Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker

“You always look so cool. You resemble the advertisement of the man . . . you know, the advertisement of the man.” Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby

We all know the art of J.C. Leyendecker. He’s best known as the creator of the Arrow Collar Man in the shirt advertisements as well as the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. Leyendecker’s art captured the zeitgeist of the Roaring Twenties. However, few of us know the man J.C. Leyendecker and his relationship with the Arrow Collar model Charles Beach. 

 

 

 

Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker is a new documentary by Ryan White. According to the official website,

J.C. Leyendecker was one of the most prominent artists of his time, but his story is largely forgotten. Forced to keep his sexuality a secret, his coded imagery spoke directly to the gay community and laid the foundation for LGBTQ representation in advertising today.

Winner of the Best Documentary Short award at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival, Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker is beautiful, and well-made. It mixes gorgeous animation with photography and rare film with a moving soundtrack and informative narration.    

I highly recommend this documentary. Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker is currently showing on the streaming service Paramount +.

History Repeats Itself

Currently, controversy is brewing in State and Local governments across the U.S. over whether Critical Race Theory should be taught in public schools. According to Wikipedia, "Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the intersection of race and U.S. law and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. CRT examines social, cultural, and legal issues primarily as they relate to race and racism in the United States." Also, according to Wikipedia, "As of 2002, over 20 American law schools and at least three non-American law schools offered critical race theory courses or classes that covered the issue."

This would not be the first time governments have attempted to prevent the teaching of subjects of which they disapprove. 

On March 25,  1925, the Tennessee House of Representatives passed what would be known as the Butler Act. Introduced by member John Washington Butler, this legislation prohibited public school teachers from denying the Biblical account of humankind's origin. The law also prevented teaching that humans evolved from what it referred to as lower orders of animals in place of the Biblical account.

The law was challenged by the ACLU in the famed Scopes Trial, in which John Scopes, a high school science teacher, agreed to be arrested on a charge of having taught evolution. Scopes was served a warrant on May 5, 1925. Scopes was found guilty during the trial, and the law was found to be constitutional by the Tennessee Supreme Court on the grounds that it didn't establish a "preference to any religious establishment or mode of worship." However, Scopes's conviction was reversed on a technicality. 

John Scopes

The Tennessee Legislature finally repealed the Butler Act on May 18, 1967.

In 1955, The Scopes Monkey Trial was turned into a play and later, in 1960, a major motion picture titled Inherit the Wind. The film was directed by Stanley Kramer and starred Spencer Tracy as lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March as his friend and rival Matthew Harrison Brady. It also features Gene Kelly, Dick York, Harry Morgan, Donna Anderson, Claude Akins, Noah Beery Jr., Florence Eldridge, and Jimmy Boyd.

Scene from the movie Inherit the Wind

Babylon Berlin

During times like these Netflix is a blessing from the gods. One of the great series on it is the crime drama Babylon Berlin.


Babylon Berlin is a German neo-noir television series based on novels by author Volker Kutscher. The series takes place in Berlin during the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s. The central characters are Gereon Rath, a police inspector on assignment from Cologne who is on a secret mission to dismantle an extortion ring, and Charlotte Ritter, police clerk by day, flapper by night, who is aspiring to become a police inspector.

Babylon Berlin realistically captures Berlin during the Weimar Republic. It was a time when crime, drug abuse, and prostitution had largely taken over the city. In many ways, Berlin of the Twenties was the embodiment of the Dark Deco style of Dieselpunk. The only thing missing is retrofuture tech to make Babylon Berlin Dieselpunk.

Germany, of course, got to view season 3 back in January. For those of us here in the States Netflix recently loaded season 3 of Babylon Berlin just this month.

I’m a big fan of Babylon Berlin and I highly recommend it to any Dieselpunk.

How To Drink

Many of my readers know that I’m a drunkard connoisseur of beer. wine, and spirits.  Therefore, I was excited to learn about the "How to Drink" videos on YouTube.

The presenter is Greg who has never been a bartender. However, he has an obvious passion for making cocktails. In each video, Greg shows how to make one to three types of cocktails. They might be classics (such as a bloody mary or a martini) or something with a pop culture tie-in (Friends, Game of Thrones, video game, etc)

So, what’s dieselpunk about a YouTube channel on cocktails? One is the fact that alcohol played a major role in shaping the 1920s with Prohibition. In fact, Greg makes a great video celebrating Repeal Day in which he discusses in length the events surrounding Prohibition.



Another is his music. In each video, his theme and background music is “Hot Lips - Foxtrot” by Bill Brown and His Brownies, which was recorded in 1927. This gives each video such a strong decodence (i.e. the sense of the Jazz Age or Art Deco).

Don’t get me wrong. There are steps Greg could take to elevate each video. His set has a definite man cave feel to it with the head of Bambi’s mom hanging in the background. Plus, he’s got this lumberjack thing going on with his plaid shirt.

However, these negatives are minor and maybe a little picky. I love watching Greg’s videos. There are several how-to-make-cocktails series by others out there. His videos are by far the best on the interwebs. His humor combined with his talent makes his video series binge-worthy.

So pour yourself a tall one and check out his YouTube channel. You’ll be glad you did.

Welcome to the Roaring 2020s!

You’ve seen the Facebook memes declaring that this year marks the return of the Twenties. For Dieselpunks, the Nineteen-Twenties was the first of the decades that form the source material. Therefore, the Twenty-Twenties are exciting times for Dieselpunks.

The Nineteen-Twenties marked the beginning of enormous worldwide changes that still impacts us today. It’s tempting to write a summary of the decade. There certainly were elements that each country shared. However, each country carved its own path during that turbulent time.

As evidence of the differences, different countries have different names for the Nineteen-Twenties. In the US it’s called the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age. In Germany, it’s called the Golden Twenties (Goldene Zwanziger). In France, it’s known as the Crazy Years (Années Folles). While in Japan it’s known as the Taishō period.

In upcoming blog posts, I plan to explore the Nineteen-Twenties as it appeared across the globe. In addition, I’ll explore Dieselpunk trends during Twenty-Twenties.

Exciting times, indeed.

Jazz Age Halloween

I love Halloween. So I knew as it approached that I had to write about it. But I just wasn’t sure what. Then it hit me. I decided to write about Halloween of the Jazz Age.

According to History.com,

In the early 20th century, Irish and Scottish communities revived the Old World traditions of souling and guising in the United States. By the 1920s, however, pranks had become the Halloween activity of choice for rowdy young people.

The Great Depression exacerbated the problem, with Halloween mischief often devolving into vandalism, physical assaults and sporadic acts of violence. One theory suggests that excessive pranks on Halloween led to the widespread adoption of an organized, community-based trick-or-treating tradition in the 1930s. This trend was abruptly curtailed, however, with the outbreak of World War II, when sugar rationing meant there were few treats to hand out. At the height of the postwar baby boom, trick-or-treating reclaimed its place among other Halloween customs. It quickly became standard practice for millions of children in America’s cities and newly built suburbs. No longer constrained by sugar rationing, candy companies capitalized on the lucrative ritual, launching national advertising campaigns specifically aimed at Halloween.

I would like to wish all my readers a happy and safe Halloween.

Jazz Age and Baking

As 2020 approaches it seems that the Roaring Twenties are getting greater attention. The most recent was from a highly popular British television cooking competition series.

The Great British Baking Show (GBBS) is currently in its 10th season. GBBS, which is produced by Love Productions, began in the UK on BBC One and is now carried by Channel 4. In the US it was originally carried on PBS but is now exclusively on Netflix.

Episode 5 of the current season saw a tribute to the Jazz Age with the Roaring Twenties as a theme. Each dish created by the contestants had to have a tie-in with the 1920s. However, some media critics, and some viewers like myself, thought that they stretched the 1920s theme a little far. As the web site Eater.com wrote,

The baking tests: shortcrust pastry; custard; decoration with a 1920s theme???

The two most Jazz Age-themed challenges were the “Signature” where the contestants show off their favorite recipes and the “Showstopper” where they’re tasked with making something spectacular. In the Signature challenge, the contestants were tasked with making custard pies, which was popular in the 1920s. One of the contestants went with a decidedly Lovecraftian theme with something that (vaguely) resembled Cthulhu. In the Showstopper, they were tasked with baking cakes based on prohibition cocktails, which was a reference to prohibition in the US during the 1920s.

Teapot Dome Scandal

The US news is filled with reports of Congress demanding that the IRS turn over President Trump’s tax return for the last six years. Congress is using an obscure law from 1924 that, according to House Democrats, would allow them to make such demands. Needless to say the reference to 1924 should raise the eyebrows of any dieselpunk. To understand this law requires us to look back to the 1920s and what had been the worst scandal in US history until Watergate: the Teapot Dome Scandal.

US President Warren G. Harding

The following is a brief summary stolen borrowed from Wikipedia,

The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery scandal involving the administration of United States President Warren G. Harding from 1921 to 1923. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, and two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of a seminal investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies, Fall became the first presidential cabinet member to go to prison; no one was convicted of paying the bribes.

Before the Watergate scandal, Teapot Dome was regarded as the "greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics". It damaged the reputation of the Harding administration, which was already severely diminished by its controversial handling of the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 and Harding's veto of the Bonus Bill in 1922. Congress subsequently passed legislation, enduring to this day, giving subpoena power to House and Senate for review of tax records of any US citizen without regard to elected or appointed position, nor subject to White House interference.

Once again, the mundane world is reminded of what every dieselpunk already knows. To understand the present you must first understand the past.

Coming to America

“Remember, remember always, that all of us, you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Immigration is a major political issue today in America. However, this is far from the first time Americans have debated this issue. For the first half of the existence of the US, there were no immigration laws. Walk off the boat and the moment your feet hit the shore you could be an American. No papers needed and no questions asked.

The first Federal bill governing immigration was passed in the late 1800s. The Page Law of 1875 was decidedly racist in that it was meant to reduce immigration of women from Asia. The second law was the equally racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was just as the name implied. Also in 1882 was the Immigration Act, which prohibited the entry of “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.”

As horrible as these three bills were they didn’t impact the majority of people coming to America. For most, all they had to do was to get to the US. Things began to change during the Diesel Era and again race played a major role. It was during the 1920s we first have the existence of 'legal' immigration.

Nativist Political Cartoon - 1921

The Immigration Act of 1917 was one of the first major immigration laws with wide reaching implications. This law included a literacy test, which required reading short passages in any language, and if a man was literate and his wife and children weren’t, they all still earned access to the country. It was thought that the law would reduce the number of new arrivals (mainly from eastern and southern Europe) by more than 40 percent. In reality, only 1,450 people of 800,000 immigrants between 1920 and 1921 were excluded on the basis of literacy.

The legislation with the biggest impact was the National Origins Act of 1924. The law was primarily aimed at further decreasing immigration of Southern Europeans, countries with Roman Catholic majorities, Eastern Europeans, Arabs, and Jews. Virtually all Asians were forbidden from immigrating to America under the Act.

A group of Chinese and Japanese women and children wait to be processed as they are held in a wire mesh enclosure at the Angel Island Internment barracks in the late 1920s. AP

The Immigration Act made permanent the basic limitations on immigration into the United States established in 1921 and modified the National Origins Formula established then. In conjunction with the Immigration Act of 1917, it governed American immigration policy until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which revised it completely.

For the next four years, until June 30, 1927, the 1924 Act set the annual quota of any nationality at 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States in 1890. That revised formula reduced total immigration from 357,803 in 1923–24 to 164,667 in 1924–25. The law's impact varied widely by country. Immigration from Great Britain and Ireland fell 19%, while immigration from Italy fell more than 90%.

Newspaper headline from 1921

The Act established preferences under the quota system for certain relatives of U.S. residents, including their unmarried children under 21, their parents, and spouses aged 21 and over. It also preferred immigrants aged 21 and over who were skilled in agriculture, as well as their wives and dependent children under age 16. Non-quota status was accorded to wives and unmarried children under 18 of U.S. citizens; natives of Western Hemisphere countries, with their families; non-immigrants; and certain others. Subsequent amendments eliminated certain elements of this law's inherent discrimination against women.

The 1924 Act also established the "consular control system" of immigration, which divided responsibility for immigration between the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. It mandated that no alien should be allowed to enter the United States without a valid immigration visa issued by an American consular officer abroad.

Health inspection of immigrants at Ellis Island in 1921

It provided that no alien ineligible to become a citizen could be admitted to the United States as an immigrant. This was aimed primarily at Japanese and Chinese aliens. It imposed fines on transportation companies who landed aliens in violation of U.S. immigration laws. It defined the term "immigrant" and designated all other alien entries into the United States as "non-immigrant", that is, temporary visitors. It established classes of admission for such non-immigrants.

As a divided America struggles today with the issue of immigration we need to remember that the ideas of 'legal' and 'illegal' immigration date back only to the 1920s and like so much of American history are tied to race.

Sources: Immigration to United States.org, Smithsonian Magazine, LA Times

American Epic

I recently watched a series that every Dieselpunk should see, American Epic.

American Epic comprises a three-part historical music documentary, a feature-length performance film, and a set of companion album releases. The project is executive-produced by Jack White, T Bone Burnett, and Robert Redford directed by Bernard MacMahon and written by Bernard MacMahon, Allison McGourty, and Duke Erikson of Lo-Max Films..

Featuring newly discovered film footage and photographs, American Epic is the result of "some eight years of research" by MacMahon. It examines the period from the 1920s when US record labels explored rural America to find new audiences for music, and recorded "a huge variety of folk, blues, country and ethnic songs", representing "the DNA of America, its raw expression". The films feature "exclusive interviews with some of the last living witnesses to that era, when the musical strands of a diverse nation first emerged".

In addition to the three-part historical documentary there is a recording session with contemporary musicians released as a DVD and CD.


The official American Epic web site
The official American Epic PBS site
The official American Epic BBC Four Arena site

Dieselpunk Lexicon Part 10: Decopunk

"No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney." -  Al Smith, American statesman, Governor of New York, Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928

Dieselpunk has always had a dark reputation. One of its creators, Lewis Pollak, described it as being dirtier and grittier than Steampunk. But not all Dieselpunk is dark.

Decopunk is a brighter, more positive member of the Dieselpunk family. In an recent article at the Barnes & Noble web site titled Why "Decopunk" Deserves to Be Bigger than Steampunk, Sam Reader wrote,

"Drawing from the sleek, streamlined, futuristic aesthetic of the art deco movement, decopunk takes the glitz and glamor of the Roaring ’20s in science-fictional directions, frequently sprinkling in glittering elements of the weird and pulp fiction of the era."

Decopunk Movie "The Great Gatsby" (2013) Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Recently there have been rumblings on the internet describing decopunk as being a full-fledged genre-punk (Reader’s article is one example). However, those who would make such claims are mistaken because it’s not a genre-punk of its own. Decopunk source material is the 1920s, which as I mentioned in a prior blog post is one of the decades that provides source material for Dieselpunk. Wikipedia is correct when it defines decopunk as a subset of dieselpunk.

You can slice sashimi until it resembles fugu but it's still raw fish. ‘Decopunk’ is but simply a thin slice of Dieselpunk.

Decopunk Fiction, Radiance: The Novel by Catherynne M Valente

Dieselpunk Lexicon Part 9: Interbellum Period

In my last post I wrote about the Diesel Era, which stretched from roughly World War One through the Korean War. Buried within this Era was the Interbellum Period or Interwar Period.

The Interbellum Period had clear starting and ending dates. It began on November 11, 1918, which the day the Armistice went in effect and hostilities stopped in World War One, and ended on September 1, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. This roughly twenty year period of time saw dramatic upheavals, politically and economically, across the globe.

The Interbellum Period saw peace and prosperity. In the 1920s, the US economy flourished. The UK and France both recovered from the devastation of the war. Democracy appeared in Japan with the Taisho Democracy and in Germany with the November Revolution and Weimar Republic. Plus, voting rights for women were granted in both the UK and the US. There was a cultural renaissance across the globe.

However, the Interbellum Period also saw chaos. The world economy collapsed in 1928 resulting in the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl smothered the central regions of the US during the 1930s. In 1922 Benito Mussolini rose to power and established the first fascist dictatorship in 1925. By 1933 both the Japanese and German democracies had been replaced with fascist dictatorships. Russia saw starvation partially caused by collectivization, the rise of Stalin, purges of anyone he thought might oppose him, and the terror of the Soviet Gulags.

Dieselpunk Lexicon Part 5: Lovecraftian

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” - H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

A dark, ominous sense of dread. An ancient book with bizarre drawings and script. What’s this passage behind the walls? A staircase that travels down deep into the bowels of the earth. Something alien lurks in the darkness. Ancient and evil. A descent into madness.

Lovecraftian refers to a genre of fiction credited to H.P. Lovecraft during the 1920s and 30s. Rather than focusing of gore and shock, Lovecraftian horror focuses on a world-view called ‘cosmicism’ in which everyday life is believed to be just a veneer over a meaningless and alien reality that if fully revealed would drive a person insane.

H.P. Lovecraft

Some of the most common tropes of Lovecraftian horror are:

Great Old Ones - The beings first appeared in Lovecraft’s novella ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ (1931) but were already hinted at in the early short story ‘Dagon.’

Cthulhu - Cthulhu is in many ways a personification of the extreme nihilist vision of cosmicism. Cthulhu was first introduced in his short story The Call of Cthulhu published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. In the story he described it as ‘A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus- like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.’

Cthulhu

Necronomicon - A fictional grimoire capable of awakening Cthulhu and bringing the apocalypse. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft’s 1924 short story ‘The Hound’, written in 1922. Though its purported author, the ‘Mad Arab’ Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in Lovecraft’s ‘The Nameless City’.

I highly recommend HP Lovecraft: The Mysterious Man Behind the Darkness by Charlotte Montague.

Dieselpunk Lexicon Part 2: Manhattanism

People packed into urban spaces like sardines, living on top of each other. Life is as much vertical as it is horizontal. Skyscrapers seem to literally reach for the sky. Glass, steel and asphalt has chased away Mother Nature.The city is alive with it’s own heartless soul that never sleeps. The city no longer just a city. It’s become The City.

This extreme vision is known as ‘Manhattanism’, which was a term coined in 1978 by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In his book, Delirious New York, Koolhaas wrote, "Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan’s architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion."

Manhattanism is a theme that appears in a lot of Dieselpunk creations. The most famous being the proto-Dieselpunk movie 'Metropolis', which became the theme for so many Dieselpunk cities.

Metropolis (movie), 1927

Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow (book), 1929

Just Imagine (movie), 1930

Batman (movie), 1989

New Cap City from Caprica (television), 2010

Metropolis in DC Comics

Click here for an interesting online article about Manhattanism, Star Wars and Metropolis.

82nd Anniversary of the Repeal of Prohibition

Today marks the 82nd anniversary of the end of the disastrous "noble experiment" called Prohibition. The 18th Amendment of the US Constitution was ratified on January 16, 1919 and went into effect one year and a day later. Enforced by the Volstead Act of 1919, Prohibition outlawed the sale of beer and intoxicating liquors within the US. Though it succeeded at dramatically reducing the consumption of alcohol, Prohibition resulted in a dramatic increase in criminal activity and made criminals out of everyday citizens.

You can read the news article from the Daily News, printed December 6th, 1933, concerning the end of Prohibition here. 

Macy’s Day Parade

Here in the U.S. we’re celebrating Thanksgiving Day. Like so much, there’s a Diesel Era connection. To learn more visit the NYC Tourist web site.

Omerta

An important source material for dieselpunk is the rise of organized crime in the US during the 1920s, which was largely due to an unforeseen consequence of Prohibition.

The official web site for the History channel has a great short video on the Italian mob practice called “Omerta”.

The Great Gatsby (1974)

This is the first in a series of blog posts about contemporary creations based on the novel The Great Gatsby.

The year was 1974. Disco was new. Richard Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal. Patty Hearst was kidnapped. “All in the Family” was the most popular television show in America.

And The Great Gatsby premiered at the movies.

All of my readers should know the storyline of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel by now. Nick Carraway arrives in New York from the Midwest hoping to make it big selling bonds as the stock market is sky rocketing. After moving into the upper class neighborhood of West Egg he meets up with his cousin Daisy Buchanan, her husband Tom (an old friend of Nick from Yale) and Jordan Baker. Then one day Nick receives an invitation to attend a grand party hosted by his neighbor, the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Nick learns from Jordan that Gatsby had known Daisy years before and that he wanted Nick’s help in reuniting the two them. Events quickly begin to spiral out of control leading the deadly consequences.

The 1974 film had an all-star cast with Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Bruce Dern as Tom Buchanan and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway. Jack Clayton directed and David Merrick was the producer. The legendary Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay.

Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby

Vincent Canby's of The New York Times back in 1974 wrote in his review of the movie, "The sets and costumes and most of the performances are exceptionally good, but the movie itself is as lifeless as a body that's been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool."

In my view, Canby was being overly generous. I found the sets and most of the costumes to be horrible. Gatsby mansion was bland and the costumes at times looked more 1970s than 1920s. One might not enjoy Luhrmann’s Gatsby but at least the fashion was more accurate than Ralph Lauren’s attempt in the 1974 movie. I have no idea how the movie won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design.

I give the director Jack Clayton credit. It takes a unique talent to suck the life out of great an actor like Robert Redford but he succeeded. The acting was stilted and the camera angles were bizarre with strange editing. The cinematography was the same bad quality found in so many of the movies in the 60s and 70s. In addition, who in the name of all of the Gods of the Cinema thought that Bruce Dern was a good fit for Tom Buchanan? Dern was an abysmal choice for that role.

Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan

Oh, there were a few bright spots in the movie. The portrayal of Gatsby’s grand parties was spot on. The costumes of the partiers, especially the women, as opposed to the main cast, were quite accurate (maybe that was why it won an Oscar). Same for the dancing, which looked like it was straight from some of the candid films made of flappers during the 1920s. Moreover, Redford, unlike DiCaprio, was able to make the phrase ‘old sport’ seem natural although he fails to say it often enough in the movie.

The movie poster read, “Gone is the Romance that was So Divine.” That statement is a perfect description of the 1974 version of Gatsby.

Thankfully, you don’t have to spend your hard-earned money to watch this movie. If you really want to torture yourself, you can always watch it online at You Tube.