For some reason I can see the post title in Google Reader, and here, but not on the front page.
It was here for a bit. "Sweet Story"? "Sweet Tooth"? Something like that.
It's a weird editing thing - when I go back to a post and make a change (like I forgot the post title at first) and then save it, it shows up everywhere. And then half the time, five minutes later, it gets undone and forgotten, and I have to go back in and manually re-insert the change. I don't know why.
My short term memory, let me expose it to you.
I do recommend the story to everybody. It's a medium-long magazine piece, but I thought it was full of evocative details. From this, setting the scene of segregation on the strip (and also foreshadowing the idea that part of what would make it difficult to sustain is that African Americans were such an important part of the music and entertainment business that it was hard to exclude them).
Lena Horne was the exception who proved the rule. A favorite of Bugsy Siegel, the gorgeous torch singer was allowed to stay at the Flamingo as long as she steered clear of the casino, restaurants and other public areas. When she checked out, her bedsheets and towels were burned.
To this, after the Rouge has closed
Dancer Anna Bailey couldn't get work. She had backed up Cab Calloway and the Ink Spots in Harlem, danced with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson in Los Angeles, but no Vegas show-runner would hire her. One night in the late '50s, she joined a group of black women going to see Sinatra at the Sands. "A security guard stopped us," Bailey recalled. No blacks allowed, the guard said. "And Frank Sinatra came and got us at the door. He walked us into the lounge and sat us down at his table. Sammy Davis Jr. had his head down, he was so embarrassed by what happened to us. I was just so proud, walking behind Frank Sinatra and sitting down to his table!"
I was struck lately at the role of World War II and national embarrassment related to race shown in this Steinbeck telegram. I wonder to what extent white people were genuinely concerned about the US's international image, and to what extent anti-racists used that as an excuse to become more vocal.
Some editors at Smithsonian have recently made it clear to contributors that their stories should cast US history in a positive light. That's not to say that this piece is bullshit, but the narrative does seem awfully romantic to me. And the central conceit -- that the market integrated Vegas -- is a pretty suspect reading of that era's history.
8: Cold War politics was critical during the modern civil rights movement. Eisenhower (during Little Rock and the sit-ins), Kennedy (during the sit-ins, the Ruby Bridges shitshow, the Freedom Rides, etc.), and Johnson (pretty much all the time) fretted endlessly about the nation's image abroad. And civil rights activists understood that journalists and film cameras weren't just carrying their stories to sympathetic observers in the North, but also to the rest of the world. This was one reason that MLK's opposition to the Vietnam War was so controversial, even among people who pushed for or supported desegregation.
I'm suspicious on that front as well: while it does appear to be the case that entertainment big-wigs preceded the rest of the population in tolerance (as they do now with respect to homosexuality), surely other, less romantic policy changes had a dramatic effect on racial integration.
I once worked at a children's magazine that partnered with the Smithsonian. We ran a story on little kids who spontaneously became vegetarians (as in weren't raised that way, weren't encouraged by parents to do so*). Congress (the US Congress!!!) went apeshit. We were denounced in both House and Senate. The Smithsonian had to deny any knowledge of the story and sever ties (or maybe just renegotiate the extent of them?) -- at the risk of losing their funding. The issue was pulled from shelves. Because, you see, Phil Gramm and Texas can't have that shit. (The story was a ridiculous parody of cautious evenhadedness. Everyone involved in it ate meat. But the topic literally could not be mentioned as a possibility.)
*I had nothing to do with it! I was writing shit about codebreakers and stuff.
Because, you see, Phil Gramm and Texas can't have that shit.
Heh. I don't want to move the thread away from the OP's topic, which is really interesting, but it's just so bizarre that Texas or western states in general cannot abide the non-beef tribe. It feels like a religious thing over in those states.
14: the Enola Gay fiasco totally neutered the Smithsonian.
And that's what I get for switching browsers. Oh well.
18: Exactly. This would have been 1996, too.
I vaguely remember hearing about that. What was really startling to me in traveling cross-country, though, was that there seemed to be no acknowledgement that the defensiveness was economic in nature. As far as regular people in the relevant areas were concerned, being of a non-beef nature was just in the creepazoid realm.
Huh. I just went back and read a news story about the whole dumb thing. It was '97, and the freelancer hired to write the piece was in fact a vegetarian. None of the editors (except me, who was a fake editor) was a vegetarian, and the person who pitched the story and insisted upon it was the German, very-super-not-vegetarian, fake EIC, who also happened to be the owner of the whole publishing conglomerate (such as it was). The magazine was just starting and hadn't fully staffed up, so the owner was the EIC until we could find a new one, and I think I was the research editor. (I used to work for the company and they offered me a bunch of money to write stuff and help out with the launch and the first issues.) This matters only because when the Cattleman's Association demanded that heads roll, it was easy. The placeholder editors were "fired" and Phil Gramm could rest easy.
That's not to say that this piece is bullshit, but the narrative does seem awfully romantic to me. And the central conceit -- that the market integrated Vegas -- is a pretty suspect reading of that era's history.
I have no doubt that there's more than a spoonful of sugar in that article, but it doesn't actually claim that the market painlessly integrated Vegas. According to the article, the Rouge opened and closed in 1955 and the strip wasn't integrated until 1960 -- as part of an agreement to prevent a mass protests.
It also acknowledges that the integration of the strip itself was not the end of the story:
"Since then we've had no racial problems," says Claytee White, director of the Oral History Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "I'm joking!" White notes that when Governor Sawyer named former Moulin Rouge emcee Bob Bailey to a state commission investigating racial bias in 1961, "Bob didn't have to search too hard." Hotels in the state capital, Carson City, refused to serve blacks, so commissioner Bailey packed box lunches and changed clothes in a men's room in the Capitol building.
I also appreciate this detail which suggests that the Rouge is part of the mythology of Vegas but that reality is never as clear-cut as the story:
"Developers and preservationists kept trying to save it," recalls Oscar Goodman, Las Vegas' mayor from 1999 to 2011. "I must have gone to 17 groundbreakings there. I did more groundbreakings at the Moulin Rouge than anywhere else in the city, but that lot's still sitting there empty."
I'm attacking neither you nor the piece, but I do think you're underestimating the feel-good nature of the essay. It suggests that before the Rouge, things were bad: pools were drained, sheets were burned, black people only worked in the back of the house.* After the Rouge, things began to improve. Yes, there's all kinds of room for complexity within that broader narrative, but the author is telling a particular story that includes causal claims.
To be specific, my sense is driven largely by the story's pivot:
Then came the Moulin Rouge...
Again, the author is saying, "yes, things were bad, but they began to change when the Rouge opened its doors." Later in the piece, he'll say that The Rouge "represented" a "sea change."
The sentence above continues:
...a neon cathedral dedicated to the proposition that the only color that mattered in Vegas was green.
Like I said above, the mechanism for change here is the market. It's not grassroots activism. It's not federal legislation. It's not even Supreme Court decisions.** It's the market.
And then there's the claim that the Rouge was some kind of racial utopia:
Rather than the riots some pundits predicted, everyone got along.
Really? I mean, I'm sure that the Rouge was sometimes a great place to be. And I'm sure that African American performers were often happy to play there. I'm even sure that white people (Frank! ZOMG!) were typically delighted to go to shows there and to gamble there -- even next to African American people. But as presented, this is a just-so story, and it fits with the meta-narrative of American history -- progress! driven by the market! and heroes! -- that Smithsonian peddles to its readers.
* That's just like the back of the bus, isn't it?
** Even though the first Brown case was handed down the previous year -- chronology that the author, in hinting at causation, complicates intentionally. Note, too, that "Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat...two months after the Rouge closed." This is a classic, "How the Thing I'm Writing About Changed America" story.
I should clarify: I am attacking the piece, but only as bad history. Still, I think it's a reasonably skillfully rendered example of the genre. And it's a very interesting subject.
I'm attacking neither you nor the piece, but I do think you're underestimating the feel-good nature of the essay.
On one hand I'm even more complicit than just understating the ways in which it's selling a particular point of view. Had it not been a feel-good piece, I probably wouldn't have bothered to link to it. So I think you're absolutely correct to challenge that.
That said, I still think it's worth reading, and is entertaining, interesting, and informative despite -- or more likely because of -- fitting into very familiar conventions of the genre. I'm talking it up because I know that without some encouragement most people wouldn't bother.
And it's a very interesting subject.
25 cross-posted with 24, but I am glad that you found it interesting.
I am attacking the piece, but only as bad history.
I'm not totally convinced this is the proper standard to which Smithsonian articles should be held. But I haven't read this one.
14 blows my mind, and I thought I had a pretty good sense of just how crazy the US Congress could get.
9
Some editors at Smithsonian have recently made it clear to contributors that their stories should cast US history in a positive light. ...
If that is true how does The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson fit in? And do you all think that article is good history?
If anyone is seriously interested in this, a high school friend of mine is a communications professor who has written extensively about the history of casino marketing in Nevada; I'd be happy to shoot her a line and see if she can shed any detail about how shiny-happy the Moulin Rouge actually was.
On this issue, I support Phil Gramm. Our kids have enough problems with state funded food policy, I for one don't want my tax dollars encouraging them to be vegetarians.
33 took much longer to appear than I had guessed it would. You're pretty slow for a caveman, Halford.
Maybe he was busy running down a wildebeest.
I'm worried that he's sabertooth tiger bait. Protip, Halford: metal tools!
Now that I've lost all credibility, let me say that 23 appears driven by an anti-Smithsonian agenda that doesn't really have much to do with this article, which struck me on a very quick skim as a perfectly fine and reasonable little piece about a somewhat interesting piece of Vegas history about which no one else ever would have known. It's also plausible that Vegas in its bizarre way does represent a march towards progress in racial equality that's driven by its all-corrosive greed; in many ways Vegas is still today a remarkably integrated (and incredibly unionized!) place. It's still a depressing and evil monument to greed and stupidity though, plus hooo boy is the judicial system corrupt.
Oh my God. I read an article about the controversy. The Smithsonian magazine for kids had a cover with a picture if a cow saying "Please Don't Eat Me." Congress was totally justified in shutting down that kind of propaganda.
I hope that tiger gets you, after all.
38 - wtf no. Congress has no justification for meddling in content issues like that.
I believe in freedom of speech for kid-harming vegetarians, but I don't want to pay for their microphone.
Oh man, I've been taking so long to put this comment together that the thread has moved on.
... I became distracted, looking up and then looking at the work of one Khalil Gibran Muhammad. This man was on Bill Moyers a couple of months ago, and I recalled him talking about the ghettoization of blacks after they were identified as criminally inclined. There's a 2.5 minute video clip of KGM at the link explaining that this stemmed from the 1890 census. But I seem to recall other work, on later urban planning policy, that acknowledges the same point. Erm, some stuff about Cabrini Green in Chicago, which was created to segregate blacks into an intentionally lesser-served environment. They were left behind.
Why am I babbling about this? The Smithsonian article's feel-goodness elides all of this urban policy stuff, which was going on very much into the mid-20th century, I think.
23:There are no representations without ideological editing, and we could look at what narrative "afto" is trying to put in place of the Smithsonian's. It is going to be just as biased and inaccurate.
And why "anonymous for this one" anyway?
40: Congress has no justification for meddling in content issues like that.
Congress gets all weird about things to do with the beef as well as the dairy industry here.
I need to amend 42.last: it's going on today.
I still haven't read the article, but surely it doesn't claim that the Rouge ended all racism throughout America forever.
Dani Cavallero, Cinema of Mamoru Oshii
The representations conceived through the deployment of those codes and conventions are accordingly naturalized as their status as constructs is squarely effaced. In the vast majority of Western cultures, the process of naturalization has been assiduously sustained by the logic of realism as the dominant philosophy of representation. Indeed, realist techniques ensconce the process of construction of an image or text so as to lure us into unproblematically accepting that representations simply reflect the world, that they provide a keyhole view on a solid and consistent reality shared and recognized by each single member of the same culture . Representations thus serve to bolster the distinctive ideologies concocted by that culture* in order to assert its legitimacy and regiment its subjects in the name of ideological stability.
*Or subcultures or local cultures.
Beware people who talk about "bad history" they are grabbing privilege
Oh, I'm sure it doesn't. I haven't read it either: I was just going on anon-for-now's remarks to the effect that the article suggests that the mighty greenback -- money, the market -- solves or did solve problems. I suppose that's a separate discussion: maybe things were awesome in Vegas, but, like, who cares?
It was '97
So, a year and a half after every child in the relevant age group was introduced to the topic by Lisa Simpson and Paul McCartney?
27: I think that's right, which is why I added the part about this essay being just fine for what it is. Still, the overall project of Smithsonian is increasingly pernicious. And insofar as that project relates to making American history accessible to the public -- which is a genuinely worth goal -- it's a shame that so much of what appears in the magazine, including this piece, is steeped in currents of Whiggishness, triumphalism, or exceptionalism.
Still, the overall project of Smithsonian is increasingly pernicious. And insofar as that project relates to making American history accessible to the public -- which is a genuinely worth goal -- it's a shame that so much of what appears in the magazine, including this piece, is steeped in currents of Whiggishness, triumphalism, or exceptionalism.
I don't disagree with that, but it's a problem that goes well beyond this one magazine.
41 -- obviously this is objectively quite funny, but ever since Maplethorpe I can't find `congress attacks speech it doesn't like' particularly amusing.
"... false beliefs and superstitions are rejected by the critical side of the SF [science fiction] intellect, but on the other side SF writers and fans are attracted to magic because it presupposes as yet unknown and unpredictable changes in our reality system."
- Casey Fredericks, from the above.
I'm liking Cavallero, though she looks a little prolific
A realist or scientific ontology really wants a world that is predictable, doesn't it? Which means a world that is controlled. Think about what meliorism or incrementalism really means.
Utopian Colonies book review of "The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America by Richard J. Ellis as providing a good examination of authoritarian impulses among progressives since roughly the 1830s." at FDL.
Reviewer really can't handle the idea of liberal authoritarianism
I think the biggest point I got from the article is that I sure am glad that I wasn't trying to be in an interracial lesbian relationship during segregation, which of course I already knew.
In al seriousness, I feel like this particular article=not that bad. In particular, it very expressly is not a "market integrated America" piece; it makes clear both that (a) the hotel ultimately failed, (b) it was only the threat of protests that in fact integrated the strip, and (c) the hotel is now a vacant abandoned lot. Also heroes dont really show up, except for the reference to Sinatra, who actually did do a reasonable amount for integration. At most it's a "the market momentarily created an integrated place that was cool, before the market and the really visceral racial prejudice of the time shut it down, and now it's basically forgotten" which seems reasonably likely to be ... true. If they'd called it a "contingent site of resistance and refashioning" the academic historians would eaten it up. There is a little bit of pure nostalgia for all night jam sessions and the like, but actually that does sound pretty cool. If this is the face of whiggish terror, it's not that bad.
57 - For people like me who basically know him as a bloated Reagan hanger-on/Vegas punchline*, it's somewhat shocking how outspokenly anti-racist Sinatra was, to the extent that he was beating the drum for Henry Wallace.
* But so good in The Manchurian Candidate!
If they'd called it a "contingent site of resistance and refashioning" the academic historians would eaten it up.
Ooh, burn.
38: If you read an article, it's weird you get a major (really major) fact wrong. And if you read the actual article in question, you'd know it did no such thing.
The article was in "Vegetarian Times"!
Then I've read it. There is no such thing as the "Smithsonian Magazine for Kids." The article makes that clear. There was some light co-branding, but very few, if any, of your tax dollars were involved, as the mag was just a new publication from the folks who bring you the most well respected and successful kid mags in the country. (Incidentally, no vegetarians I know whinge about their tax dollars and price supports for actual meat, much less someone writing about how some people choose to eat meat!) The owner ( meat enthusiast) and senior editors (ditto) wanted to have provocative thought pieces with bold graphics for kids. (A Junior Economist! was the dopey internal tag line.) The article just talked to some sub 10yos who decided to stop eating meat about why they did that. And kids who ate meat and why. This isn't something the beef industry and their minions want discussed.
I wasn't very serious about this, you know.
The owner ( meat enthusiast) and senior editors (ditto)
You don't have to keep saying this, oud, babe. It doesn't matter whether they themselves were meat eaters, surely.
I mean, since everyone is being so fucking earnest, my real view is that it's obviously stupid to shut down funding for a kids magazine over something like that. And that the Smithsonian should either be permitted curatorial/editorial independence or probably shouldn't exist. 57 was in earnest, though, the article really isnt that bad and im glad NickS found it. But perhaps I should have said "some academic historians circa 1991" and had better fucking spelling and grammar.
65: double plus earnestness! There was no money wrt the magazine to take away! The magazine was run and paid for by a private company. The knuckle draggers were threatening the Smithsonian Inst's funding for having their name in 12 pt type on the cover.
Thank god now the Smithsonian doesn't have to rely on government funds since they have the Koch brothers bankrolling their we-can-live-with-climate-change exhibits.
I wasn't taking you seriously, tiger snack. Have a Zima and cool out.
Eh, kind of? There's the Koch Hall of Human Origins or whatever and it has a subtle "climate change has happened before, isn't it wonderful that we can adapt?" message. I think I complained about it here after seeing it and IIRC Upetgi pushed back a bit and it's true that the exhibit isn't that bad and most people probably ignore the subtle propaganda anyway.
Here's the Koch Hall of Human Origins website, if anyone wants to dig deeper. I haven't seen the exhibit myself, so I don't have any particular opinion on it.
The cards sold here are pretty amazing.
Huh. Okay. I didn't realize there was that kind of creep. This makes me unhappy -- I didn't notice the previous discussion here about it.
I found an isolated comment I wrote in the archives complaining in the vaguest of terms and no one responding to it. I feel like there was more discussion at some other time but maybe I made it up or dreamed it or something.
I have a bunch of photos of the exhibit on my phone, unless I deleted them at some point, because I was planning to write a long rant about it, which I never did. It's really striking, though, in discussing climate change without even suggesting that anyone might have ever said that humans might be responsible.
Well, it seems to be a real thing, a real problem, in any case.
This appears to be the beginning of the more extended discussion.
Tangentially, maybe 5 or 6 years ago my BF went to a steak house in Minneapolis which was basically segregated. There were a lot of middle to upper middle class African Americans in one room, and then he and his two white friends (I don't know whether their Egyptian friend tagged along) were seated in a different room. So weird.
Sorry. Those fuckers at Parade Magazine have warped my mind.
BG, what's the clinical term for someone who does "free association" type things but can't stop themselves and keeps connecting things in ways that make no sense? I think there was one, but I can't recall it and wikipedia isn't helping.
85 is open to anyone, but I figured Bostoniangirl was in the field.
It's something like asyndesis, but not quite so much.
Maybe it's just "loose associations" and there is no Latin for it.
Associations are like stools, best when not too loose.
what's the clinical term for someone who does "free association" type things but can't stop themselves and keeps connecting things in ways that make no sense?
My cow-orker.
79 reminds me of all the times I've gone into a restaurant with a group of physicists who are at a conference and we all have backpacks on and half the people have forgotten to take off their nametag and we somehow get seated in a separate room or a distant corner or something.
The Smithsonian magazine for kids had a cover with a picture if a cow saying "Please Don't Eat Me." Congress was totally justified in shutting down that kind of propaganda.
So why don't the Texas knuckledraggers go after Chick-fil-A?
That's actually a really interesting story. Anyway, I thought the standard leftist version of desegregation (and indeed of emancipation) was that capitalism couldn't stand stupid racists getting in the way of business, and therefore an opportunity presented itself for the revolutionary masses to align with a progressive segment of the bourgeoisie aaaand it's tara, Jim Crow, but no card check because shut up?
93
That's actually a really interesting story ...
The story does sort of gloss over the question of why if the casino was really doing so well (shows sold out and all) it failed so quickly.
91: Adults wearing backpacks to dinner at an actual, sit-down restaurant?
Adults wearing backpacks to dinner at an actual, sit-down restaurant?
And your point is? There are restaurants which don't demand a dress code involving jacket and tie these days.
79: Really? I wonder which one it was? If that was an actual policy, I feel like (A) I would have heard of it, and (B) there would be a pretty much constant stink being raised about it in the local alternative media. Huh. I have some speculations about which one it might be, but I would fain wait for some confirmation before I went around badmouthing them.
96: Just not something I've seen. I was noting my lack of surprise at the restaurant staff's behavior.
"Clang associations" was the term in my Seventies psych classes. Thought to be an indicator of psychosis then, probably now just an indicator of too much TV watching.
91: Adults wearing backpacks to dinner at an actual, sit-down restaurant?
Well, if you're at a conference and don't want to waste the time for everyone to go back to their hotel and leave their things before dinner, then yes.
Higher-end restaurants usually offer to check the bags; it's some intermediate range where it leads to being removed from sight.
Needs more Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds.
Showing up disheveled to a nice restaurant has gotten me more than a few quiet, private dining experiences.
For people like me who basically know him as a bloated Reagan hanger-on/Vegas punchline*, it's somewhat shocking how outspokenly anti-racist Sinatra was,
Also: cock joke.
The story does sort of gloss over the question of why if the casino was really doing so well (shows sold out and all) it failed so quickly.
They say bad management, who knows exactly what sort of graft that entailed . . .
I was thinking though, that the whole article could be read as an answer to the question, "why does anybody care, and why were there 17 different groundbreakings trying to celebrate or re-open a casino which was open for less than six months originally?"
From that perspective I think some of anon's criticisms are less relevant -- it hypes its subject because otherwise it would just be an obscure piece of Vegas history.
104
They say bad management, who knows exactly what sort of graft that entailed . . .
What they actually said was:
What killed the Rouge? Jasmin believes her bosses looted the place. Others blame the owners of established resorts, who may have pressed banks to call in loans to their red-hot competitor. Still others blame mobsters bent on proving that they ran the city; or a mid-'50s glut of new hotels that put downward pressure on prices; or even Westside blacks who didn't gamble enough. "There's plenty of murk in Las Vegas history," says Green, the Southern Nevada professor. "In the end I think four factors sank the Moulin Rouge: bad management, bad location, bad timing and bad luck."
which isn't very definite. It is strange to spend a lot of money building a casino hotel and then close after 4.5 months if you are really drawing good crowds. So perhaps the crowds weren't so good day in and day out, there were just a few good nights that are what everyone remembers. Another possibility is that it is actually a bit tricky to operate a casino without your customers and/or your employees robbing you blind. So perhaps as a startup operation with new and inexperienced workers it failed to maintain adequate security in the casino.
This June 1955 cover of Life has a picture of dancers at the Moulin Rouge but also an ominous headline "LAS VEGAS --IS BOOM OVEREXTENDED?"Another source I found claimed the owners had a "falling out".
105: So what are you trying to insinuate here? If it is that the casino failed because people rightly avoided spending money there due to their justifiable distaste for miscegenation, you're being more than usually opaque & obtuse. Obviously, this was an idea whose time had come only insofar as the anticipated riots/major backlash never materialized. There's plenty of evidence that Las Vegas (and many other segments of US society) weren't actually ready for full integration at that point. Which is why you need radicals to drag everyone kicking and screaming out into the sunshine.
107
So what are you trying to insinuate here? ...
Just saying the article was weak on why the casino failed. Offering a whole bunch of rumors with no apparent effort to find out what really happened.
