A Fierce Performer: The Magdalena Gómez Papers Collection (1979-2012)

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Some of you may have seen already the UConn Today article announcing that the UConn Libraries’ Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center has acquired the Magdalena Gómez Papers (1979-2012). Born in NYC but currently a resident of Springfield, MA, Magdalena Gómez is what I consider the quintessential Renaissance woman: an award-winning poet, playwright, performance artist and social activist. Magdalena Gómez has the ability to combine art with social activism to create projects that are uplifting and empowering, one of the many reasons that guide me when I decided to acquire her collection.

Magdalena Gómez’s creative output is impressive. Poetry,  plays, non-fiction, puppetry, monologues are just a few of the things that Magdalena has created, performed, engaged for several decades; and still there is more to come, as she herself shared with us recently:

I am in what may be the most creative period of my life. As I near the beginning of six decades on the planet I am at last finishing my novel, getting my first book collection of poetry published by Red Sugar Cane Press, NYC (I have chapbooks and two CD’s), and have poems and monologues, some of which have been set to music, by acclaimed composer, Desmar Guevara running Off-Broadway this Fall: Dancing in My Cockroach Killers, a co-production between Pregones theater and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, an Off-Broadway house since the 1960’s, founded by one of our legendary actors, Ms. Miriam Colón. It will be directed by another legend of American theater (all of the Americas), Rosalba Rolon, with choreography by Antonio Vargas.

In addition, Magdalena’s commitment to social change and justice through art is evident in such projects as Teatro V!da, the first Latino theater in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she is Co-Founder and Artistic Director. From their website:

Teatro V!da was founded to build youth leadership through the arts with a special focus on the creation of youth generated multi-media performance works in collaboration with professional adult artists. Our intergenerational ensemble work provides a venue for youth to identify and address issues that concern them in creative, positive, and life-giving ways.

Magdalena is the consummate collaborator. Her most recent effort is with Maria Luisa Arroyo, a writer and educator, with whom she co-edited a book on bullying, Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (2012), an anthology of essays and poems written by educators and students, young and old people alike, who have suffered bullying but found that speaking out and sharing their experience is a way of healing–be it through a testimonial, a poem, or a short story.

At this point in time, we have a small collection, with a wide variety of materials that showcase the diverse projects and endeavors in which Magdalena has engaged from 1979-2012. Magdalena Gómez is an incredibly productive artist so more material will surely arrive in the archives as time goes by. Currently we have the following types of materials available in the collection: photographs, published poetry, published books and unpublished manuscripts of original poetry and plays, publicity posters and flyers, and empowering workshops material which highlight her creative output. Materials related to Teatro V!da and her book on bullying are also included, in addition to workshop material that she produced to teach educators, young children and adults, prisoners, abused women, etc. with the aim to empower them to reach their potential. A finding aid to her collection should be uploaded online by the end of the Fall semester.

Please visit the Archives & Special Collections, John P. McDonald Reading Room to see a display of Magdalena Gómez materials. The display will be available from Sept. 24 to Oct. 31st, 2013 during our regular hours, Monday-Friday: 10:00am-4:00pm.

Finally, today, Wednesday, October 9th the UConn Libraries, together with the Puerto Rican and Latin American Cultural Center, El Instituto, the Asian American Cultural Center, the Asian American Studies Institute and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Institute are co-sponsoring the event An Evening with Magdalena Gómez, at the Student Union Theater starting at 4pm, where we will celebrate Magdalena’s work and life. During the program, Magdalena will perform work from her forthcoming poetry anthology (Reception to follow at PRLACC).

Marisol Ramos, Curator for Latina/o, Latin American & Caribbean Collections, UConn Libraries
Suzanne Zack, Marketing & Communications Specialist, UConn Libraries

For Private Eyes Only: A Place to Record Continuity and Change

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Ann T. Winchester was not looking forward to returning to school on September 28, 1943. She has written “Doom Day!” next to that date. Her entry continues:

Fooled around all morning getting ready for the great trek back to Storrs. We started at 2:00. [T]ook Jane and Mrs. Schafer – she gave me a beautiful blue cardigan and a white wool kerchief. We found my room in Wood – small but a single.

“Wood” in this case refers to UConn’s very own Wood Hall, which currently houses the History Department. Ann, a resident of Windsor and student at the University of Connecticut from 1941 to 1945, had lived in Holcomb Hall on East Campus during the Spring of 1943, but moved into Wood Hall for the 1943 – 1944 school year.

Ann was a student at the University of Connecticut during World War II when the ratio of male to female students on campus was at its lowest (nearly 1:1) since the University’s inception, due in part to the significant numbers of young men fighting in Europe and the Pacific. Notably, she was also one of the first students to graduate from the University of Connecticut’s School of Nursing, which accepted its first class in September of 1942. nutmeg_1944_0035She was a member of the Nursing Club, worked in the infirmary, and participated in an in-residence nursing training program at Backus Hospital in Norwich during the summer of 1943.

I once heard a writing professor define a diary as “a place to record the highs and lows of the day.” Ann’s diary, a series of short entries written daily from January 1, 1943 through December 31, provides consistent insight into the highs and lows of each of her days. A typical entry reads as follows:

May 7, 1943: After physics this a.m. – I went out on the roof for a couple hours of sunbathing. Hot and muggy today. Looked like Coney Island out there. Fooled around the rest of the day except for going to nursing class. Tonite we painted quite a bit. Then we took a walk up to the restaurant up the road and had coffee and doughnuts and smoked. Was fun – the nite is swell – warm and smells good. The peepers were singing for all they were worth.

In this way, each daily entry can read as a stand-alone record of one day’s events. But when read in its entirety, we start to see that Ann’s journal became a place where she recorded continuity and changes in her life over days, weeks, years, and semesters. Take, for example, the following excerpts from entries Ann writes over the course of three days in the Spring of 1943 about “an escapade,” which seems to have involved co-authoring a controversial note about one of her fellow house-mates (Flavia) with her roommate, Jane (May 4). This got her into particular trouble with a “Mrs. Davis,” presumably the house mother in Holcomb Hall, where she was living at the time:

April 28: Tonight Jane and I went to the House Council Meeting not expecting too much bad. Mrs. Davis gave us hell and threatened us with suspension. Not only the note was brought up – but working on shreds of truth, she told wholesale lies about us – “we’re vulgar.” Forbade Flavia to associate with us. Mrs. Davis is absolutely low and treacherous. In short she nauseates me!!!!

April 29 – I wrote mother about last nite – hope she’ll stand up for me! This place is stifling me – the petty minds and the cats that abound…Now Davis says [Flavia] can eat with us, but not come into the room. We’d corrupt her. I’ll get even with Davis some day!

And finally:

May 1: Both [Jane and I] went down to see Mrs. Davis this aft – she was too sweet to us. Well, maybe she thinks a little better of us. But you never can tell. To bed early.

These successive entries indicate that this issue remained a feature of Ann’s life over the course of several days. blogAnnWBy reading each of these entries, then, we see that Ann used her journal to record her changing thoughts on the consistent features in her life, and perhaps gain insight into the relative importance of each of these concerns to her. Certain topics, including her relationships, class work, habits, and career goals, seem to be of greatest concern to Ann because she writes about them at length. Some aspects of her life – such as her ongoing battle with her physics and chemistry classes – are easy to recognize as important to her because she writes about them explicitly and frequently.

But there are other continuities, such as her on-going friendship with her roommate Jane, which we know are important to her, even if she doesn’t say so explicitly. Ann never writes, “Jane is an important part of my life.” We simply know this, because she mentions her nearly every day. Their friendship is so pervasive that as I read her journal, any time Ann used the pronoun “we,” I automatically began to assume it meant “Jane and me” – even if this wasn’t always the case. More ambiguous is the relative importance of the War to Ann’s life, which we recognize only through passing references to rationing, war-time movies, blackouts, and a visit by Mrs. Roosevelt to campus in March of 1943.

Long-term change, as well as short term change, is also a feature of Ann’s diary. During her summer (June – August 1943) spent as an in-residence nursing student at Backus Hospital, Ann befriends a “Miss Classé,” an instructor at Backus. Taken with her, Ann writes, “She looks like the perfect nurse. I’ll have to pattern myself after her” (July 16). Later, in October, when she attends a Nursing Club lecture given by an ex-Navy nurse, she confides to her journal that, “I rather think I would like to be a navy nurse” (October 25). In this way, Ann uses her diary to anticipate and project her present life into her future, particularly as it relates to her career – unsurprising for a young person in school.

Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. In her blog series For Private Eyes Only she will study various diaries available in Archives and Special Collections at the Dodd Research Center to explore the history of journal writing and reasons why we write journals.

Postcard Poems in the Archives

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Stephanie Anderson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Chicago and the recipient of a 2013 Strochlitz Travel Grant. Travel grants are awarded bi-annually to scholars and students to support their travel to and research in the Dodd Research Center’s Archives and Special Collections. 

These days, when I’m thinking of a friend, I usually toss off a quick text or email.  But a few weeks ago I stumbled upon a postcard image of Robert Burns’s cottage, and I had to send it to my mother, a Burns fan.  The simple act of addressing and sending the postcard reminded me what a joy postcards can be; my mother would know right away why I had sent the card.  Postcards anticipate some sort of response, even if it’s not a written one. In that regard, they are like poems – often understated, yet capable of signifying a great deal; sometimes intended for a particular addressee yet also circulating, exposed, in public. And like poems, their text is not their only means of signifying; it is generally only one component of the entire “message.” 

The postcard’s other marks of distance – foreign stamps, the obtrusive postmark, the image on the front (which, as with the postcard to my mother, may be more “private” than the text on the back, as it can represent a mental placement of the addressee in the sender’s position or thoughts for reasons that an over-hearer/reader may not be able to intuit) – can be just as weighty. In other words, often it is the entire object or one of its components that signifies more than the epistolary text. As Derrida says, “What I prefer, about post cards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, the Plato or the Socrates, recto or verso. Nor what is the most important, the picture or the text, and in the text, the message or the caption, or the address.”[1] The postcard tracks the movement of the sender, and confirms the fact that the other is still in the world.

Members of the group of poets known as the “Second Generation New York School” (active from about 1960 to the present) used postcards as a primary form of communication. The cards were printed en masse to advertise readings; they were handwritten en masse as invites to parties and celebrations. Presses printed individual poems on them to advertise books. For the artist Joe Brainard as well as others, they suited his interest in assemblage and his reclamation of kitsch. He tirelessly sent vast numbers of postcards, such that their saturation became, for their recipients, a form of articulating presence – and as evidenced in a letter from Bill Berkson, Brainard even considered starting a postcard company.[2] We can assume that for the group, the exchange of postcards can be seen as a form of playful conversation.

At the Dodd Research Center’s Archives and Special Collections this summer, I had the berkson_notleycard1pleasure of looking through archives of several “Second Generation New York School” participants, including Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, and Larry Fagin. A chapter of my dissertation examines the epistolarity of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets, and so I was very excited to come upon letters and postcards throughout these archives.

Berrigan wasn’t a prolific letter writer, but he did like postcards quite a lot; at the time of his death in 1983 he was working on a series of poems written on postcards. The poet and Berrigan’s widow Alice Notley reports that though these blank postcards were printed by the Alternative Press, they were 4½ by 7 inches, distributed in groups of 500, and given to other artists and writers as well.[3] The appeal of the postcard, Notley suggests, is its materiality; it is a “block”-like unit.[4] She explains how Berrigan used the postcard:

The postcard poem was a form dominated by the size of the card, though a relatively longer poem could be written on a card if Ted shrank his handwriting. Ted immediately used semi-collaboration as a way into the poems, inducing everyone he knew to write a line or draw an image on a postcard. He later eliminated the names of the “facilitators,” except for the occasional dedication. The poems are often epigrammatic, but are just as likely to be longer; they chronicle, not so explicitly, a difficult year…[5]

The Bill Berkson papers contain one beautiful example of such a collaborative postcard, which has a “trillium” in the background painted by Notley (the back is empty). According to a note in his papers, Berkson received the postcard in 1983, after Berrigan’s death. berkson_notleycard2re The smooth and luscious lines of Notley’s watercolor flower provide an interesting contrast to the card’s text, which begins (after listing the address to situate the card’s production) “I stand in the dock in judgement / literally already condemned, but am / here to be informed…” The second slash is actually present in the text, insinuating that Berrigan conceived of the lines as poetry but perhaps a poetry still in a nascent or draft state.

The remainder of the text goes on to question groupings such as the “Second Generation New York School” tag that I employed above.  Berrigan was at this point seen as central to the “group,” and here he name-drops other artists (Lorenzo Thomas and Kathy Acker) to poke fun at his placement vis-à-vis the public perception of the “group,” suggesting that aligning his own work with that of Lorenzo Thomas and Kathy Acker is a mistake. One aspect of their work’s reception, he says, is its ability to “provoke angry / exchanges + bloody fist fights,” an end his work cannot accomplish. He will, instead, simply attempt to communicate: “…so, what I am / going to do is talk, which is what I do plus read / my poems.” His “one word of advice” to Berkson, scrawled almost illegibly in the upper right-hand corner, is “Duck,” perhaps partially intended to pun on predictability. The image of the flower contains an upward trajectory in its lines, some of which guide the eye toward this right-hand corner, but semantics of the word hiding there suggest the opposite movement. “Duck,” as a verb: keep your head down, keep moving, don’t get hit by the incoming “bloody fist[s].”

I don’t take this statement to be apolitical, or against aesthetic provocation; I read it instead as a wariness of generalizing about groups and group labels. It is desirable to be included – or to have others included with you – in such grouping, even with the tongue-in-cheek tone (“I am pleased and flattered / to be joined in such noble / company,” he writes). But as in a boxing match, one can only avoid being knocked out (critically pigeon-holed and labeled, we might say) by remaining unpredictable, both in aesthetics and in perceived group affiliations. Hand-delivered to Berkson, it has a specific addressee, yet the suggestions Berrigan makes about aesthetic groupings seems directed toward a larger audience. Of course, he couldn’t have anticipated that 30 years later, a budding scholar would be thumbing through his correspondence looking for clues about his work and milieu – yet the postcard felt like it was intended to be overread by a recipient exactly like myself, in order to complicate and nuance conceptions of poetic form and coterie labeling

– Stephanie Anderson

[1] The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13.

[2] “United Artists Papers,” Archive (UCSD, n.d.), Box 1 Folder 9, MSS 0012, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD.

[3] The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 12–13.

[4] “It’s a very graspable, manageable unit.” (See the introduction to A Certain Slant of Sunlight (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1988), n.p.)

[5] The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, 13.

Remembering the New England Hurricane, September 21, 1938

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The New England Hurricane of 1938 was one of the most famous of weather disasters in the region’s history and for many years the standard upon which all other hurricanes were held.  The devastation was enormous: after making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on September 21 it is estimated to have killed between 682 and 800 people, damaged or destroyed over 57,000 homes, and caused property losses estimated at $306 million ($4.7 billion in 2013).

For Private Eyes Only: Why Write Diaries Anyway?

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Rebecca D’Angelo is a senior undergraduate student in History and Anthropology. In her blog series For Private Eyes Only she will study various diaries available in the Dodd Research Center’s collections to explore the history of journal writing and reasons why we write journals.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been reading other people’s diaries.

I didn’t feel guilty about it at first. The diaries I’ve been reading are part of the Dodd Center’s Diaries Collection. Most were written over one hundred years ago. Unlike other collections which tend to be organized by donor, the Diaries Collection houses an eclectic mix of personal diaries, daybooks, copybooks, and ledgers, many written by New Englanders. The collection spans one hundred years of journal writing, the earliest diary in the collection dating to 1851. Two diaries, which both date to 1943, are the latest in the collection; both were written by Connecticut women, one, a painter with the surname Whitlock living along the Connecticut shoreline, and the other, a University of Connecticut student named Ann T. Winchester who was studying to be a nurse during her time at UConn.

diariesAt first I viewed the diaries in the Dodd Center’s collection purely as sources. I was interested in the stories they could tell me about the past and about the people who occupied it. I was also interested in the quite literal range of forms and colors present in this collection. Some, like Ann Winchester’s are handwritten in a book printed with “Diary” on the front. Hers is bright red. Others are written in tiny notebooks, and others in leather-bound volumes. Some only include personal entries. In others, notes on the writer’s day are included alongside general musings and business records.

Then I saw this message, inscribed on the inside cover of one diary written by S.E Warren, a young Massachusetts man training to become a school teacher in the 1850s. It read:

“All of my journals[,] To be read by no one but my parents in case of my death as a single man or widower. Others may see the index only, and may have such portions read to them as are not marked Private. Or else my relict or heirs only shall see them as above directed.”

 Suddenly I felt like one of those TV sitcom dads who gets caught snooping through his daughter’s diary. The person who wrote this diary didn’t intend for me to read it. As a historian, I tend to forget that sources are generally not written for me. It’s true that some historical accounts or objects are created “for future posterity.” But generally, artifacts are the surviving residue of a past life, lived day-to-day, with little concern for what a history student writing about them in a blog would think about them one hundred years down the line. After all what is a diary, if not something extremely personal, a continuous letter to self? I’m guessing that S. E. Warren didn’t intend for future historians to read his journal. Then again, he clearly anticipated that someone other than himself, his parents, or his heirs might pick it up. Why else would he have included such a preface?

As I continued browsing through these journals, I started thinking about my own journal-writing. I keep several irregular journals to explore my thoughts. I imagined S.E. Warren, Whitlock, and Ann T. Winchester each had their own similar motivation for writing in their respective journals. I thought back to other historical journals I had read. Growing up, I valued Anne Frank’s diary for the story it told and for the perspective it offered me into the lives of Jewish German nationals forced to flee Germany during World War II. Now I began to wonder: Why did Anne value her diary? Realizing that I read other people’s journals even though I barely go back and read my own, I started wondering why I kept mine. Why does anyone write in a diary or journal?

Today, psychologists and writers extol the benefits of journal-writing. A quick internet search on “why we write diaries” reveals a laundry list of blog articles encouraging me to keep a journal for various reasons – to reflect, to project, or simply to practice writing. In 2007, the New Yorker published a fabulous review piece that pondered this very question. “Diaries,” the author suggests, “are exercises in self-justification.” He ultimately concludes, “We write to appease the father. People abandon their diaries when they realize that the task is hopeless.”

I am no psychologist and will not pretend to be one, but I am a historian and I’m interested in these questions – why did we write diaries in the past? Why do we continue writing them today? I intend to use this blog series to help me answer these questions. By reading, researching, and analyzing the range of diaries available through the Dodd Center’s Diaries Collection I hope to explore the different forms diaries take on, the stories and details we entrust them with, and the function they serve in our lives.

How a Filmmaker Researches the Past

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Fred Ho

from Steven De Castro’s film
Fred Ho’s Last Year

— Steven De Castro is a recipient of a Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant to use the Fred Ho Papers held by Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.  A description of his research experience appears below.

Most folks visiting a library are doing so to write a book or a paper. But a library preserves not only the papers of our culture, but also its sights and sounds. And these audio and visual records are of particular interest, not just to writers, but to filmmakers.

Research on a historical film is similar to researching a book or paper. The director John Sayles, before producing Amigo (his drama set during the Philippine-American War), read over 100 books on the subject. The difference in documentary filmmaking is that after engaging in the scholarly work, one has to then engage in the business of negotiating and purchasing the rights to the video you have unearthed.

As a filmmaker, I have found Archives & Special Collections invaluable in my research for the upcoming documentary film, Fred Ho’s Last Year.

ABOUT THE FRED HO PAPERS

Enclosed within the walls of the Dodd Research Center’s archives are the sights and sounds created by one of the greatest avant-garde jazz artists of his generation – a prolific composer, a committed Asian American activist and public intellectual – Fred Ho (b. 1957).

Fred Ho is a 6-time Rockefeller Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a 2-time National Endowment of the Arts recipient, the winner of an American Book Award and a Harvard Arts Medal. Despite these accomplishments, most people – even in the field of contemporary music – have never heard of him. Whether it is because of the fact that he is an outspoken Asian American (a rarity in the music industry), or whether it is because he infuses his own brand of leftist politics in most of his work, is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the most compelling reason why such a prolific artist is not more widely known is that he refuses to be categorized. His music is too challenging to attract a popular fan base, and yet it embraces (and remakes) so many popular styles of music that it is not “out there” enough for other avant-garde musical cliques.

One of the most important facets of Fred’s art is that if you are buying his albums and enjoying his music, you are experiencing only a portion of his creative work. Fred is not only a musician, but an operatic composer whose works are meant to be both seen and heard at the same time. The only way to experience this, short of attending a performance, is through audio/visual media. The central repository of audio/visual records of Fred Ho’s work and public statements is in the Fred Ho Papers held by Archives & Special Collections.

Fred’s artistic and political direction profoundly changed when, in 2006, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Currently Fred’s condition is terminal and he has refused further chemotherapy. Incredibly, Fred still continues his work. As of this date, he has a concert with his orchestra at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and an upcoming book. The significance of the Fred Ho Papers to the fields of Asian American studies, art, and music is difficult to quantify, both for this generation of scholars and for future generations.

Most of the video within the Fred Ho Papers is undiscovered and unplayed. Video is (quite understandably) not of interest to scholars whose main interest is to publish papers and books. And although the video is quite visually fascinating and intellectually provocative, much of it is stored on magnetic tape that degrades with each passing year.

BRINGING THE ARCHIVES TO THE MOVIE SCREEN

Through my research at Archives & Special Collections, I am able to tell a more comprehensive story of Fred Ho’s life and work on a greatly expanded timeline, through the use of archival video. The video shows Fred performing and speaking many years ago, before I began shooting. Through the skills of documentary storytelling, this material comes alive and brings the art and thought of Fred Ho to undiscovered audiences.

And yet, finding the material is only a first step. Under the Fair Use exception to the Copyright Act, a university is allowed to play these videos to a classroom of students. However, a filmmaker is not allowed to incorporate these materials into a film without authorization. So I had found the videos. Now what?

In addition to being a filmmaker, I am a lawyer. Through weeks of calls and internet searches, I was able to track down these rights holders for a release. The television production companies had their own release forms, but in one instance, I drafted the release for the company representative to sign.

Licensing of archival video footage for a film is expensive. Generally, institutions have different rate plans for licensing, which eases the cost for independent producers such as myself. Thankfully, one institution and most individuals I have asked have released their rights for free.

Due to the age of the material, many rights holders failed to locate the original high-quality versions of the footage within their own archives. Therefore, some of the video archives in the Fred Ho Papers turned out to be the only existing copies. In those cases, my research allowed me to acquire these materials and negotiate their release even when they were lost by the production company that made them.

When a video is made, it is usually made for a short term purpose. Production companies cover an event to place on the evening news. A performer may videotape his own performance for the purpose of reviewing it the following day. The maker of the video rarely intends to create a lasting archive. And yet, as a historical documentary filmmaker, I depend on the archival video at Archives & Special Collections – sometimes stored in archaic analog formats – to bring the subject alive.

Steven De Castro, J.D., is the Producer and Director of the upcoming feature documentary, Fred Ho’s Last Year. His research is made possible by the University of Connecticut’s ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES INSTITUTE, ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AT THE THOMAS J. DODD RESEARCH CENTER, FRED HO FELLOWSHIP, and STROCHLITZ TRAVEL GRANT. You can contact him at decastro@credibilitymedia.com.

Northeast Conference on British Studies

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Lion_Rampant_TitleOn October 4th and 5th, the red coats are coming to UConn!  This years annual meeting of the Northeast Conference on British Studies, organized by Prof. Brendan Kane of UConn’s History department, is working collaboratively to promote historical research in archival collections.  The Dodd Center and Archives & Special Collections will be on display the evening of October 4th for the initial day’s reception.  Archives & Special Collections will have materials on display from the early modern period to anti-colonial struggles of the late twentieth century.

Mimeo Hip: Poems from Literary Mags Recently Added

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Take a trip with Mimeo Hip! Bite-sized posts highlighting poems and literary mags from the 1950s through the 1980s that were recently added to the Archives.

Welcome back to class, to a new home, and to autumn, with a poem by Bill DeNoyelles from Blue Smoke 3, March 1985:

Clean Sweep

A bedroom door opens easily with no humidity
My socks touch a chain whose charm was
Lost in a parking lot last night
We use sheets and blankets
For the first time in weeks
It rains… BLUESMOKE0001

 

BluesmokeCover

A Letter from Thomas A. Edison

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Letter from Thomas A. Edison to E.E. Dickinson & Co. of Essex, Connecticut, written on March 16, 1916, about a recommendation for Mr. V.L. King for work at the company. E.E. Dickinson Co. Records, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Libraries.

Letter from Thomas A. Edison to E.E. Dickinson & Co. of Essex, Connecticut.

Recently a researcher visited our reading room to look at the E. E. Dickinson Co. records and brought this letter to our attention.  Written on March 16, 1916, from Orange, New Jersey, it is a letter signed by inventor Thomas A. Edison about his recommendation of Mr. V.L. King, who was seeking employment at the E.E. Dickinson Company, a maker of witch hazel and birch oil in Durham and Essex, Connecticut.

The E.E. Dickinson Company was established by Alvin Whittemore, who owned a drug store in Essex.  By 1870, partners of Whittemore consolidated under the control of Rev. Thomas Dickinson and his family, including his son E.E. Dickinson, held the company as a family business until the 1980s.  By the 1920s the company produced half of all witch hazel produced in the United States.

Archivists and historians value primary sources for their content and context — how they contribute to our understanding of historical events or a historical time.  The value of a letter just because it has a famous person’s signature doesn’t usually fit in this category.  It has a different sort of value, one where anything that attaches us to a famous person is automatically valuable. In any event, we are happy to know about this letter in our collection and hope you enjoy it too.

Dodd International Justice Research Fellowship Report, 2013

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Court Scenes, 1945-1946
Thomas Dodd, Chief Trial Counsel in the Court of the International Military Tribunal, 1945-1946.

In January 2013 I applied for the Thomas J. Dodd International Justice Research Fellowship. This fellowship supports research at the Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, furthering the Center’s aim to promote human rights. The Center is also dedicated to promoting the work and career of Thomas J. Dodd, executive trial counsel for the United States at the International Military Tribunal (IMT Trial). A higher degree by research student from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University, Melbourne (Australia), I was both honoured and excited to be given this opportunity. The fellowship involved a two-week stay at the University of Connecticut (UCONN) campus to conduct Ph.D. research during summer 2013. Over a period of two weeks I worked closely with the Center’s staff searching through the Thomas J. Dodd collection and analysing documents relating to war crimes trials of Nazi criminals held in the aftermath of World War II, specifically the IMT Trial.

The Dodd Center’s collection is exceptional because it brings together a comprehensive range of trial documentation at one location. The Dodd Papers are a valuable set of historical documents that hold relevance in a range of academic fields, not least human rights and history. Moreover, the documents are predominantly printed in English, and include various translated German documents, which normally I and many other scholars would be unable to access. I was excited to be given the opportunity to conduct research in an international setting but also to engage with the valuable archives housed at the Dodd Center.
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Dodd’s Congo Foray

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Thomas J. Dodd and Moise Tshombe, 1961

Thomas J. Dodd and Moise Tshombe, 1961

“…the role of the Senate [is] to advise on foreign policy and not merely to assent to faits accomplish…”

Sen. Thomas J. Dodd to Sec. of State Dean Rusk, December 1964[i]

 Within two weeks of the Congo gaining independence from Belgium in June 1960, the mineral-rich Katanga province attempted to secede, thrusting the country into chaos. The Eisenhower administration intervened in order to prevent a communist takeover of the nation. During the Kennedy administration U.S. involvement marked an unprecedented projection of American power in sub-Saharan Africa. As Secretary of State Dean Rusk said in July of 1962, “there was no other problem including Berlin in which [the] President, [the] Secretary and senior colleagues have spent as much time as [the] Congo.”[ii] The event created a paper trail at the Kennedy Presidential Library second only in volume to Vietnam; surpassing that of Britain, and even of the Soviet Union.[iii] When including donations to UN operations, U.S. aid given to that country amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

As I argue more thoroughly in my dissertation, the Kennedy administration viewed the crisis not only as central to the Cold War, but also to decolonization. In 1960 alone, seventeen African nations declared independence. By intervening in the Congo, Kennedy wanted to prove to newly emerging nations on the African continent, as well as the Third World at large, that American-styled democracy and capitalism could secure political and economic freedom for colonially oppressed peoples. Like other U.S. interventions during this era, however, events did not turn out as American policymakers had expected. Gen. Joseph Mobutu ascended to power in 1965, ruling the country as a dictator until 1997. The decay of the state under his rule contributed to the destabilization of the region and approximately five million deaths even after he had departed from power.[iv]

Sen. Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT) was one of the leading opponents of the Kennedy administration’s policies in the Congo.  Believing Kennedy’s sympathy with Third World nationalism had caused the President to lose sight of the larger Cold War struggle, Dodd used his position on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to effectively challenge the power of the executive branch. Dodd supported Moise Tshombe, the leader of Katanga with whom the Kennedy administration was at odds. Even though Tshombe was reviled by the Afro-Asian bloc for betraying Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Congo who was assassinated by Belgium in 1961, Dodd argued that the United States should nonetheless support Tshombe’s bid for power since he was a self-avowed anti-communist willing to partner with the West.

The UN thwarted Tshombe’s secession in 1963, but through an unlikely turn of events he became Prime Minister in 1964. By then the Kennedy administration’s nation-building efforts had failed to transform the Congo into a viable nation-state, and leftist revolutionaries with support from Algeria, Cuba, and China, were seeking to overthrow the government. Dodd’s persistent lobbying in Washington had kept alive the possibility of Tshombe becoming an American ally. Indeed, Dodd’s advocacy made a difference when the Johnson administration began searching for a new Congolese leader to back, one capable of warding off the revolutionaries and partnering with the West to bring stability to the country.

As a recipient of a Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant, I was able to spend a week examining Dodd’s papers at the Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center located on the campus of the University of Connecticut in Storrs.  With approximately seven linear feet of material relating to the Congo, it is an especially rich collection that provides a detailed account of the Senator’s opposition to the Kennedy administration’s policies as well as his advocacy for Tshombe. Some of the highlights of the collection include private memoranda between Dodd and his staff, the itinerary and notes from Dodd’s trip to the Congo in 1961, speeches and periodical articles written by Dodd, reports from American missionaries in the Congo, and correspondence between Dodd and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Secretary of State Rusk, Tshombe, and Tshombe’s representatives. The collection also contains official government documents from Katanga, including cabinet meeting minutes.[v]

Scholars studying U.S. foreign policy and/or the Congo will find this collection informative. It serves as a prescient reminder that congress can effectively challenge a president’s foreign policy, and helps reveal the agency and vision of Tshombe whom conventional narratives have portrayed as a puppet of Western interests. Recent events in that country demand that we examine its history, of which this collection helps to illuminate.

–William Mountz, PhD Candidate, University of Missouri

Recipient of  a 2013 Strochlitz Travel Grant

[i] Letter from Sen. Thomas J. Dodd to Sec. of State Dean Rusk, 21 Dec. 1964, Box 260, Thomas J. Dodd Papers, Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT.

[ii] Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in the Congo, 7 Jul. 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, vol. 20 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1994), 501-503.

[iii] John Kent, America, the U.N. and Decolonization: Cold War Conflict in the Congo (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2.

[iv] Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011).

[v] Researchers will also be happy to know that they will encounter an exceptionally professional and friendly archival staff.