Posts Tagged ‘Georgia’
“It is generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended”*…
Scheduling note: as tomorrow is July 4, (Roughly) Daily will be off. Regular service will resume on July 5… and should continue uninterrupted for awhile. Meantime…
The “Great American State Fair,” ostensibly celebrating the 250th birthday of the U.S., is having a rocky run. After the talent for what was presented to them as a bi-partisan event largely withdrew, the Fair’s champion, President Trump, converted the opening into an unabashed “Trump Rally.” Thereafter, sparse attendance, equipment issues, high prices, and other embarassments.
As it happens, President Trump has some historical company. 100 years ago, in Philadelphia, dicey politicians hoped to replicate the success of the 1876 Centennial Exposition with a celebration of America’s 150th birthday. Instead, the 1926 “world’s fair” lost millions of dollars, hobbling the city’s finances on the eve of the Great Depression. Meilan Solly reports…
A century ago, the first visitors to Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial International Exposition—held to mark the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding—waded through mud and wandered along unpaved sidewalks to reach the heart of the fairgrounds, only to find carpenters still at work on half-finished exhibition halls and gaping holes marking the spots where attractions had yet to be built.
Dining and shopping options were limited, and some of the few exhibits on view stretched the very definition of “entertainment.” One was a model Post Office where “you could go send yourself a letter and watch it get canceled,” says historian Thomas H. Keels, author of Sesqui! Greed, Graft and the Forgotten World’s Fair of 1926. “That was it.”
The 200,000-plus Shriners in town for their fraternal organization’s national convention realized that their parades and rallies were the main events planned for these early days of the fair. Many went home disappointed, telling family and friends that the exposition wasn’t worth visiting…
Held in Philadelphia between May 31 and December 31, 1926, the fair—referred to as the Sesqui—celebrated the 150th anniversary of the United States’ founding. Little remembered today, the event was a financial failure that Varietydeemed “America’s greatest flop.” Exact figures are hard to come by, but Keels suggests that the fair lost the equivalent of more than $410 million in today’s dollars, effectively bankrupting the city of Philadelphia.
The exposition was America’s main celebration of the sesquicentennial. Congress authorized the fair and provided limited funding for it, in addition to issuing commemorative coins and encouraging local celebrations, but the scale of federal participation paled in comparison with that of the 1976 bicentennial and this year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Attendance at the Sesquicentennial Exposition also failed to match the numbers of Philadelphia’s 1876 centennial celebration, which attracted roughly 20 percent of the country’s population in an era when planes, cars and luxury liners had yet to make long-distance travel more accessible. Organizers predicted that 30 million people would visit the 1926 fair; ultimately, fewer than five million paid to attend. [For comparison, more than 44 million people visited the “World of Tomorrow” at the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair. Two and a half decades later, 51 million visitors flocked to the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.]
What doomed the sesquicentennial? Poor planning and lukewarm reviews by the fair’s early visitors contributed to the disastrous outcome. So, too, did the streak of bad weather that plagued Philadelphia during the exposition’s run, with rain falling on more than half of the days the fair was open to the public.
Although some observers considered the lackluster public response a sign that the golden age of world’s fairs had come to an end, Chicago’s 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition proved this prediction wrong, drawing more visitors than any of its predecessors. Overall, Keels attributes the 1926 fair’s failure to its “association with what was being viewed as an increasingly corrupt political machine,” headed by Pennsylvania Republican William Scott Vare.
After the fair incurred “nationwide ridicule,” Keels tells Smithsonian magazine, Vare and other local politicians were eager to move on from the endeavor, selling off leftover structures piecemeal “for pennies on the hundreds of dollars.” This push to forget the sesquicentennial has reverberated into the present: Just one building constructed for the 1926 fair stands in Philadelphia today…
More of the macabre story: “America’s 150th Birthday Celebration Was Deemed the Nation’s ‘Greatest Flop.’ What Went Wrong With the Sesquicentennial?” from @smithsonianmag.bsky.social.
Apposite: “America Is Trapped in the Grossest Pool Party of All Time.”
* John Steinbeck
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As we rethink recreation, we might celebrate one of the great “public parties” of all time, recalling that it was on this date in 1970 that the Second Atlanta International Pop Festival opened in a soybean field adjacent to the Middle Georgia Raceway in Byron, Georgia. Running officially through the 5th (but actually ending around dawn on the 6th), 500-600,000 folks attended a festival designed to foster a sense of community that transcended race, region, and social class. And while the weather was boiling (local farmers brought watermelons and cantaloupes to help attendees), and there were reports of occasional nudity and recreational drug use, the three days were essentially trouble free… and a blast.
Performers included The Allman Brothers Band, the Chambers Brothers, Richie Havens, Grand Funk Railroad, It’s a Beautiful Day, B.B. King, Lee Michaels, Mott the Hoople, Mountain, Poco, Procol Harum, Rare Earth, John Sebastian, the Bob Seger System, Spirit, Ten Years After, Johnny Winter– and the Jimi Hendrix Experience who, at midnight on this date in 1970, played his rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” for nearly 500,000 people—the largest crowd of Hendrix’s career.
Georgia’s “colorful” governor at the time, Lester Maddox, who had tried repeatedly to prevent the festival from taking place, vowed that he would do whatever it took to block any similar event in the future. The state legislature willingly complied and enacted sufficient restrictions to make it much more difficult for anyone to organize another rock festival in the state. A third Atlanta Pop Festival never took place.
Georgia’s loss. As “Abraham Lincoln” said (in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), “Be excellent to each other. And… PARTY ON, DUDES!”
“History has left its mark on every corner, reminding us of our roots”*…
Wendell Brock on photographer Paul Kwilecki, who spent four decades documenting a single southwest Georgia county, a place he called home and where he never truly fit in…
Paul Kwilecki, the great Southern documentary photographer, was so enamored of his hometown that he could get homesick without even leaving.
He spent a remarkable four decades taking pictures of Bainbridge, Georgia, and surrounding Decatur County – and virtually no place else.
“The picture of the stores on Broad Street that I took Sunday is so lyrical and melancholy and has such a quality of loneliness that it has set me to thinking and feeling further in this direction,” Kwilecki wrote in his private journal in 1967, just seven years into his singular body of work.
“In that picture I put my finger on a feeling that is distinctly little-town. The stillness of the buildings with not a person in sight gives the viewer the feeling that he is standing alone just across the street about to cry with homesickness, in spite of this all being familiar and his hometown, for it is a more remote, unapproachable home that he longs for. This is as poetic an image as I ever made and I want to pursue the quality that makes it so.”
Exactly what was the “remote, unapproachable home” this isolated artist so desperately yearned for? Was it a metaphor for heaven? A memory of a lost moment in time?…
… Over time, Kwilecki’s great themes would emerge: home, memory, the passage of time, the certainty of death. And by the time of his own death in 2009, at age 81, he had metamorphosed from a somber young man into a sweet, wistful grandpa with a white beard and a yellow Labrador retriever he fed cubes of cheese and talked to like a baby. By then, Charlotte, his beloved wife of 56 years, was gone, and his work was done: He’d shot thousands of images and culled them down to the 539 master prints that form the core of the Paul Kwilecki Photographs and Papers Collection in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University. Consisting of more than 9,000 items in 56 boxes and one large folder — 42 linear feet — the archive is a trove of negatives, prints, contact sheets, journals, letters, speeches, and arcana that reveal the soul of the self-taught artist from Bainbridge.
Today, photo geeks the world over consider Paul Kwilecki a master of the documentary form. I’ve never met a serious photographer or curator who didn’t want to pull up a chair and rhapsodize about Kwilecki. Never. You can see his influence on Athens-based Mark Steinmetz, Bainbridge native Jimmy Nicholson, North Carolina’s Rob Amberg, Kentucky’s Sarah Hoskins.
And yet to the general public, Kwilecki’s iconic images of the Decatur County Courthouse, Willis Park, Oak City Cemetery, the Flint River, and numerous other scenes barely register. Kwilecki got this. He did not feel seen — and felt required to explain himself at every turn, from the first picture to the last…
Brock traces Kwilecki’s steps, combs through his archives (sharing more photos), and cracks open his personal journals, revealing the man’s inner life – and genius: “The Only Home He Ever Knew,” from @MrBrock in @BitterSouth.
* Paul Theroux, Deep South
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As we reflect, we might send carefully-composed birthday greetings to Berenice Abbott; she was born on this date in 1898. While studying to be a sculptor in Paris in 1921, Abbott signed on as assistant to Man Ray, and quickly developed a reputation for her photographic portraits of his artist friends, then more generally of important cultural figures of the interwar period.
In 1929, Abbott moved to New York, having been taken with the city’s “photographic potential.” Over the next decade, she focused on documentary photography and on portraying the city as it underwent a transformation into a modern metropolis. Ralph Steiner wrote in PM that Abbott’s work was “the greatest collection of photographs of New York City ever made.”
Abbott’s third act began in the 1940s, when she turned to science. Abbott’s style of straight photography helped her make important contributions to scientific photography. She produced a series of photographs for a high-school physics textbook, developed by the Physical Science Study Committee project based at MIT to improve secondary school physics teaching. Between 1958 and 1961, she made a series of photographs for Educational Services Inc., which were later published. They were subsequently presented by the Smithsonian Institution in an exhibition titled Image of Physics. Then, in 2012, some of her work from this era was displayed at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For more on Abbott– and many examples of her wonderful work– see here, here, and here.
“Troubles hurt the most when they prove self-inflicted”*…
Earlier this year, Georgia’s Secure, Accessible, and Fair Elections Commission held a public meeting at the state capitol to answer a pressing question: What should Georgia do to replace its aging, touchscreen voting machines, as well as other parts of its election system? In the preceding years, security vulnerabilities in the state’s election system had been repeatedly exposed: by Russian operatives, friendly hackers, and even a Georgia voter who, just days ahead of the 2018 midterms, revealed that anyone could go online and gain access to the state’s voter registration database.
Computer scientists and elections experts from around the country had weighed in during the seven months of the commission’s deliberations on the issue. They submitted letters and provided testimony, sharing the latest research and clarifying technical concepts tied to holding safe, reliable elections. Their contributions were underscored by commission member Wenke Lee, co-director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Information Security and Privacy, and the group’s only computer scientist.
Despite this, the commission ultimately did not recommend measures backed by Lee and his colleagues at places like Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Google — including the recommendation that the state return to a system of paper ballots filled out by hand, combined with what scientists call risk-limiting audits. Instead, the commission recommended buying a system that included another, more expensive touchscreen voting machine that prints a paper ballot. Months later, Lee was at a loss to explain: “I don’t understand why they still don’t understand,” he said.
With its decision, Georgia’s counties remain among the 33 percent of counties nationwide that use either machines with no paper trail or machines that print paper ballots, which are then scanned on separate machines. The vast majority of the rest of the counties use paper ballots filled out by hand, which are then scanned or counted by hand…
Georgia is one of many states that is adopting or considering voting technology that some experts say decreases security and election integrity: “Georgia’s New Election System Raises Old Computer Security Concerns.”
[Most of those voting systems run on Windows 7, a dated operating system that’s demonstrably vulnerable to hackers… and that reaches “end of life” in January.]
* Sophocles
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As we wonder why, we might recall that it was on this date in 1946 that notices were tacked onto the doors of African-American churches in Fitzgerald, Georgia reading “The first n-gger who votes in Georgia will be a dead n-gger” [without the ellision].
Scoping scale…
On AndaBien, web designer Steve Rose pursues his extra-vocational enthusiasms… among them, evolution.
His Evolution Timeline is a marvelous evocation of the sheer temporal scale of our antecedents.
— From first life-forms to homo sapiens
* The background indicates inches and feet.
* 1/20th in. = roughly 100 thousand years. (108,000)
* 1 inch = about 2 million years. (2,160,000)
* 1 foot = about 26 million years. (25,920,000)
* The whole page is about 135 feet wide, almost half a football field, representing 3.5 billion years. (3,500,000,000)
The very beginning of the timeline (and of life on Earth)
So, be prepared to scroll… and scroll and scroll and scroll… And to learn. (By way of reinforcing one’s sense the extraordinary sweep of it all, readers might also appreciate Rose’s “Evolution, The Movie.”)
As we struggle with the recent revisions to the tree of life and the suggestion that humans are more closely related to fungus than to plants, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that Coca-Cola was first sold to the public at the soda fountain in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia. It was formulated by pharmacist John Stith Pemberton, who mixed it in a 30-gallon brass kettle hung over a backyard fire. Pemberton’s recipe, which survived in use until 1905, was marketed as a “brain and nerve tonic,” and contained extracts of cocaine and (caffeine-rich) kola nut. The name, using two C’s from its ingredients, was suggested by his bookkeeper Frank Robinson, whose excellent penmanship provided the famous scripted “Coca-Cola” logo.
Are you sending a text, or are you just glad to see me?…
From Clusterflock, via the ever-illuminating Jason Kottke, “Meat Stylus for the iPhone“:
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.
It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger. Here’s the not-entirely-useful English translation of a Korean news article about the soaring sausage sales.
As we head directly for the refrigerated section of our grocery stores, we might recall that it was on this date in 1733 that James Oglethorpe founded that 13th of the original American Colonies– Georgia– and a settlement that has grown to become Savannah. February 12 is still observed as Georgia Day.
Oglethorpe’s idea was that British debtors should be released from prison and sent to the new colony. Ultimately, though, few debtors ended up in Georgia. Rather, colonists included many Scots and English tradesmen and artisans and religious refugees from Switzerland, France and Germany, as well as a number of Jewish refugees. The colony’s charter guaranteed the acceptance of all religions– except Roman Catholicism, a ban based on fears born of the colony’s proximity to the hostile settlements in Spanish Florida.
Oglethorpe also arranged that slavery should be banned by Georgia’s Royal Charter; and the colony was slavery-free through 1750 (after Oglethorpe’s departure back to England). At that point, the Crown acceded to land owners’ desire for a larger work force, and lifted the ban.
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