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wolfhuntsmoon · 5 years

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Sarah Rogers pt 2: or, how baby!Steve imbibed a fuck-you attitude with his mother’s milk

Okay, so after looking at Sarah’s backstory, how she met Joseph and had Steve and decided to go to America, I couldn’t stop thinking about: what next? The MCU wiki is VERY thin on the ground with detail, and she’s so interesting! Plus, this is, like, one of the most criminally underdeveloped sources for Steve Rogers’ character, as I mentioned in pt 1. So, what can we reasonably source from the time to fill in the gaps?

So: I said in my previous post Sarah likely arrives in January/February of 1918. This is because in those days, travel times were long, conditions were VERY poor and you did not want to be heavily pregnant on a cheap ship to America with the conditions on board. Plus, in those days there was no guarantee a ship company would even sell you a ticket if you were visibly pregnant. It did happen, but was risky for the company, so you could never be sure. Sarah would have left asap once she made a decision.

The journey itself would have taken about 3-4 weeks. First she would have had to travel to London, because nothing would have been leaving to America from the French or Belgian coastline, as a) most of it was too close to the war and b) the bits that weren’t wouldn’t have been profitable. Travel to London from Passchendaele would have taken a few days to a week, given the mud and absolute priority troops and military materials were given on all journeys. This map here shows it took between 7-10 days to arrive in New York from London (by ship, no flights until the late 1920s/1930s) in 1914 before the outbreak of the war. I mentioned how at this point the German U-boats were basically sinking anything they found not flying a German flag, which made this journey pretty hazardous, even with the newly introduced (and very effective) protection of the convoy system. If Sarah was travelling on a fast convoy (less likely as they were primarily for troop ships) it would have taken about a week. Slower moving convoys carrying mostly cargo might have taken 2 weeks, even 2 and a half weeks if the weather was bad. Convoys, by the way, were where groups of ships were clustered together and escorted across the Atlantic by a combination of naval ships bristling with every explosive known to man, and navy ships disguised to look like harmless merchant cargo ships but ALSO bristling with every explosive known to man, to prevent U-boats sinking them. And also attack U-boats when they turned up. Not if. When. As you may be imagining, these journeys often contained lots of Things Going Boom and people Dying in Unpleasant Ways. Sarah would have been told by literally everyone she knew that this was a stupid, near-lethal decision, and that she should just NOT. But Sarah being Sarah, ignored this in the pursuit of what she felt was right and best for her and her baby... that doesn’t sound familiar at all, does it?

Okay, so she’s made it through the journey to the iconic Ellis Island. The next problem was that Immigration to the USA was incredibly curtailed by 1918, compared to the levels of immigration to the US prior to WWI beginning. In this, Sarah was lucky. Prior to WWI, on average between 1900-1914 about 1 million immigrants arrived into the US each year. In 1918, roughly 110,000 did - Sarah being one of them. I’ve said before that she would have had an easier time getting passage on a ship in the first place because she was comparatively better off on a nurse’s wage and was a middle class professional. More than that, most travel was reserved for the military - and Sarah likely had connections, being the wife of an American soldier, which made it easier for her to gain passage on a ship. (More on this later.)

Her status and profession is also very important for explaining how Sarah gained entry to the US, because by the end of WWI, the open door policy of the 19th and early 20th century had been solidly shut. The open-door policy had essentially allowed anyone who could pass a very basic medical and legal check free entry to reside in the USA, and the Ellis Island museum has a very good description of just how cursory these checks were - they were nicknamed the ‘six second physicals’. 98% of immigrants passed straight away, and a only a very small percentage of the remainder were put on a ship back to their country of origin. But by the outbreak of WWI, politicians and the public had become uneasy about this. Mostly due to racial concerns - Chinese immigration was the first to be restricted in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act. Japanese immigrants were targeted in 1907 and all Asian immigrants in 1917. (I see a lot of posts on tumblr talking about how immigration restrictions in the US began by denying Jewish refugees entry in the 1930s, which... is wrong. So, so wrong. But anyway.) Here is a contemporary cartoon showing a pretty good summary of attitudes to immigration by the time Sarah would have been travelling:

(The 3% refers to immigration restrictions put in place by Congress AFTER the war, btw.)

But the US wasn’t just worried about one continent’s people! Or even ‘just’ non-whites! Oh no... they were also VERY worried about the ‘wrong sort’ of white immigrant too. Namely, anyone from southern and eastern Europe, and the Irish.

The discrimination against the Irish is an interesting one, because on the face of it, the Irish were the kind of immigrants the US wanted - north and western Europeans. But here’s where eugenics and pseudoscience come along and fuck things up for a lot of people. Part of the reason why the US was suspicious of southern and eastern Europeans was political - that they harboured a tendency towards violent revolutions, communism and anarchy. The Irish, after the violence of the 1916 Easter Rising and the fact that a not-insignificant number of violent revolutionaries tried to facilitate a German invasion of Ireland (and then unionists ran guns during the war through Kriegsmarine U-boat dropoffs on the Irish coast in... defence???? Idk either.), came to be included in this politically radical group. That’s the first strike.

The second strike came from the fact Irish had the British working against them. In those days, British media and culture really set the tone for the rest of the world. Remember, the US was not a world superpower yet - this is when Britain is at the height of its power, ruling 20% of the world’s people and 25% of its land surface by 1924. Britannia really did rule the waves, and much of the world’s culture, at this point. Hollywood, and American ‘soft power’ had yet to develop into the behemoth it is now. British culture persistently depicted the Irish as subhuman, ape-like, feckless, uncivilised and dangerous, as you can clearly see here:

The top one is from 1866, and the second one from 1849. Both were cartoons published in Punch Magazine, which was the pre-eminent social and political publication that EVERYONE read in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It also played a huge role in shaping social attitudes, and you can see more of its, and others, views on the Irish in these excellent galleries. The rest of the British media was the same - almost universally negative views of the Irish, which filtered across the Atlantic over time. And seemed to be vindicated by events like the 1916 Easter Rising, and before that a long running number of secret societies the British kept discovering, plotting revolution against their rule. The whole ‘kiss me I’m Irish’, dying the Hudson green on St Patrick’s day, ‘omg I love an Irish accent’ thing? Didn’t happen until the latter half, or really the last quarter, of the twentieth century. The Irish were pretty much persona non grata when Sarah was alive. Part of the explanation for this came from the idea that the Irish were a part of a lesser race, their Celtic origins leading to a lack of judgement, predisposition to alcoholism and hotheadedness, and passionate outbursts which meant you needed to treat them more like children. Conveniently enough for the British, this explanation meant you didn’t need to treat your subjects like equals, deserving of the vote, or indeed with anything except violence and condescension. Ha. Funny that.

But anyway, back to America.

Third strike: the Irish were Catholic, as Sarah would have been. Only the very richest in society were Protestant, because they were descended from British settlers. Both the British and the US governments of the time viewed Catholicism with deep suspicion, partly for historical reasons (Martin Luther, 1517 and all that jazz) but ALSO because the Catholic Church remained a vastly powerful institution which could and did command the loyalties of people more than the national government, and this represented a dangerous fifth column within the nation state. Most of north and western Europe was Protestant, unlike the south and east which was predominantly Catholic (with the exception of France. But hey, they’re the French. No big.) so the Irish being 99% Catholic was yet another reason they got lumped in with the other ‘undesireables’.

Not a small part of this was caused by the fact that the Irish had been immigrating to America in vast numbers ever since the Great Famine (aka the Potato Famine/Blight) to the tune of and average of c450,000 Irish per decade between 1850-1900. That is... a LOT. Like, New York’s population in 1890 had only just hit 2.5 million! Ireland’s population TODAY is 5 million! So by the end of WWI, there was already a sense that Too Many Irish were here, particularly since the Irish tended, like most immigrant communities, to move into certain areas in large numbers via family groups and connections. Sarah would have been no exception to this, which I’ll explore more in pt 3 later. It was a very common practice in this period for a man to go to America and work, then bring his family and extended family over. Or for young relations to go and live with family already in America if there was no work in Ireland - which there wasn’t, the Irish economy being subsistence agriculture and not a lot else.

All of this together means that when Sarah arrives in Jan/Feb of 1918? She’d get a pretty rough welcome at Ellis Island (still used for incoming immigrants until new legislation establishing a visa system in 1924 went through and basically made it redundant.) and beyond.

Below is a pic of an Ellis Island arrival card, just because it’s cool:

These tightened restrictions resulted in not just health checks, but intelligence tests and ‘mental fitness’ tests, which if failed, could result in the immigrant being sent back to their country of origin. However, Sarah would have made it through okay, because she had good English, her profession and likely her marriage cert and references from Joseph Rogers’ commanding officer to speed her passage. She may even have had family connections already in New York or America, but for the reasons outlined in my previous post, probably wasn’t in contact with them. Or if she did contact them, was likely to be ignored and ostracised. Because patriarchy, yay.

But ironically? Getting into America was the easy part. I know, I know, unbelievable, especially when you consider she was PREGNANT during this. I mean, can you imagine enduring morning sickness and all the other joys of pregnancy on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic in WINTER, in danger of sinking from a U-Boat torpedo at any moment? Can you? Can you??? Sarah Rogers came up against an immense set of obstacles just to get into America and just fucking ploughed through them like they were tissue paper. Which explains a LOT about Steve Rogers, that’s for sure.

Join me next time for pt 3, where I explore Sarah’s living and working situation after she arrives and we all learn to be even more in awe of how fucking metal she was.

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juniorformulamotorsport · 4 years

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Thursday, 28th November/Friday, 29th November 2019 – Hamburg

We always aim to go somewhere that has plenty of Christmas markets, and plenty of other things to see and do as well for the first weekend in Advent, and so this year we headed to Hamburg, in the North of Germany, for our “get in the mood for Christmas” trip.

It’s a city I have some history with, having been a few times including my first trip abroad in 1966 when I was despatched via BOAC to stay with my aunt, Lottie, who lived there, for the six weeks of the summer holiday. I was 7 years old and had my own passport, and my parents drove me all the way to Heathrow, handed me over to the airline staff, and picked me up again 6 weeks later. I was keen to have another look at a city that I last saw 30 years ago, a week after the Berlin wall fell, when it was the logical place for my parents and I to meet our relatives from the East who were able to travel west for the first time in my life. So… history… I wondered if I��d recognise much and was keen to find out. First we had to get there of course. A noon flight out of Heathrow was perfect timing, and having booked Club Europe tickets (only marginally more expensive than Economy) we had lounge access at the airport, fast track security, and were well looked after on the flight out too. The meal provided was very good, and the Champagne was generously supplied.

We landed on time and didn’t have to wait too long for our luggage, and were soon out of the airport and swinging into a cab for the short-ish ride to the city. We could have used our Hamburg Cards, but if we don’t have to, we prefer not to wrangle luggage on and off public transport. As we would later discover, it would almost certainly have involved the Number 6 bus, because as far as I can tell, everything did! It took slightly less than 30 minutes to get to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and we were soon checked in, with an upgrade thanks to my IHG Ambassador membership. There followed around an hour attempting to find anywhere to put anything! The rooms have been recently refurbished and I don’t think it’s for the better, personally. In the room we had there was a small wardrobe for hanging things, and not a single shelf or drawer for anything that can’t be hung, like, say socks. It was utterly infuriating in a “first world problems” sort of way. We ended up parking stuff on the narrow ledge that ran from the tiny desk space round the side of the room, Lynne put stuff under her bedside cabinet, and I used the floor under the tiny table beside my bed. I really wasn’t amused and it’s a shame that they’ve done this… A social media rant later revealed that this is now a common complaint, especially among my female friends who travel for business. Perhaps whoever designs these things should be made to spend a week in a mocked up version of whatever they are considering, in possession of a week’s worth of stuff, and see how they damn well like it!

Eventually we got organised, and cleaned up, and decided that we’d pop to the bar for our welcome drinks. The bar proved to be very welcoming, and the staff were superb. Friendly, engaging, keen to help, which is all you can hope for in hotel staff. A drink or two and we were due to head out for dinner at TYO TYO, of which more in a separate post.

On Friday we treated ourselves to a latish start, and had a very good breakfast in the hotel, at least once we’d got the hang of the coffee machine, we did. The cups are too small for the latte/cappuccino options, and I didn’t realise immediately that there were larger, glass mugs available for those. It’s the sort of thing you want to be obvious when you’re coming in for breakfast, because until you’ve had coffee, nothing is obvious! After that we headed out into the Sankt Georg neighbourhood, which is interesting it its own right, to walk to the Kunsthalle, having been told we really should not miss it, and being advised by the guidebooks that we should spend as much time in there as we could spare. They said it would be rewarding; they weren’t wrong! If anything, they understated their case substantially.

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is is one of the largest museums in Germany, and was founded in 1850. Today, it covers seven centuries of European art, from the Middle Ages to the present, with a focus on North German painting of the 14th century, paintings by Dutch, Flemish and Italian artists of the 16th and 17th centuries, French and German drawings and paintings of the 19th century, and international modern and contemporary art. Needless to say it also runs a variety of exhibitions, and you could probably lose yourself in the complex of three buildings for an entire weekend. The museum began life as the “Städtische Gallerie”, run by the Hamburg Kunstverein, which was founded in 1817. The collection grew with donations, and purchases, and they quickly needed a building to house all the works. The original red brick Kunsthalle was built between 1863 and 1869, financed largely through private donations and it has grown, and grown from there.

The Kunsthalle is divided into the Gallery of Old Masters, the Gallery of 19th-century Art, the Gallery of Classical Modernism and the Gallery of Contemporary Art, and in a sense of linear solidarity we started with the early works of which they have a very healthy collection, including some mighty fine altarpieces, which is not surprising in such a rich city. The museum website highlights the works of the masters Bertram von Minden, who seems to have spent most of his life in and around Hamburg, and whose work I was much taken with, particularly the Buxtehude altar piece and this, which is from the Petrikirche in Hamburg and dates from 1379 to 1383. It’s huge and phenomenally detailed and definitely rewards close study.

As if that wasn’t enough, they have works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, in particular a portrait of the three electors of Saxony, (the rather wonderfully named Frederick the Wise, John the Steadfast and John-Frederick the Magnanimous), and Hans Holbein the Elder, and we made our way through the rooms admiring the works, and thinking we maybe should have picked up the audio guide (though if we had we’d probably have needed even longer to get round).

After we’d dealt with them, we moved on to a rather fabulous collection of drawings by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn – to give him his proper name – in an exhibition entitled Rembrandt, Masterpieces from the Collection. The Kunsthalle has around 300 Rembrandt etchings which belonged to the art dealer and collector Georg Ernst Harzen (1790–1863), who bequeathed them to the City of Hamburg in his will in 1869. I suspect we’ll be seeing some of them again in Oxford in January next year, but that in no way detracts from the sheer joy of getting up close to some of these incredible works. It’s amazing what can be done with just a few apparently scratchy lines, is all I can say! There turned out to be another roomful of these amazing treasures downstairs in the basement, and I could have happily spent a large part of the day taking in the details.

Of course, we already knew about Caspar David Friedrich, but I’d not seen any of the paintings it real life before. When you hit the section on German Romanticism, there’s a whole roomful of them, including the especially well known “Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer”(Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog) from 1817. It’s so famous it even appears on a piece of Hamburg street furniture close to our hotel, and while it’s regarded as his masterpiece, I’m not so sure.

Personally I was more enamoured of “The Sea of Ice” in terms of atmosphere, finding it to have something oddly futuristic about it.

Failing that, however, the piece I would steal is this one of church ruins near Dresden, “Kirchenruine Oybin”. The light is so special and so magical.

By now we were in need of a break, having had nothing beyond a coffee since breakfast, so we found our way to the basement and the café Das Liebermann, where we were soon in possession of much-needed cake. The Cube would have been a better choice perhaps, but we’d been informed that it was closed for a special event of some sort, so cake it was.

Fortified by cake (and somewhat disappointed to later discover we could have had soup or a wurst) we set off back into the collection, moving ahead in time to the turn of the last century and promptly tripping over the first of a series of works in the 100 Years of the Hamburg Secession – Encounters with the Collection exhibition, scattered throughout the galleries with other works from the same time period. I knew about the Viennese Secession, but the Hamburg group was new to me, and I was especially interested to see the work of a number of women artists prominently displayed, including Alma del Banco, Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen, Anita Rée and Gretchen Wohlwill.

After we’d finished there we needed another quick sit down, before heading over through the Modern Art section (via Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso et al) to the Impressionism exhibition. On the way though I was much taken with this humourous Picasso owl which just made me smile so much – though it does seem that in addition to knowing some funny looking women, and men, Pablo also knew some funny looking owls.

The Impressionism exhibition in the newer part of the museum, which you get to by tunnel. Here the display was of masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection, which I had not heard of but which I think I now need to check out. The collection, which is state-run, began with paintings collected by businessman Wilhelm Hansen and his wife, Henny in the late 19th century. The collection contains works by all of the leading Impressionist artists from Camille Pissarro, by way of Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet, to Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the rest, including a group of eight paintings by Paul Gauguin. It is obviously an impressive collection, even with just a selection on show in Hamburg so I think it may need to be seen.

Feeling somewhat exhausted by now, and realising several hours had gone by, we headed back outside and decided to walk down to one of the Christmas Markets not far away. We settled on the Weisser Zauber on the Jungfernstieg, the promenade that runs along the Binnenalster. The stalls are all white and are quite upmarket and swish, and I managed to buy myself a new wallet because mine is now falling apart, and a new pair of fleece lined dark blue leather gloves as despite having packed in an organised manner, and having a 64kg luggage allowance (!) I’d managed to forget my gloves and hat. We decided we’d stop for a gluehwein, which should have been relaxing, but no one told the Hamburg seagulls, which are an absolute menace. When one dive-bombed some poor bloke for whatever it was he was eating and skimmed straight past my face to do it, we figured we’d best drink up and move away.

I wasn’t any keener on the seagulls after we spotted one eating something that turned out to be the wing of a pigeon… Lovely. We soon forgot about that though as we walked through the delightful Alsterarkaden, a charming arcade built between 1844 and 1846 after the Great Fire of 1842 took out the old town and made way for new developments. The design was the responsibility of Alexis de Chateauneuf (1799-1853), the architect who was born in Hamburg and whose work can also be found in Paris and Oslo. It’s full of rather swish cafés, and very posh shops including this upmarket rum establishment, and again reminds you that there is money in Hamburg (it has the largest number of millionaires in all of Germany).

It also overlooks the Rathaus square, which has its own Christmas market, and which we would take a closer look at on another day. It was time to wander back towards the hotel, investigating a couple more markets on the way, one of which was selling the paper lampshade stars we like to use at this time of year.

We also stuck our noses into the Pride market, but although the DJ was in full swing, and the glitterball was reflecting off the pink reindeer, it was far too early for the clientele and there was hardly anyone there. We walked back along Lange Reihe and stopped off at a small wine shop to buy a bottle of wine before returning to the hotel to shower and change ahead of dinner at Wolfs Junge.

Travel 2019 – Hamburg, Days 1 and 2 Thursday, 28th November/Friday, 29th November 2019 - Hamburg We always aim to go somewhere that has plenty of Christmas markets, and plenty of other things to see and do as well for the first weekend in Advent, and so this year we headed to Hamburg, in the North of Germany, for our "get in the mood for Christmas" trip.

#2019 #Arts #Bars #Christmas #Crowne Plaza Hamburg #Europe #Germany #Hamburg #Hotels #Jungfernsteig #Kunsthalle Hamburg #Museums #Travel #Weisser Zauber Christmas Market

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