World War I

While I was reading this issue of Blast Magazine, I was thinking mostly about why the magazine was given this title, and what was meant by all of the instances of the word "BLAST" that appear, especially in the Manifesto near the beginning of the magazine. For example, on pages 18-19, in the 6th section of the Manifesto, it reads "BLAST YEARS 19837 TO 1900//CURSE ABYSMAL INEXCUSABLE MIDDLE-CLASS", which is an explicit and direct attack upon the Victorian Period. In this context, the authors are using violent rhetoric, with the language of war and weaponry, to express their discontent with the past.

This magazine is avant-garde for several reasons. For one, the typographical layout is striking and aggressive, as everything is written in bold, all capital letters. It also makes direct references to the reader, for example: "Curse those who will hang over this manifesto with silly canines exposed". It is meant to shame those who are not in line with what this manifesto is calling for (as any manifesto would do). And the fact that a Manifesto is one of the first things in the magazine is like drawing a line in the sand. This aggressive stance taken by Wyndham Lewis and the other contributors is similar to the prevailing international opinion in 1914: that a huge world war (a "BLAST") would effectively erase the past and allow humanity to start building a brighter future. Unequivocally taking a position against any reader who does not adhere to the Vorticist ideals, BLAST is an attempt to catalog the virtues that ought to be a part of that new world, such as individualism, a lack of class distinctions, and a frank way of dealing with the world through unhindered artistic expression.

When reading Blast, I found myself puzzled by the way that it breaks up plays and short stories with a few pages of art. I was initially very jarred when, with no warning, I would go from one page of text to a group of illustrations. These illustrations would last for a few pages before transitioning bact to text just as suddenly. This can be seen in the Enemy of the Stars, The Saddest Story, and Inner Necessity.

Initially, I found myself at a complete loss trying to discern why the magazine would be arranged in this way. This arrangement is, at best, jarring to the reader, and at worst, wholly off putting. It was not until I considered the concept of the vortex,that I could understand this choice. Here, the various pieces are flowing freely and swirling together, just as they would in a vortex. It is because of this that I find Blast to be more than just a collection of articles, as most magazines are, but is a piece of art in and of itself, a physical representation of the vorticism it champions.

Though I’ve read this issue of BLAST once before, I’m by no means bored with it. If anything, I enjoyed it more this time, and look forward to hopefully reading it again in the future. There are so many layers of content and meaning in this magazine, some of which completely baffles me. The bafflement, though, is what makes reading BLAST so enjoyable. As much as I try to piece things together, I get the idea that certain parts of the magazine are not supposed to make sense or have depth of meaning. Rather, the reader simply can enjoy some delightfully creative pieces of diction, for instance, “BLESS the HAIRDRESSER…He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee…BLESS the HESSIAN (or SILESIAN) EXPERT correcting the gross anachronisms of our physique,” (25). Though I don’t know for sure, I’d hazard a guess that no other writer in the history of the English language has described the hairdresser’s profession in such an unconventionally creative way.

            Creative use of language stands out as one key part of BLAST, though maybe not the most important. Some of the articles, such as Wyndham Lewis’ “Exploitation of Vulgarity,” reveal so much about the mindset of the Vorticists. “Exploitation of Vulgarity” celebrates ugliness and stupidity as perfect conditions in which to create true art. The last line of this piece even warns against placing value in what is traditionally “good,” saying, “The ice is thin, and there is as well the perpetual peril of virtuosity,”  (145). The Vorticists do not want the neat, ordered virtues of the Victorian Era. BLAST makes perfectly clear that true value and art lies in the imperfect, messy parts of humanity and the world.

When looking at the March 1918 issue of The Crisis, this page, containing a group of pictures of African American soldiers at Camp Meade caught my eye. Most immediately stiking about these photos is the overwhelmingly positive image of military service it presents. Among these pictures exist a couple of themes which make military service seem very attractive to The Crisis' readership.

The first of this is the overwhelming sense of unity and comaradery which these images evoke. Both the first and last images show group of African American soliers standing together at attention, presenting an image of militaristic strength. The middle left picture also show a group of African American soldiers, but the mood is far more relaxed. The soldiers stand closer together, and the men in the front is even seated. In this photo, the soldiers are shown to be close comrades. Taken together, these photos present the military as a place where an African American could both excel and find fellowship.

I hadn't really thought about this for a long time, but when I was younger I used to be fascinated by baseball history, and specifically any history related to the Negro Leagues.  My memory was jogged by this photo I found in the September 1916 issue of The Crisis.​ Although the photo doesn't seem to give too strongly an editorial of the war, the photo is on a page with the caption, "Shadows of Light."  The 25th Infantry, stationed in Hawaii during WWI were never commissioned for combat, however, the baseball team represents an important wartime medium through which African American service men were heroized.  As a consequence, the civillian and wildly popular Negro Leagues were established immediately following the war in 1920. Baseball was an impetus for racial integration, as evidenced by the inclusion of such players as Jackie Robinson after WWII--before Jim Crow laws were outlawed by the US Supreme Court.

I was interested to find information about the 25th Infantry ball-players in William McNeil's book, Black Baseball Out of Season: Pay For Play Outside of the Negro Leagues, which you can view here. Particularly interesting to me (since I'm a Tulsa, Oklahoma native) were the details I read about Oklahoma native Cap Rogan, who was a player on the 25th who later became a player for the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro League baseball team. Coming back to the war, McNeil writes that several black service men bought their way out of the Army in order to join the Negro Leagues for as little as $150 (did other members of the military have this opportunity? I'm guessing not--it would make much more sense for black service men to leave the military since they were rarely utilized).  The military ball-players exhibited extreme talent, and were followed by many black publications back home.

I really enjoyed looking into the information I found for this post.  If you're interested in the Negro Leagues, you can check out the website for the museum in Kansas City here.

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=130270396...

The February 1915 edition of The Crisis (vol 9, number 4) contains a piece about the War in its opinions section. It contains quotiations from The Chicago Post, The Washington Times, and A.P.O. of South Africa, all about the resistance of white people to let Colored troops join the fight. The section from The Chicago Post discusses a bomb that was thrown into a peace meeting hosted by an African American peace group. The director of the meeting, Dr. Hirsch is quoted, explaining why he thinks there is such resistance to the group's activities: "We, whom I represent, cannot be held responsible for the failure of the world's teachings. Nationalism has not failed... Nationalism in this very country has grown to mean racialism. This fallacy of race superiority has brought this harvest of war." (179). Hirsch is suggesting that America's (and presumably Europe's) racialism has caused the war because the white people interpret nationalism as defending their country from the "inferior" races. Not allowing African Americans to train for the Armed Forces is a good example of this.

The section goes on to develop this idea of nationalism as toxic and as a cause of the war using a quotation from The Washington Times. It explains the war from an African American point of view: that Europeans feel a need to control all of the land while knowing that they are outnumbered by other races, so they get very defensive in order to maintain this control, leading to wars. It goes on to quote The A.P.O. in South Africa, which contains an account of European troops denying 13,000 South African men who wanted to fight in the War, saying that "this war is 'a European war,' and Colored troops could not be employed" (179).

From an African American point of view, this War affects most countries in the world and yet whole races of people are being denied when they express the desire to fight for their own countries. Nationalism has led the European powers to feel a strong desire to protect their land, even if it is land that they colonized and is therefore the homeland of different races. Because of the extensive European territories in Africa (especially French), you would think that these European countries would want to employ these countrymen to str'engthen their numbers, but their nationalistic 'racialism' instead hurts them because they do not want Colored" people involved in their "European war".

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&view=pagetur...

image 11 (p.271)

The Crisis:
A Record of the Darker Races
Vol. 13, No. 6: Easter Number
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt (editor)
New York: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1917-04

Otto Leland Bohanan wrote the The Dawn's Awake, the first poem featured on page 274. This piece takes place in the East, where the soldier describes the war in a romantic light. "The dawn of a thousand dreams and thrills. and music singing in the hills..."  the soldier seems to be going into to battle for the first time, as "The boon of light we craved, awaited long, has come, has come!"

The second poem, by Leslie Pinckney Hill, In the Still Night is similar to the  first poem in that it is still expressed in romanticism,   even as the soldier is dying. He depicts an angel coming while everything around him becomes background noise. "The moil of the living shuts away. Then can the soul her fountains fill, while all the universe is still..."

Both poems are very short, and by being placed side by side, it allows the reader to think that the soldiers in the poems might be one and the same. The poems together seem to complete the soldiers’ life in battle; his optimistic cheer in going into battle, and his sad, yet beautiful slipping of reality.Both works are similar to the famous WWI poems of the English soldiers, Rupert Brooke and Seeger whose work shows the valor of the soldier in battle.  Both poems were done by black poets; they are great, yet until recently were relatively obscure.  Unfortunately, that was the fate of many black artists; their work was unknown outside of their own milieu

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=128895796...

"Opinions." The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races. Vol. 10 No. 2. June, 1915. pp. 69-71, 75-77.

I'm looking at three short pieces in the Opinion section of this issue. One appears under the heading "The Birth of a Nation," and the other two under "The Great War." Since my primary field is film studies, my interest was naturally piqued by seeing a contemporary reaction in this magazine to the landmark, famously controversial film The Birth of a Nation. Not surprisingly, the author of the piece heavily criticizes the film for its well-known and (ultimately) highly damaging racist distortions of history. (Interestingly, from my point of view at least, the picture is referred to always a "Dixon's film play," admitting no mention of D.W. Griffith, already by that time perhaps the most famous film director in the world.) The piece does not, however, precisely invoke or question the concept of racial superiority, although it is certainly present in the film. The author acknowledges that Dixon conceives narrowly of race relations in terms of "the sex problem of 'Aryan and African,'" which is certainly true (p. 69), but more fraught with notions of racial hatred and superiority in our post-Nazi age than it would have been at the time. The article goes on to combat the film not by debating the social unacceptability of miscegenation, but in purely historical terms: "To present the members of the race as women chasers and foul fiends is a cruel distortion of history. Bad things occurred, but what man will say that the outrages of black on white equalled in number the outrages of white on black?" (p. 69-70) Sensible, and yet these two excerpts are merely as close as the author comes to approaching a moral or philosophical question of whether or not all men are created equal, the issue which we traditionally think of when we hear the word "racism." The outrage remains couched in terms of factual misrepresentation rather than philosophical misconception. The question of spiritual equality, of "superiority," seems less pervasive in the race debate than in the gender debate.

Several pages after this article, however, in the pieces on the Great War, the notion of "superiority" is raised again in an interesting way. Booker T. Washington's first paragraph should be quoted in full: "It is assumed that the dark articles skinned people, who are now classed along with the Slavs as inferior peoples, will infallibly imitate the example of the superior races; that they will plot and plan and secretly con­trive means for overcoming those who stand above them, meanwhile interpret­ing every action of their rivals in the worst possible light and unconsciously employing every possible means to in­cite fear and hate, so that at last, when their hour finally strikes, the lesser peo­ples will be ready and willing to rise up and throw off the protection which the stronger races have imposed upon them. In that case the fear and hate which they have cherished secretly in their hearts will give them courage to be as ruthless in their rebellion as the superior races are likely to be in suppressing it. And they will do this in order to convince themselves and the rest of the world that they are really not inferiors, but the equals, if not the superiors, of the white races." (p. 75-76) Needless to say, Washington goes on to question this assumption, which is an exact description of the white anxieties depicted in The Birth of a Nation, to which the Ku Klux Klan (in the film's version of history) are a response. Washington sees through this view, and could be describing how the film functions as propaganda when he writes that this view "is the excuse for the harsh measures that it seems necessary to use now and then to keep the lesser peoples in their lesser places." (p. 76) Washington's piece touches the ugly assumptions which underly and shape The Birth of a Nation's representation of history, that one race is naturally and inherently superior to others. W.E.B. DuBois, in the piece which follows, links World War I to an imperialist agenda of racial oppression: "We must fight the Chi­nese, the laborer argues, or the Chinese will take our bread and butter.  We must keep Negroes in their places, or Negroes will take our jobs. All over the world there leaps to articulate speech and ready action that singular assump­tion that if white men do not throttle colored men, then China, India, and Africa will do to Europe what Europe has done and seeks to do to them." (p. 77) War, in The Birth of a Nation and in DuBois' argument, is seen as a struggle for the right to exert an idea of racial superiority, "by the simple process of getting on top and holding the other down." (p. 76)

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=128895941...

I would like to discuss the cover of Volume 10, No. 5 of The Crisis. I found this to be a particularly interesting cover, and it presents a rather interesting and encouraging view of the war and the role of race in the war. The cover features an African American officer, "the Colonel of th Eighth Regiment," according to the table of contents for this edition. The photograph is a portrait, showing the Colonel from the waste up, as he looks directly out at the viewer. He is dressed in an elaborate uniform, complete with a decorated hat and very prominent medals. 

I believe that this cover image does what we discussed in class as the purpose of The Crisis. That is, it presents a positive view of African Americans. The Colonel is distinguished in appearance. The medals stand out, and he looks accomplished with them, as well as the dress uniform that he wears. I think this image could have had a powerful effect on viewers. It is representing an African American man in a place of power. It also seems to suggest that African Americans can play an important role in the war, as this Colonel clearly has. Within this issue, there is a section that includes multiple photos of various African American military officers. The article they are included in is an article about African Americans in Chicago, and it says very little about the war itself. However, featuring such a prominent, distinguished African American soldier on the cover, as well as including many others within the issue, would probably have been encouraging to the viewer, shedding a positive light on African Americans and the role they could play in this war. 

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=129242478... (First page on the right side)

http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=129242478... (Second page continued)

This article is from The Crisis: Vol. 14, No: 2. June 1917. This article is from the editorial section of The Crisis, the main point of this article is questioning why no African American have been put into officer positions within the army. The author is calling out for The Crisis to bring this new issue up in the magazine to inform the general public of this "crisis." The author keeps calling the unwillingness to create an African American regiment with Afrrican American officers the ways of Jim Crow. To the author, the war has done nothing but continue the ways of Jim Crow and has done nothing for the African Americans that joined and supported the war effort. He also points out the want by the "level headed' African Americans to have these regiments run by African American officers. The author spoke for Dr. Spingarn and Dr. DuBois, "No, but they want black officers and they advocate a separate camp rather than see Negro regiments soley officered solely by white men." It seems the author is trying to draw in show that the idea of black regiments are supported by well respected African American men. It seems that the African American community is getting tired and worried about seeing no progress made for their people.

It is interesting to look at this article and the one we had to read for class on Tuesday. In the first article, it seemed there was so much hope and so much could be gained from the war. What was to be gained? The abolishment of Jim Crow laws and finally recieving equal treatment. But then you fast forward a few years. The war has gone on for a few years now and no real progress has been made the way the general African American public thought. It seems by now many believed that African Americans would have better positions within the army and would be serving a larger part. It is just interesting to see how hopeful and how proud the first article was to where is now, there is a sense of worry and a sense of disheart because the progress has not been made.