Valentines in the U.S.--It All Started Here!

Time to re-post my annual Valentine's Day essay. I see that in last year's New York Times there was a long article about Valentines, including two photographs of Esther Howland valentines--but no mention that she was living, and began making, Valentines in Worcester, MA!

(I recently bought these English and German-made valentines at an auction--sadly, they are not from Howland or Taft.)

Worcester, MA, the once-bustling industrial metropolis 45 minutes west of Boston where I live, is enormously proud of its rather peculiar list of “famous firsts”, including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the birth control pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball, the first liquid-fueled rocket and the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon (starring in a soon-to-be-published tell-all book “The Saga of Smiley”, printed by the Worcester Historical Museum and written by me.)

And every year about this time, you hear about how Worcester produced the first commercial valentines in this country thanks to a foresighted young woman named Esther Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine.

Esther Howland (1828-1904) attended Mount Holyoke at the same time as Emily Dickinson. She was the daughter of a successful Worcester stationer and, in 1847, she received a frilly English valentine that inspired her to ask her father to order materials from England so that she could assemble her own.  She then convinced her brother, a salesman for the company, to show a few of her valentines on his sales rounds.

The initial demand was overwhelming and Esther gathered some of her friends to help her assemble the valentines, seating them around a long table on the third floor of her home.  The company was eventually earning $100,000—a phenomenal success.

Esther is considered significant because, according to historians, she was among the first commercially successful women overseeing a female-run business, and she basically created the assembly-line system, paying the local women “liberally”.

She introduced layers of lace, three-dimensional accordion effects, and insisted that the verses be hidden inside--something you had to hunt for. She had her staff mark the back of each valentine with a red “H”.

In the Victorian era, Valentines were wildly popular, and the elaborate cards were scrutinized for clues—even the position of the stamp on the envelope meant something. Often the valentine was intended as a marriage proposal.

On Feb. 14, 1849, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousin, “The last week has been a merry one in Amherst, & notes have flown around like snowflakes.  Ancient gentlemen & spinsters, forgetting time & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for smiles…”

In 1879—after 30 years in business—Esther Howland merged with Edward Taft, the son of Jotham Taft, a North Grafton valentine maker.  Together they formed the New England Valentine Co. (and their cards were marked “N.E.V.Co.”)

This is where Esther Howland’s title of “Mother of the Valentine” begins to get a little shaky.

It seems, upon much study, that Edward Taft’s father, Jotham Taft of North Grafton, a small village near Worcester, started the commercial valentine business in the U.S. even before Miss Howland did,  but he didn’t like to talk about it, because the Taft family were strict Quakers and Jotham Taft’s mother sternly disapproved of such frivolity as Valentines. (Full disclosure—I live in North Grafton, about a stone’s throw from where Taft worked.)

In 1836, Jotham Taft married Sarah E. Coe of Rhode Island and two years later, they welcomed twin sons.  But in 1840, one of the twins died suddenly, leaving Mrs. Taft prostrate with grief.  Jotham decided to take his wife and surviving son to Europe with him on a buying trip for the stationer who employed him, and while in Germany, he bought many valentines supplies—laces, lithographs, birds and cupids.

When he returned, Taft began making valentines with his wife’s help, and in 1844—3 years before Esther Howland graduated from college—he opened a valentine “factory” in North Grafton (then called New England Village.)  But because of his mother’s disapproval, Taft never put his own name on the valentines—only “Wood” (his middle name) or “N.E.V.” for “New England Village”.  Some believed that Taft trained Elizabeth Howland as one of his workers before she opened her own factory

Taft and Howland merged into the New England Valentine Co. in 1879, and a year later Esther’s father became ill and she left her business to care for him.  After he died, she moved in with one of her brothers and she passed away in 1904.

Unfortunately, despite all the couples who presumably found their true love thanks to Esther’s creations, the “Mother of the Valentine” never married.

In 1881, George C. Whitney bought the combined business of Taft and Howland and it became The Whitney Co,  which dominated valentine production for many years.  Instead of cards laboriously made by hand, Whitney turned to machine- printed valentines and eventually added postcards in the 1890’s.  The Whitney designs, featuring children who resembled the “Campbell Soup “ kids, were wildly popular, although more often exchanged by children than adult lovers, and in 1942 the Whitney factory closed, as a result of wartime paper shortages.

Valentines in the U.S.--It All Started Here!

Time to re-post my annual Valentine's Day essay. I see that in today's New York Times there is a long article about Valentines, including two photographs of Esther Howland valentines--but no mention that she was living, and began making, Valentines in Worcester, MA!

 (I recently bought these English and German-made valentines at an auction--sadly, they are not from Howland or Taft.)

Worcester, MA, the once-bustling industrial metropolis 45 minutes west of Boston where I live, is enormously proud of its rather peculiar list of “famous firsts”, including barbed wire, shredded wheat, the monkey wrench, the birth control pill, the first perfect game in major league baseball, the first liquid-fueled rocket and the ubiquitous yellow Smiley Face icon (starring in a soon-to-be-published tell-all book “The Saga of Smiley”, printed by the Worcester Historical Museum and written by me.)

And every year about this time, you hear about how Worcester produced the first commercial valentines in this country thanks to a foresighted young woman named Esther Howland, known as the “Mother of the Valentine.”

Esther Howland (1828-1904) attended Mount Holyoke at the same time as Emily Dickinson. She was the daughter of a successful Worcester stationer and, in 1847, she received a frilly English valentine that inspired her to ask her father to order materials from England so that she could assemble her own.  She then convinced her brother, a salesman for the company, to show a few of her valentines on his sales rounds.

The initial demand was overwhelming and Esther gathered some of her friends to help her assemble the valentines, seating them around a long table on the third floor of her home.  The company was eventually earning $100,000—a phenomenal success.

Esther is considered significant because, according to historians, she was among the first commercially successful women overseeing a female-run business, and she basically created the assembly-line system, paying the local women “liberally”.

She introduced layers of lace, three-dimensional accordion effects, and insisted that the verses be hidden inside--something you had to hunt for. She had her staff mark the back of each valentine with a red “H”.

In the Victorian era, Valentines were wildly popular, and the elaborate cards were scrutinized for clues—even the position of the stamp on the envelope meant something. Often the valentine was intended as a marriage proposal.

On Feb. 14, 1849, Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousin, “The last week has been a merry one in Amherst, & notes have flown around like snowflakes.  Ancient gentlemen & spinsters, forgetting time & multitude of years, have doffed their wrinkles – in exchange for smiles…”

In 1879—after 30 years in business—Esther Howland merged with Edward Taft, the son of Jotham Taft, a North Grafton valentine maker.  Together they formed the New England Valentine Co. (and their cards were marked “N.E.V.Co.”)

This is where Esther Howland’s title of “Mother of the Valentine” begins to get a little shaky.

It seems, upon much study, that Edward Taft’s father, Jotham Taft of North Grafton, a small village near Worcester, started the commercial valentine business in the U.S. even before Miss Howland did,  but he didn’t like to talk about it, because the Taft family were strict Quakers and Jotham Taft’s mother sternly disapproved of such frivolity as Valentines. (Full disclosure—I live in North Grafton, about a stone’s throw from where Taft worked.)

In 1836, Jotham Taft married Sarah E. Coe of Rhode Island and two years later, they welcomed twin sons.  But in 1840, one of the twins died suddenly, leaving Mrs. Taft prostrate with grief.  Jotham decided to take his wife and surviving son to Europe with him on a buying trip for the stationer who employed him, and while in Germany, he bought many valentines supplies—laces, lithographs, birds and cupids.

When he returned, Taft began making valentines with his wife’s help, and in 1844—3 years before Esther Howland graduated from college—he opened a valentine “factory” in North Grafton (then called New England Village.)  But because of his mother’s disapproval, Taft never put his own name on the valentines—only “Wood” (his middle name) or “N.E.V.” for “New England Village”.  Some believed that Taft trained Elizabeth Howland as one of his workers before she opened her own factory

Taft and Howland merged into the New England Valentine Co. in 1879, and a year later Esther’s father became ill and she left her business to care for him.  After he died, she moved in with one of her brothers and she passed away in 1904.

Unfortunately, despite all the couples who presumably found their true love thanks to Esther’s creations, the “Mother of the Valentine” never married.

In 1881, George C. Whitney bought the combined business of Taft and Howland and it became The Whitney Co,  which dominated valentine production for many years.  Instead of cards laboriously made by hand, Whitney turned to machine- printed valentines and eventually added postcards in the 1890’s.  The Whitney designs, featuring children who resembled the “Campbell Soup “ kids, were wildly popular, although more often exchanged by children than adult lovers, and in 1942 the Whitney factory closed, as a result of wartime paper shortages.

Obama Visits Greece and Nick Quotes Him the Bible

  Was it only last year that I posted this?   Why does it seem like it happened so many years ago?  Wonder if the current POTUS is as familiar with the Bible as Obama was?

Last Sunday, Nick and I were in New York when he got word that he was invited to attend the state dinner in President Obama’s honor to be given by the Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos in the Presidential Palace in Athens on Tuesday night.

So we drove back to Massachusetts while Nick scrambled on the phone to find a flight out of Boston that would get him to Greece in time for Tuesday.  (There are no direct flights to Athens at this time of year.) He eventually flew on Monday afternoon on Lufthansa to Frankfurt and then to Athens, arriving midday on Tuesday. I really wanted to go too, but the Embassy told him no spouses were coming, not even Michelle Obama.

Nick has sent me photos of the event, which he thoroughly enjoyed.  Young women in native costume welcomed the 120 guests entering the grand dining room.  They were seated at long tables arranged like three sides of a rectangle, or the Greek letter pi. Obama sat in the center of the head table, at the right of Greek President Pavlopoulos and on Obama’s right was Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

 I was amused to see that Tsipras, who as a Marxist and leader of the leftist Syriza party made a point throughout his campaign of never wearing a tie, appeared throughout the state dinner and other events honoring Obama, always tie-less in an open-necked white shirt.  I was also amused that the Prime Minister, an avowed atheist, was seated next to the Archbishop of Athens. I wonder what they talked about.

While Prime Minister Tsipras speaks halting English, Greek President Pavlopoulos knows it well, but both made their public remarks in Greek and then paused for an English translation.  Watching the event on Greek TV, I heard Obama whisper to President Pavlopoulos, “Is this your house?  Do you live here?” and Pavlopoulos answered, “No, I have a home over by the Hilton.”

The menu, printed in two languages, featured “Shrimps with citrus fruits”, “rice with vegetables and herbs”, “baked grouper with greens, garnished with potatoes and cherry tomatoes”, “chestnut dessert”, ”seasonal fruit, two kinds of wines and coffee.

President Obama began his remarks with “kalispera” (good evening) and lauded Greece for the country’s hospitality, humanity and its contributions to the world as the source of democracy.  After the Greek president and prime minister spoke,  the children’s choir of the Greek National Opera sang four songs, both John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Simon and Garfunkel’s  “Sounds of Silence” and two popular Greek songs by Theodorakis and Hadjidakis.  Afterward, Obama enthusiastically mixed with the children and thanked them for their performance.

Sadly I have no photo of Nick talking to Obama.  At U.S. State dinners, there is usually a photographer who takes your photo as you are introduced to the President in a reception line, but at the Greek state dinner, Obama shook hands with the guests as they filed out of the dining room.

Nick had a brief conversation with Obama which delighted them both—Nick said, paraphrasing a famous statement made by Saint Paul right before his martyrdom: “Mr. President, you have fought the good fight, you have finished the race, you have kept the faith.  History will not slight you.”  Obama replied, “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”  Then he took a few steps, turned back smiling and said, “Letter to Timothy right?” (He was right, it’s from 2nd Timothy 4:7.  Proof that our President knows his Bible and was not dozing during Sunday school.)

The next day, Wednesday, Obama visited the Acropolis Museum and saw the Parthenon for the first time.  Then he spoke to a large group of invitees at the new Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center.  Nick was there.

I asked Nick, when it was all over, if he felt Obama’s visit to Greece had been a success. (It was covered live for three days on Greek TV, which I watched sporadically.) The New York Times said last Tuesday that Trump’s victory had rattled Greece because “Obama had been supportive of Greece’s efforts to get its finances in order, and of Europe’s bid to keep Greece stable.  Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hoped that Mr. Obama, who travels to Berlin on Thursday, might even persuade the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to offer Greece some debt relief by the end of the year.”

In answer to my question Nick said, “I think it was important to both the visitor and the visited. Obama, as he finishes his presidency, wanted to go to the fountainhead of the values he pursued as President. And that of course is Greece, where democracy and individual rights and equal justice under law were developed.  And the Greeks needed somebody to show compassion for their plight in view of the hard stand their fellow Europeans, especially the Germans, are taking. I think both of those goals were fulfilled very successfully. Obama was really in top form.”

 

Forgotten Family Photos from 1983

 The other day, going through some files in my husband’s office, I came across these three photos that were taken by a People Magazine photographer early in 1983.  My first thought was “Were we ever that young?”  The second: “Was my hair ever that curly?” (Clearly that was a perm!)

 The photos were taken shortly after Nick’s book Eleni --about his mother’s life and death in 1948 during the Greek civil war-- was published and then sold to become a movie.  The film Eleni was released in 1985, starring Kate Nelligan as Eleni and John Malkovich as the adult Nick.  (Secret: you can watch it on Youtube for free.)

 People published a six-page article about the book and Nick’s attempts to find his mother’s killer. These three photos were never used in the magazine, which is probably why we have them.  They were taken right here in our house in Grafton, MA, which still looks much the same 34 years later, but we sure don’t.  In the photos son Christos is 11, and daughters Eleni and Marina are 8 and 5.  Nick is 43 and Joan is 42. 

 It was poignant but also exciting to rediscover those photos from so long ago, when the children were still small.  We had been living in a suburb of Athens, Greece from September of 1977, when Marina was only a few months old, because Nick was sent there by The New York Times to be a foreign correspondent.  We returned to the U.S. and our house in Grafton in 1982, a year before the book Eleni was published. 

After I discovered the photos, I dug out of the files the People magazine with the article.  The opening spread is above.  You can read the whole article on line here:  http://people.com/archive/a-sons-quest-for-revenge-vol-19-no-21/ but it doesn’t include any pictures.

At the same time I discovered the People photos, I came across two amazing shots of Nick on the job in Iran in 1977 when he was covering the Iranian revolution and almost became a hostage in the American embassy in Tehran.  But I’m saving those for a future post.

Obama Visits Greece and Nick Quotes Him the Bible

 

Last Sunday, Nick and I were in New York when he got word that he was invited to attend the state dinner in President Obama’s honor to be given by the Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos in the Presidential Palace in Athens on Tuesday night.

So we drove back to Massachusetts while Nick scrambled on the phone to find a flight out of Boston that would get him to Greece in time for Tuesday.  (There are no direct flights to Athens at this time of year.) He eventually flew on Monday afternoon on Lufthansa to Frankfurt and then to Athens, arriving midday on Tuesday. I really wanted to go too, but the Embassy told him no spouses were coming, not even Michelle Obama.

Nick has sent me photos of the event, which he thoroughly enjoyed.  Young women in native costume welcomed the 120 guests entering the grand dining room.  They were seated at long tables arranged like three sides of a rectangle, or the Greek letter pi. Obama sat in the center of the head table, at the right of Greek President Pavlopoulos and on Obama’s right was Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

  I was amused to see that Tsipras, who as a Marxist and leader of the leftist Syriza party made a point throughout his campaign of never wearing a tie, appeared throughout the state dinner and other events honoring Obama, always tie-less in an open-necked white shirt.  I was also amused that the Prime Minister, an avowed atheist, was seated next to the Archbishop of Athens. I wonder what they talked about.

While Prime Minister Tsipras speaks halting English, Greek President Pavlopoulos knows it well, but both made their public remarks in Greek and then paused for an English translation.  Watching the event on Greek TV, I heard Obama whisper to President Pavlopoulos, “Is this your house?  Do you live here?” and Pavlopoulos answered, “No, I have a home over by the Hilton.”

The menu, printed in two languages, featured “Shrimps with citrus fruits”, “rice with vegetables and herbs”, “baked grouper with greens, garnished with potatoes and cherry tomatoes”, “chestnut dessert”, ”seasonal fruit, two kinds of wines and coffee.

President Obama began his remarks with “kalispera” (good evening) and lauded Greece for the country’s hospitality, humanity and its contributions to the world as the source of democracy.  After the Greek president and prime minister spoke,  the children’s choir of the Greek National Opera sang four songs, both John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Simon and Garfunkel’s  “Sounds of Silence” and two popular Greek songs by Theodorakis and Hadjidakis.  Afterward, Obama enthusiastically mixed with the children and thanked them for their performance.

Sadly I have no photo of Nick talking to Obama.  At U.S. State dinners, there is usually a photographer who takes your photo as you are introduced to the President in a reception line, but at the Greek state dinner, Obama shook hands with the guests as they filed out of the dining room.

Nick had a brief conversation with Obama which delighted them both—Nick said, paraphrasing a famous statement made by Saint Paul right before his martyrdom: “Mr. President, you have fought the good fight, you have finished the race, you have kept the faith.  History will not slight you.”  Obama replied, “Thank you. That means a lot to me.”  Then he took a few steps, turned back smiling and said, “Letter to Timothy right?” (He was right, it’s from 2nd Timothy 4:7.  Proof that our President knows his Bible and was not dozing during Sunday school.)

The next day, Wednesday, Obama visited the Acropolis Museum and saw the Parthenon for the first time.  Then he spoke to a large group of invitees at the new Stavros Niarchos Cultural Center.  Nick was there.

I asked Nick, when it was all over, if he felt Obama’s visit to Greece had been a success. (It was covered live for three days on Greek TV, which I watched sporadically.) The New York Times said last Tuesday that Trump’s victory had rattled Greece because “Obama had been supportive of Greece’s efforts to get its finances in order, and of Europe’s bid to keep Greece stable.  Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras hoped that Mr. Obama, who travels to Berlin on Thursday, might even persuade the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to offer Greece some debt relief by the end of the year.”

In answer to my question Nick said, “I think it was important to both the visitor and the visited. Obama, as he finishes his presidency, wanted to go to the fountainhead of the values he pursued as President. And that of course is Greece, where democracy and individual rights and equal justice under law were developed.  And the Greeks needed somebody to show compassion for their plight in view of the hard stand their fellow Europeans, especially the Germans, are taking. I think both of those goals were fulfilled very successfully. Obama was really in top form.”

 

Aging Gracefully vs. Cosmetic Intervention

Danny Ghitis for The New York Times

When I saw the large photograph of Dr. Fredric Brandt, the “King of Collagen” on the front of last Sunday’s New York Times Styles section, I was startled by the image of an expressionless face with red over-puffed lips and a gold halo around his head like that of a saint on a Greek Orthodox icon.

My first thought was that it was Bruce Jenner, father to the Kardashian klan, who seems to be turning from a man into a woman with the help of cosmetic fillers and plastic surgery.

But no, it was an article on dermatologist Fredric Brandt, who is evidently the leading doctor of choice with celebrities like Madonna and Stephanie Seymour, thanks to his ability to keep them looking ageless.  According to The Times, “Dr. Brandt is the designated magician responsible for keeping faces both well known and otherwise in states of extraordinary preservation. …The 64-year-old physician acts as the syringe-wielding wizard responsible for using techniques like his signature Y lifts—in which fillers are injected below the cheekbones—to hold back time for any number of supermodels, trophy wives, celebrities and industrial titans of either sex.”

The author of the article, Guy Trebay, responded to a comment by Dr. Brandt that some Hollywood stars want to cut too soon, to overfill, “When there’s too much pulling, too many procedures, you lose the softness along with the personality of the face…” by asking him if he felt his experiments on himself had produced that effect.  Brandt replied, “People think I look pretty good.”

Now I’m not in a position to criticize people for using cosmetic surgery, since I’ve written several articles for Vogue magazine on the subject of my two facelifts over the past 20 years and a go-around with “Fraxel: Repair” laser treatment five years ago. (I’m now 73.).  But my gut reaction to The Times’ photograph of Dr. Brandt was that he’d be an ideal candidate to play a vampire in one of those films that have become so popular recently. His skin is so taut and his face so pale (except for the red puffy lips) that he seems embalmed.

This was much like the reaction my husband had to the sight of Kim Novak in her much-discussed appearance at the Oscars.  (I missed it, but looked her up later.  The problem that both Kim Novak and Dr. Brandt seem to have is:  too much filler and too much Botox, eliminating all the expression lines that make a face individual.)

On Sunday I saw the article on Brandt, then on Tuesday I looked up the reactions on-line to the piece.  I wondered if I was the only one appalled by the famous doctor’s work on himself, but after reading 106 comments, I learned that the vast majority of the reactions echo my thoughts—that the doctor’s appearance is “super creepy” and, as one person wrote.  “When a doctor can't even perceive his own disfigurement, how could you possibly trust his aesthetic decisions?”

 Monday night, on the Turner Classic Movie channel, I saw an hour-long interview with Eva Marie Saint, talking about her life in films and the leading men and directors she’s worked with.  She said straight out that she was 88 years old (and has been married to the same man for over 60 years.) People, she’s turning 90 on July 4, 2014!

I thought she looked wonderful—she had wrinkles, sure, but they were nice wrinkles.  I can’t tell you if she’s had any “work” done, but her neck did have the turkey wattle effect that is so hard to avoid.  I remembered Eva Marie Saint vividly from her role in “On the Waterfront” with Marlon Brando.  It was her first film and she won an Oscar for it in 1954, when I was 13. It was a shock to see once again in the clips from the film what a young, innocent, almost vulnerable girl she appeared.  But now, at 88, she was confidant, vivacious, funny, smart and she moved with youthful grace—all of which made her seem much younger than her years.

I listened avidly to what she said about her life, hoping to catch some clues as to how she remained so vital.  One thing she emphasized was:  “You have to walk every day—walk for an hour every single day!”  It was also a matter of genes—her mother had lived into her nineties.  And she remarked several times that she had a very happy childhood and a long, loving marriage to a husband who was a director—and thus understood her art as an actress.  But she felt that if she had married a fellow actor—or a lawyer or doctor—there might have been a clash of egos that would doom the marriage.

First I heard about all the plastic surgery digs on the social networks during the Oscars, then last weekend I read about Dr. Brandt and saw the results of his work. Finally, after marveling at how Eva Marie Saint has maintained her verve and beauty for 88 years, I think it’s time for me to stop fighting.

In the last year or so I’ve acquired those fine crepe-y wrinkles around the mouth and eyes. Everyone knows that  people like me, with fair skin and blue eyes, wrinkle sooner and worse than those with darker skin, but I’ve decided to let time take its toll without further cosmetic intervention---except, maybe, just a teensy, tiny shot of Botox between the eyebrows now and then, when I notice that those frown lines are back, making me look perpetually angry.   

The Power of a Photograph

This photograph, taken by Bassam Khabieh for Reuters, was on the front page of The New York Times on Aug. 22

I read with great interest the article in Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review, “The Delicate Handling of Images of War”, written by Margaret Sullivan,  the newspaper’s public editor, defending the decision of The Times’ editors to use in the newspaper two shocking photographs from Syria.

One was a large (four-column-wide) photograph from August 22 that I described in a recent post, “The Children of Damascus”, which began " The beautiful babies and children, wrapped in their white shrouds, laid in a row in the street in front of a mosque, while a voice on a loudspeaker asks people to come forward and identify the bodies.  They seem to be sleeping, but they were choked to death with poison gas.”

This image deeply affected me when I saw it on the front page of my morning newspaper, and it (and similar photos and videos) clearly moved President Obama as well because, in his address to the nation on Tuesday, he said: "The images from this massacre are sickening.  Men, women, children lying in row, killed by poison gas.”

I’ve been a journalist all my life and my medium is words, not photographs, but I’ve always been fascinated by the ability of a photograph to hit you like a punch in the gut –something that words can rarely do (but sometimes it happens—especially if you’re reading Yeats.)

This unique ability of photographs to elicit a visceral reaction in the viewer is one reason photography has always fascinated me and why I’ve been collecting antique photographs for decades.  Today, when we’re all aware of the ways that an image can be manipulated, it’s hard to realize how shocking and convincing the first photographic images were in the 1840’s, after Louis Daguerre revealed his discovery to the world. 

These images “written by the sun” as they were advertised, (because, before electricity, they could only be taken on a sunny day) were understood to be God’s undeniable truth.  That’s why photographs were immediately used by scientists and politicians for propaganda to promote their warring views.  Louis Agassiz, the leading scientist of his day, traveled to southern plantations in the 1850’s and had African-appearing slaves stripped and photographed on daguerreotypes (now owned by Harvard University) in an effort to substantiate his arguments that the Negro was a separate (and inferior) species from the Caucasian.  That’s why the Northern abolitionists, starting with Charles Sumner, hired photographers to photograph mulatto slaves-- who appeared to be white-- and circulated the images to media like The New York Times and to politicians, to excite anti-slavery feeling.  (I’ve blogged about this, most recently in   “White Slave Children of New Orleans – Why?” )

Back to the disturbing photographs coming out of Syria.  Newspapers have always taken pains editing the images on the front pages, which their readers will see as they sit down to their breakfast cereal.  But sometimes a photograph is so moving and so important that The Times runs with it.  The example I remember most clearly was the1972 image of the little girl in Viet Nam, naked and burning with napalm as she ran away from an attack on her home.  The minute I saw it, I said, “That photograph is going to win the Pulitzer Prize.”  And it did.  And perhaps it hastened the end of that war, as I (and President Obama) hope the photographs of the dead children in Syria will lead eventually to the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons.

In defending The Times’ editors, Ms. Sullivan mentioned that they cropped the photograph of a Boston Marathon bombing victim, which showed that one of his legs had been reduced to a single naked bone projecting from his knee.  In this case, the newspaper’s editors were trying to protect us from the gore, but in the present day of instant, unedited dissemination of news, I and everybody else had seen that photo in its entirety on the internet almost before the victim reached the hospital.

Photographs have a unique ability to move us and drive us to take action, and as long as the photograph is real (un-tampered with) and as long as the caption is accurate in telling us where and when it happened (not the case with a second Times photograph in Sullivan’s piece showing kneeling Syrian soldiers about to be executed by rebels in Syria), I believe that reporters and editors should never have to apologize for showing us the truth of what they see.

My interest in the impact of photography is the reason I follow a blog—BAGNewsnotes.com-- that analyzes news photographs, discussing what they appear to show and how they are being used as propaganda.  Two days ago it featured a series of photographs of executions in Syria, prefaced with the words, “Warning:  Some of the following images are graphic in nature and might be disturbing to some viewers.”  I usually can tolerate scenes of gore, but that day I chickened out after the first photo.  Today I’m going to make myself go back and look at them.