelong devotion to zoology and for his eccentricity.

His study and collecting began when he was a child.  By the time of his death, he had acquired collections which became the property of the British Museum (Later, it became the core of the British Natural History Museum.).  At its largest, Rothschild's collection included 300,000 bird skins, 200,000 birds' eggs, 2,250,000 butterflies and 30,000 beetles as well as thousands of specimens of mammals, reptiles and fishes. They formed the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a private individual.

However, his eccentricity was most obvious at his large estate, where he maintained a huge menagerie of living animals from around the world.  He often had dozens of live snakes coiling staircase banisters and railings. He kept a matched set of zebras and used them to pull his carriage. He sometimes hosted dinner parties that included chimps and monkeys as guests, and he had a bear trained to playfully swat ladies bottoms. And much, much more.