Jonathan Rees

I’ve written previously here about the good and bad sides of suddenly being able to access the world’s biggest libraries through Google Books when you have a research project that you’d like to finish someday. Another Google experiment that debuted while I was working on Refrigeration Nation was Google Ngrams.

Ngrams, if you don’t know about them, chart the frequency of words or phrases as they appeared in volumes scanned by the Google Books project against the years that those books were published. (See Eric Schultz's post from last month.) Yes, it is incredibly easy to lose several hours playing with this research tool. Luckily for me, I already knew what I wanted to chart as soon as I heard of it:

CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

That is the chart for “ice box” vs. “refrigerator.” (For what it’s worth, icebox [one word] looks almost identical.) What I really appreciate about that chart is that it basically illustrates something that my research already told me: before the electric household refrigerator came along, “ice boxes” were called “refrigerators.” Before explaining that statement a little better, let me define terms. While often used interchangeably with the word “refrigerator” by people over sixty, an ice box in the historical sense refers to a box with ice in it designed to keep perishable food fresh. The first ice boxes were made by carpenters in the 1840s, designed to take advantage of something new in American life: the regular household delivery of large blocks of ice that could be obtained daily in large cities and even small ones. Now, instead of going to market every day for your vegetables or fresh meats, consumers could buy for more than one day of meals at once, and keep the extra food in their ice box.

While incredibly convenient, ice boxes had their drawbacks. For example, you couldn’t open the door to your ice box all that often, or else the ice in it would melt too fast. Ice boxes were also hell to clean, particularly as ice cut from lakes and ponds in the early days of the ice industry often had natural sediment in it. If the smell of any food permeated the wood inside and got into the insulation, the whole appliance would become worthless. Also, if you kept the wrong products together in an ice box (butter and fish, for example) one would often end up smelling like the other.

Nevertheless, Americans gradually warmed to the ice box.* You can see that in the gradual increase in frequency of the use of the term refrigerator in that Ngram, especially after 1880 as the insulation became better and refrigerator companies began to mass-produce them for the first time. How do I know that they don’t mean “refrigerator” like the one in your kitchen now? They hadn’t been invented yet.

But while the first even remotely successful electric household refrigerator didn't debut until 1915, inventors were working on them at least a decade earlier because of the failings of the ice box as described above. This led to a need to differentiate the electric household refrigerators that they aspired to create from the useful but annoying boxes that so many people had in their kitchens at that time.  Hence, the coining of the word “ice box.”

The prime period for the growth of electric household refrigerators in the United States was the 1920s. That was when refrigerator producers gradually settled on a new refrigerant, Freon, and created a mechanism that was both reliable and quiet enough for household use. Refrigerators were one of the few goods for which sales actually increased during the Great Depression, as their value over the ice box in terms of convenience and effectiveness was just that clear. Based on my research, the ice box essentially disappeared during the 1950s as electric household refrigerators became so cheap and the country so prosperous that basically anybody could afford them. When that happened, the use of the  word “ice box” declined with the appliance that it represented.

Is a Google Ngram scientific?  Of course, not. That’s why I didn’t put it in my book. Is a Google Ngram good enough for a blog post? Of course it is, which is why I just wrote this. Trust me, the actual research squares with this interpretation. If you don’t believe me, then buy my book and see for yourself.

* Yes, bad puns are inevitable when discussing refrigeration of any kind. Why do you ask?

Edward H. Miller

At 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas—just as Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots into the presidential limousine—Louis Steven Witt stood on the sidewalk of Elm Street as the presidential motorcade passed. Witt was doing something that many of us would consider peculiar. He carried a large black umbrella opened widely as the sun shined brightly in the Texas sky. In Abraham

Umbrella Man at far left of photo.

Zapruder’s famous twenty-six second film that captured the assassination, Witt’s umbrella can be seen just as the limousine, having briefly been obstructed by a freeway sign, reappears and President Kennedy suddenly grasps for his throat. In the years following the tragedy, assassination theorists produced several outlandish accounts of what Witt—the Umbrella Man, as they named him—was actually doing. Some posited that Witt was a signalman for the supposedly numerous gunmen in Dealey Plaza that day. Another equally preposterous explanation was that the umbrella itself fired a dart, rendering the president frozen for the kill shot. Witt’s umbrella actually exemplified a common form of protest by the far Right, which was strong in Dallas in the 1950s and 1960s. The umbrella was meant to disparage any policy that involved compromise by invoking the memory of England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who always carried an umbrella) and the failed policy of appeasement that he championed against Hitler at the Munich Conference in 1938.[1]

Umbrella protests first began in England after Chamberlain arrived home from the conference carrying his trademark accessory. Wherever Chamberlain traveled, the opposition party in Britain protested his appeasement at Munich by displaying umbrellas. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Americans on the

Neville Chamberlain and his umbrella.

far Right employed umbrellas to criticize leaders supposedly appeasing the enemies of the United States. Some politicians even refused to use them for that reason. Vice President Richard Nixon banned his own aides from carrying umbrellas when picking him up at the airport for fear of being photographed and charged as an appeaser.[2] Returning from the Geneva Conference in 1955, President Eisenhower had to give a speech in the pouring rain because Nixon had prohibited presidential assistants from carrying umbrellas.[3] Campaigning against Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower’s opponent in 1952 and 1956, Nixon declared, “If the umbrella is the symbol of appeasement, then Adlai Stevenson must go down in history as the Umbrella Man of all time.”[4] When the Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 and President Kennedy did not send American troops to tear it down, German students, as well as many Americans, sent him umbrellas.[5] Upon returning home after having established new cultural and commercial ties with China in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon was met with umbrella-wielding students, who shared William F. Buckley’s assertion that Nixon had “sold out” by meeting with the leaders of the Communist dictatorship.

While it is clear that many have been tagged as umbrella men over the years, Dallas’s Louis Steven Witt said that his real target of his protest was Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., the ambassador to England at the time of the Munich agreement and whose support of Chamberlain was well known. Appearing before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, Witt explained that being a “conservative-type fellow” and, having heard from a work colleague that the umbrella was a “sore spot” for President Kennedy (because his father had been criticized intensely), he had wanted “to heckle the President’s motorcade” and thought the umbrella would do the job.[6]

Louis Steven Witt testifying in 1978.

Witt’s explanation is plausible, but what really matters is how others understood his actions that morning. If we consider the historical context—Dallas’s status as a redoubt of the far Right and the flurry of newspaper articles in Ted Dealey’s Dallas Morning News comparing Kennedy to Chamberlain and the 1963 Test Ban Treaty to the Munich agreement—it is likely that Witt’s umbrella was at least perceived by the crowd around him as a protest of President Kennedy’s nuclear disarmament policy. “Kennedy acts like Neville Chamberlain,” observed one letter to the editor in March 1963.[7] Another reader wrote in August 1963 that the “dissolution of the British Empire started at Munich with Neville Chamberlain, that of the United States in January, 1961, with the Kennedy regime.”[8] Another Dallasite, W.E. Parks, wrote in 1963: “the nuclear-test-ban treaty . . . is the Chamberlain-Hitler ‘peace in our time’ pact with a new cast and new lines.”[9] In an editorial on September 9, 1963, the Dallas Morning News drew what it called “parallels between the Munich agreement and the current U.S.-British-Soviet test-ban treaty.” Suggesting that President Kennedy was another Neville Chamberlain, the News observed, there “is no more encouragement today for believing that the Soviets have changed their aggressive intentions than there was to believe the Nazis had changed their goals in 1938.”[10]

The incident illustrates the potency and ubiquity of far Right ideas in Dallas in 1963. Elements of this worldview extended into different aspects of everyday behavior, sometimes even when ordinary moments turned into extraordinary events.

Edward H. Miller received his Ph.D. in History from Boston College. His manuscript, Into Nut Country: Dallas Republicans, the Southern Strategy, and the American Right, 1952-1964, is currently under review by the University of Chicago Press. Miller currently is an adjunct professor at Northeastern University. 

NOTES
[1] Attesting to the umbrella’s popularity as a sign on the Right in the 1960s, Todd Gitlin writes, “In one corner, right-wingers from Young Americans for Freedom hoisted black umbrellas, intimating that we were Munich-minded equivalents of Neville Chamberlain, and hissed sporadically throughout the evening.” The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam Books, 1987), 99.

[2] Richard Reeves, President Nixon: Alone in the White House (Simon & Schuster, 2001), 468;  Geoffrey M. Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford University Press, 2012), 100; and Neil A. Hamilton, The 1970s (Facts On File, 2006), 87.

[3] Ira Chernus, Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace (Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 90.

[4] Kevin Mattson, Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the “Rocking, Socking” Election of 1952 (Bloomsbury, 2012), 168.

[5] Thomas G. Paterson, Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963 (Oxford University Press, 1989), 42.

[6] Dallas Morning News, September 24, 1978; September 26, 1978.

[7] Ibid., March 24, 1963.

[8] Ibid., August 12, 1963.

[9] Ibid., August 5, 1963.

[10] Ibid., September 13, 1963.

Michael S. Green

Today thousands of Las Vegans and tourists will line up to go to a museum, thanks to Senator Estes

Frank Costello testifying before the Kefauver Committee, 1951.

Kefauver of Tennessee; a mayor who used to represent mobsters; and federal officials who proved more Las Vegan than Las Vegans.

The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, known as the Mob Museum, opened in Las Vegas on February 14, 2012, on a carefully chosen date: the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In 1929, in Chicago, Al Capone’s hoodlums executed several members of the gangs led by Scarface’s rival, Bugs Moran. The museum has the wall, complete with bullet holes and bloodstains.

Las Vegas seems like a logical place for this museum, since casino operators associated with the mob built and ran many of the resorts that dotted the Strip from the 1940s into the 1980s. Many continue to think it all began with Bugsy Siegel—or perhaps Warren Beatty—opening the Flamingo in 1946. Although the idea was somebody else’s, Siegel took over the construction and proved to be a lousy businessman, and he died before his dream had become a profit center for his mob-associated investors.

Las Vegas also turned out to be the epicenter for targeting crime families. The passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (the felicitously named RICO, as in Edward G. Robinson’s character in the 1931 film Little Caesar) and the expansion of Justice Department activities helped make possible the prosecution of major organized crime figures, including the leaders of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and Kansas City mobs. The federal government also targeted their connections at the Teamsters Union and its Central States Pension Fund, including Allen Dorfman, who oversaw the fund that made loans to Las Vegas casino operators and was a Jimmy Hoffa ally and the stepson of a Capone lieutenant.

State officials also stepped up efforts to clean up Nevada’s image and major industry. More and deeper investigations and the expansion of the Black Book or List of Excluded Persons, which bars those suspected of mob ties from even entering casinos, helped drive out the operators of several Strip and downtown casinos.

By the late 1990s, Las Vegas and its gaming industry had gone corporate. Some residents saw this as a shame, recalling the city as safer during the mob’s heyday (since mobsters actually ran street rackets, this was a myth) and missing the smaller casinos with cheaper food. Others welcomed the change and hoped to sweep the past under the rug.

Then, the federal government decided to shutter the city’s first federal building, erected in 1933. Newer structures had made it obsolete, and almost every federal office housed there had relocated. Amid plans to raze it, in a reversal of the usual claim that Las Vegas blows up its history, Mayor Oscar Goodman sought to save it. As a young lawyer, he had argued his first case there, and went on to become one of the nation’s most prominent attorneys for those accused of being part of organized crime.

Seeking something connected to Las Vegas, not to mention marketable, Goodman proposed a museum about the mob. Making the case for him, on November 15, 1950, Kefauver had held one of his hearings about organized crime in the building’s second-floor courtroom. Kefauver listened to mobsters complain about how difficult their lives were and marveled that one of the casino owners served on the state Tax Commission, which regulated his industry, while the lieutenant governor co-owned several casinos. He concluded, “As a case history of legalized gambling, Nevada speaks eloquently in the negative.”

Part of the festivities at the museum include showing a documentary about Kefauver by his daughter, Diane Kefauver, and son-in-law, Jon Rubin: Crimebuster:  Senator Estes Kefauver, Politics, Television, and Organized Crime. Kefauver had several motivations for going after the mob. He was indeed a moral reformer. He hated political machines, having won his Senate seat by overcoming the corrupt Crump machine in Memphis in 1948. And as Russell Baker of the New York Times described him, “He was an egghead masquerading as a yokel and what he wanted was the Presidency. For six years, with little more than a coonskin cap and the stamina of a drayhorse, he kept the most skillful politicians of the Democratic party in a nightmare.”

The idea for Kefauver to conduct the hearings came from Phil Graham, the Washington Post publisher and political backroom operator, who shared Kefauver’s distaste for gambling and organized crime. The hearings, held in fourteen cities and nationally televised in 1950 and 1951, helped lead to reforms and anti-gambling efforts in several areas.

For Las Vegas, Kefauver actually proved to be a boon. With casinos closing elsewhere, Nevada became a diaspora for casino executives and employees, mob or not. He also made it possible for Las Vegas to open a museum that remembers the violence and dangers—and occasional successes—of organized crime, and how politicians and law enforcement fought it and sometimes became intertwined with it. As befits modern Las Vegas, the museum is large, filled with bells and whistles, and costs some money to get into. On Kefauver Day, November 15, befitting old Las Vegas, it’s a comp: free admission.

Michael S. Green is a professor of history at the College of Southern Nevada and the author of several books on Nevada as well as on the Civil War era. He was a researcher for the museum, and serves on its advisory board and content committee.

Heather Cox Richardson

In honor of the birthday of Margaret Mitchell (November 8, 1900), I’d like to offer the very best thing to come out of Gone With the Wind: Carol Burnett’s classic spoof, entitled “Went With the Wind.” I discovered yesterday that none of my students had heard of this, and Burnett as Scarlett O’Hara in her new dress (at the beginning of Part 2) is one of the all-time greatest moments in comedic history:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Heather Cox Richardson

United States Department of Defense graphic in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted for thirteen tense days in October 1962. During those days, the USSR faced off against the U.S. over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy vowed not to permit missiles so close to America; Premier Krushchev vowed to put them in Cuba
anyway. The two week standoff was the closest the Cold War ever came to erupting into a hot war.

And with nuclear weapons widespread, it would have been a hot war, indeed.

The J.F.K. Library has put together a website that enables a viewer to experience each day of that crisis.

Brian D. Bunk

Chicago, 1905. SDN-004085, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

One sure way to irritate historians of soccer in the United States (and yes, there are a few) is to call the sport foreign. In various forms the game has been played by Native Americans and Puritans; factory workers and college students; and professionals and preschoolers throughout American history. Why then does this idea persist? The reasons are complex, but one important factor is that the mainstream sporting press, especially in the second half of the 20th century, has continually depicted soccer as a foreign game.

Anyone who watches ESPN, the nation’s dominant sports network, probably already realized what the website Deadspin.com [http://deadspin.com/what-i-learned-from-a-year-of-watching-sportscenter-5979510] quantified for 2012: the majority of airtime on the channel’s signature news program Sportscenter focused on just three leagues, the National Football League, National Basketball Association,  and Major League Baseball. Soccer meanwhile earned just 1.3% of the total and most of that miniscule amount was devoted to international soccer. Of course ESPN has only been on the air since 1979 and for many years was not nearly as influential as it is today.

Instead fans relied on printed media for sports news, and one of the leading periodicals over the last six decades has been Sports Illustrated. I spent some time examining how many times and in what context the editors put soccer on the cover. Since the first appearance of the weekly in August 1954 through to August 2013 soccer has made the cover just sixteen times. It’s not just the absence of the sport that’s significant but also the context in which it has been portrayed. Fifteen of the sixteen soccer covers have featured foreign players, foreign locations, or U.S. national team players, both men and women. The individuals include Pelé (Brazil), Giorgio Chinaglia and Mario Balotelli (Italy), Daniel Passarella and Diego Maradona (Argentina), and David Beckham (England).  Another showed Brazilian players celebrating their World Cup triumph in 1994 and in 2010 a cover story promised to explain “what soccer means to the world.” Each of the six times U.S. national team players made it to the front they were featured in their roles as representatives of the country in international competitions. In a few cases individuals playing in major American professional leagues have graced the cover: Pelé and Chinaglia from the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL) in the 1970s and David Beckham for the L.A. Galaxy of Major League Soccer in 2007. Notice that although the leagues were based in the U.S., the players featured were born overseas. Only once in all the decades of SI has an American-born player, playing in an American league appeared on the cover. Curiously it was also the first soccer cover in the magazine’s history: goalkeeper Bob Rigby of the Philadelphia Atoms (NASL) on September 3, 1973. The history of soccer in the United States is much longer and richer than most people realize, and we shouldn’t allow coverage of the sport in the United States to mask its true social and cultural significance either today or in the past.

Brian D. Bunk is a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and creator/host of the Soccer History USA Podcast.