Blacks in Whiskey Advertising III

For the past two years, my contribution to February’s Black History Month has been to discuss the historical depiction of blacks in whiskey advertising. The 2010 post focussed on a series of images to show some progression over the years as views on civil rights evolved. Last year the post featured ads depicting black waiters serving whiskey. This year I have gathered another group of images from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several of them disturbing but nevertheless instructive.

The first is a sign that shows a black man walking down a road with a chicken under one arm and a watermelon under the other. We are expected to assume that he did not come by either honestly. He has spotted lying in the road, a bottle of Fern Glen Rye whiskey and looks at it with great interest. But he will have to lay down one or the other treasures in order to secure it. “I’se in a perdickermunt,” he says. The whiskey made by the Fern Glenn Distilling Co. of St. Louis, Missouri. The company appeared only a short time, 1916 and 1917, in local business directories, perhaps indicating ads like this did not work.

The stereotype watermelon appeared in another distiller’s ad, again involving a choice between the melon and a bottle of whiskey. The melon is held by a black woman wearing an apron; the whiskey by a bearded winking man. On the ground in front of them is a boy wearing a tattered hat who is clearly torn between one and the other. The caption is a strange one: “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” The medieval saint’s temptations were largely sexual in nature, rendering this caption ridiculous.

This image appeared on a number of signs, some like this one with a faux wood motif. It was the product of the Paul Jones Distillery. It was founded by a family who provided sons and their wealth to the Confederacy only to find after the war that their home was in ruins and they themselves were destitute. This may have been the reason for the persistent racism in Paul Jones advertising. Initially from Virginia the Jones family moved to Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1886 and eventually adopted the name, Frankfort Distillery. It was one of a favored few distilleries allowed to make medicinal whiskey during Prohibition and emerged into the Post-Pro era, where its advertising continued to demean blacks.

The next ad, for Prosperity Whiskey, was the product of the Bernheim Distillery of Louisville, Kentucky, an organization better known for its I.W. Harper Brand. The Bernheims, emigrated from Germany with little money but created one of the most successful whiskey enterprises in American history. The photographic image of a Negro wedding shown on this saloon sign is profoundly offensive even by the standards of that earlier time. Although accounted philanthropists, the Bernheims apparently were not above patently racist advertising. The next ad, showing a ragged black boy dancing to his own accompaniment is also from Bernheim. It advertises “Old Continental” whiskey. Cards like this were printed with a local saloon carrying the whiskey printed on the bottom.

The next card shows a black boy kissing a black girl with the caption: “Honey duz you love me as much as my Pa duz ‘Old Prentice Whisky?’” In the background a voice from a cabin says, “Whar dem chillun.” This brand was the product of J.T.S. Brown & Sons of Louisville
in business from 1871 to 1919. These were blenders of whiskey featuring several brands and drawing their liquor from a range of Kentucky distillery warehouses.

The Louis Petzold Company of Baltimore produced a trade card with a murky message. It shows a white youth poking his head from a globe of the Western Hemisphere while in the background a group of blacks is picking a vast field of cotton. In the foreground a side-wheeler steamship moves by. The whiskey is “Dixie” and it product said to be “for medicinal use.” Petzold, a German immigrant, is said to have started a liquor business in 1862, although his initial directory listing is 1870. The firm disappeared from listings in 1898.

Unfortunately the torn label on this “Old Mose” flask prevents identifying the merchant behind the brand. The organization also issued a shot glass advertising Old Mose but did not include other information. The next trade card shows another dancing black. This time it advertises both a whiskey (Old Crow) and a saloon (Hayes at the White House). This was a Boston-based drinking establishment that sold customers a beer for a nickel and a shot of whiskey for a dime.

The sum impression of these pre-Prohibition images is their perpetuation of racial stereotypes, their distortion of black physical features, their attribution of fractured English, and their feeble attempts at humor. As a antidote to these images, I include here a 1966 Old Taylor Bourbon ad that celebrates as an American hero, Benjamin Banneker (1731-12806), a free African American astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, almanac author and farmer. The ad celebrates in particular his role in surveying the boundaries of the District of Columbia.

Harvey F. Crawford and His Shoes Under Glass

For reasons I have yet to fathom, certain businesses commonly provided glass paperweights to advertise their products or services. Among them were funeral homes, steamship lines and distillers. But perhaps the most frequently seen are from shoe companies. The epitome of this phenomenon was the Crawford Shoe Company.

This observation sends us to a hard luck but persistent and far-sighted entrepreneur named Harvey F. Crawford. Born in Maine, about 1881 Crawford emigrated to Brockton, Mass., as a young man where he was determined to succeed in the shoe business. His picture shows him with a shock of black hair, a large walrus mustache, and piercing dark eyes.

He created his first shoe manufacturing company with $25. It soon failed. Undeterred Crawford began again. This time his factory burned down. He started over yet a third time, but in 1886 was forced to declare bankruptcy when a local bank failed taking his cash reserves with it.

In 1887, with a deep-pockets new partner funding the enterprise, Crawford launched a fourth shoe company with an outlandish retailing idea. He would open proprietary shoe stores in good locations in large Eastern cities to merchandise the products of his Brockton factory. He also would sell cheap (shoes for $3.50 and $5.00) and advertise heavily in popular magazines of the day. Said a 1902 biography of Crawford: Many of his friends tried to dissuade him from what they deemed certain failure.”

As it turned out, Harvey was the Sam Walton of his day. Over a period of 15 years he opened stores in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Haven, and Washington. Their success allowed Crawford to open a second shoe factory in New York City. Within a decade he could boast 30 outlets in major Eastern cities.

Another of Harvey’s inspirations was an emphasis on customer giveaways. He favored paperweights. Shown here are an array of weights from a number of Crawford’s outlets in major cities. They demonstrate an array of vintage shoe styles. Several added color to the image.

For his Washington, D.C. retail outlet Harvey abandoned the shoe motif to issue paperweights depicting the Washington monument and the G.A.R.. Encampment of 1892 in the Nation’s Capitol. A thriving veterans organization of former Northern soldiers and sailors, the G.A.R. was a highly potent political force during the post-Çivil War era. A feature of its national conventions were commemorative medals sold to participants. Crawford replicated one on a paperweight.

Among the dignitaries attending the 1892 encampment was Rutherford B. Hayes, a former president of the United States (1877-1881) and a Union army officer during the Civil War. From Hayes we have a narrative of what happen in Washington during the G.A.R. national event. Hayes marched shoulder to shoulder with the rank and file as the “great parade” of veterans surged down Pennsylvania Avenue to great crowd applause. “Nothing of the sort could have been better than the demonstration on Fifteenth Street -- Treasury on one side, Riggs House on the other....It was enough to stir the blood of the coldest and the oldest,” Hayes recorded in his daily journal. He did not mention parading by Crawford’s shoe store at 9th and Pennsylvania.

Crawford’s prosperity did not last long. Creative but not particularly good at managing a business, after 1902 he was forced to sell out to other interests. The company eventually was owned by Charles A. Eaton, who raised prices and tried for a classier shoe image by featuring a huntsman with his dog.

As for Crawford, after retiring from the shoe business he was associated with the Crawford Manufacturing Co., making the Crawford rigid steel shoe shank. He also patented inventions in shoe manufacturing and appliances and was recognized widely in Brockton as a leader in local business development. After a long illness, Crawford died in his Brockton home, age 70.

Part of Harvey Crawford’s legacy is a wealth of glass paperweights to remind us of the footwear styles of yesteryear. The weights also memorialize the creativity of a entrepreneur who declined to let three failures at retailing shoes deter him from a fourth, spectacularly successful, enterprise.

Pantin Paperweights: Snakes in the Glass

My fascination with snakes and other reptiles in ceramic also translates into glass, in this case glass paperweights. The most famous and rare of these were produced in France in the middle of the 19th Century by a company generally known as “Pantin.” According to sources fewer than 20 of these snake, salamander and worm paperweights are known. From a range of Internet sources I have gathered eight Pantin weights to show here.

Little is known about the Pantin factory and what information is available often is partial and even conflicting. One account goes like this: The Cristallerie de Pantin was founded by E. S. Monot at LaVillette, France, in 1850. It moved to Pantin, near Paris, in 1855. The company manufactured glass tubes and other chemical glass, crystal drinking vessels, and chandeliers. None of the weights Pantin produced were signed or dated. Evidence of Pantin paperweight making is in printed materials from the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878. American delegate Charles Colne described the snakes, lizards, fruits, and millefiori that amazed him in their skilled craftsmanship. The company continued until 1915, when it merged with Legras & Cie to form Verreries et Cristalleries de St. Denis et Pantin.

The artists who produced these weight overcame the risks involved in representing delicate and detailed animals in molten crystal, while preserving the fine quality of the lampworking. Frequently the bodies were wheel-cut to simulate scales. The legs and other details were added. It is suggested that one reason salamanders are a frequent Pantin motif is that they were thought to be able to survive fire unharmed. As such, it is said, they were long revered by glassmakers.

In 2010, A Pantin weight sold for $65,370, more than double its estimate. Shown here, it is just over 4 inches in diameter and shows a yellowish orange spotted black salamander clambering across green leaves with red and white flowers, all set on an opaque white ground mottled with moss and buff-coloured sand. Beautiful, indeed, but a pricey piece of glass.

The red salamander weight that follows is another prize. It was part of the Henry Melville Fuller collection of paperweights given to the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire in 1999. Said Mr. Fuller: "One of my favorite weights from this period was made by Pantin, a factory near Paris. The paperweight is somewhat unusual...lizards and snakes being a favorite subject of the Pantin artists. But these weights are very scarce, for the factory was only in business for a short time."

Most known Pantin weights can be found in museum collections. The next item, featuring a green snake, is from the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. In 1978 that institution brought together 13 examples in a special exhibit, believed to be the largest assemblage ever made of Pantin weights. The Chicago Art Institute has in its collection a Pantin weight that features three silkworms on a mulberry leaf. I am uncertain of the provenance of the last four weights shown here.

For $65,000, one of these Pantin weights might be purchased to be held in the hand. As the next best thing, this post offers up this array of eight for viewing, each offering its own “eye candy.” And they are presented here free of charge.

Whence Ephemera Collecting in an E-Age?

Recently the Washington Post ran a lengthy article on collectors of ephemera, that is, people who all kinds of items that are made of paper or other substances that were never meant to last over time. The word itself is from the Greek and means “for a day.” There is even an Ephemera Society of America with a sizable membership and a website.

These folks collect an amazing list of items. Among them are advertisements, billheads, stock certificates, trade cards, postcards, sheet music, photographs, bookplates, cigar box labels & bands, and greeting cards. The hobby is not a new one, having begun in England a century or more ago as the British developed colorful lithographic printing with elegant designs that were collected and often pressed into scrapbooks. Shown here is a particularly interesting early British trade card, currently valued at $800.

As American printers and design caught up to the Brits in the 1900s, American printers and lithographers began turning out attractive color images, such as the ad for the Colorado Rockies shown here. This card is in a university collection. Other U.S. trade cards, such as the Uncle Sam shown, here come up at auction frequently. Often they bring high prices.

Ephemera collectors sometimes can make innovative use of their hobby. One of them is Author Caroline Preston. Ms. Preston, shown here, is described as a “former archivist and keen collector of ephemera. She has employed her collection to give birth to a new literary form: a novel that revolves around ephemera. She calls it “The Scrapbook of Freddie Pratt.”

The story, laid during the “Roaring 1920s” in a type set narrative set among images of vintage paper items. Ms. Preston, a collector herself, uses illustrations from fashion drawings, valentines, cigarette ads, party game boards, prescriptions for medicine, and trade cards to tell her story. The novel has garnered a number of favorable reviews.

I suspect very few collectors could pull off what Ms. Preston has done. For most of us, ephemera ends up tucked away in scrapbooks or plastic paged albums or even file folders. When I first began writing articles for collector magazines in 1990, I mailed my manuscript to the publishers with numbered photos inside as the illustrations. Most of them were photographs that I had purchased or taken myself. Sometimes the photos were of ephemera I had been forced to purchase just to fill out a need for pictures. Many of those trade cards, ads, etc., are still tucked at various places around the house. A few were displayed in my July 2011 post on “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.”

With the dawn of the Internet, however, a revolution has taken place. Author William Gibson, shown here, in an interview with the Washington Post on 2007 called it the “eBay era “ Gibson, who is credited with inventing the term, “cyberspace,” noted that “every class of human artifact is being sorted and rationalized by this economically driven machine that constantly turns it over and brings it to a higher level of searchability....It’s like some sort of vast curatorial movement.”

Gibson is dead right. Moreover, eBay, Google, and other sites are bringing to public view all manner of ephemera from bygone days and exposing them to public view. No longer are trade cards, labels, travel stickers, and old photos stuck away to be looked at by an individual collector when the mood hits. Now they are on public view 24-7 and often for sale.

For several years now, I have not mailed any photos. The illustrations for my pieces, like the text itself, fly over the Internet to my editors. In one instance, the final format of the piece is itself an Internet newsletter, sent to members of a collecting club. It never sees a “hard” copy. As a result of the changes the electronic age has brought, I have accumulated on my Mac several thousand images, most of them of ephemera. They grace my articles and fuel this blog and its companion blog: “Those Pre-Pro Whiskey Men.” I collect several images virtually every day, file them on the computer, and call them up when needed.

Recently for the whiskey man blog, I did a post on a man named Domenico Canale who created a liquor and food dynasty in Memphis, Tennessee. Much earlier I had come across a marvelous circa 1910 photo of a fruit vendor, which Domenico had once been, pushing a cart that advertised Canale’s flagship whiskey, “Old Dominick.” It was a highly useful image to put across visually the rapid rise of an Italian immigrant boy to financial success. I have filed the photo away on my computer to use in such other contexts as may arise in the future.

What is the bottom line for ephemera in an electronic age? Go digital, you collectors, go digital!

Buggy Makers: Gone But Not Forgotten

It is customary to say when something becomes obsolete that it “went the way of the horse and buggy.” Certainly the invention of the automobile in the late 19th Century doomed thousand of carriage makers in the United States. By the early 1920s, except for specialty builders (e.g. for Amish), virtually all were out of business. Earlier, however, a number of those companies had preserved their finest flivvers on glass paperweights that have survived through ensuing decades, many for a century or more.

This post celebrates that industry by depicting ten weights depicting buggies and providing a bit of history on each, as possible. The first, from C.H. Armstrong & Son is one of few employing color. It displays a large wheeled carriage and claims not only to provide “regular styles” but also “original novelties.” This firm was located in Wakefield, Rhode Island. It was a large carriage operation manufacturing in a long three story building with accompanying sheds. C.H. Armstrong & Son had its beginnings in 1861 and closed in 1921 when its attempts at invading the automobile business failed.

The Columbus Buggy Company was formed out of earlier companies in Columbus, Ohio, about 1875. By 1900 it was the largest buggy manufacturer in America, employing more than 1,000 workers. It is reported that both Harvey S. Firestone and Eddy Rickenbacker got their early business experience while working at the Columbus Buggy Company before moving on to other ventures. With the advent of the motor car, the company began to produce automobiles early in the 20th Century, both electric and gas powered. The vehicles failed to attract customers and the Columbus Buggy Company went bankrupt in 1913.

One of the classiest buggy paperweights in my view is one from the Buffalo Spring and Gear Company of Buffalo, New York. My research into this company has not resulted in much information, including not determining if the company made complete carriages or only springs and gears. I did discover that the Buffalo firm went out of business in 1902, well before the automobile took over. Little information is available as well on A. Meyer & Bro. They were a San Francisco firm and listed in a directory there in 1886-1887.

Henry Hooker was the head of the carriage company that bore his name, located in New Haven, Connecticut, and probably the individual most responsible for the paperweight with a photogravure picture of a buggy. A direct descendant of the Civil War general, Thomas Hooker, Henry was born in 1809 in Kensington, Connecticut. In 1840, he married Charlotte Lum of Oxford in that state and they had two children, both born in New Haven. Hooker died in 1873, before the automobile age, and a school in New Haven is named in his honor.

Wm. D. Rogers Son & Co. of Philadephia was one of America’s largest and most important carriage builders of the mid to late 1800s. This firm about 1894 moved from manufacturing the stage coach shown on the paperweight to constructing automobile bodies. It is said to have turned out the first limousine and first touring car bodies ever made in Philadelphia, constructing them for prominent local businessmen. Despite the fact that the Rogers company had a reputation for fine work, it went out of business in the 1920s.

I have been unable to find information on the Pierre Brault company of Montreal. But the J.D. Mockridge Carriage Repair was a Montclair, New Jersey, firm that operated from a large three-story building on Greenwood Avenue. There is a 1892 photo of the establishment that displays its production of buggies, wagons, and a horse drawn ambulance it was building for a local hospital. The paperweight, characterized by a multi-color format, is marked as the product of the Pyrophoto Company of New York City.

Samuel E. Bailey established his first company in 1890 in York, Pennsylvania. He specialized in the manufacture of wagons and later opened a factory for carriages in nearby Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He became the region’s largest employer, opened a show room in Philadelphia and erected a new, larger factory in 1896. The epitaph for the company, written by a historian of the buggy industry, reads: “Unfortunately the firm’s directors did not anticipate the success of the automobile, and in the mid-teens the region’s largest manufacturer was forced into bankruptcy.”

Our final paperweight is from the Burr Coach Builders of New York City. Note that it is straddling both worlds as other buggy makers tried to do, featuring both horse-drawn carriages and automobiles. Burr is reported to have experimented with automobile bodies as early as 1897 when they built the body for Henry W. Struss’s 4-cylinder Struss automobile. Burr was listed as a manufacturer of automobiles in the 1901 Hiscox directory, but historians doubt that complete vehicles were ever produced. Like so many similar manufacturers, Burr & Company did not survive, going out of business after 1910.

Ten paperweights tell ten somewhat different stories, the common thread being attempts to meet the threat to the horse and buggy from the newly invented internal combustion engine. Carriage manufacturers responded in diverse ways, but ultimately all memorialized here did not survive the technological revolution. But the artifacts they left us help to keep their memories fresh: gone but not forgotten.

Alphonse Mucha and His Art Nouveau Drink Posters

In past posts, readers of this blog have seen my interest in “Art Nouveau,” the artistic movement that took hold in the latter part of the 19th Century in Europe and America that featured organic influenced shapes and sinuous lines. As a result I have long been interested in Alphonse Mucha, a Czech who was one of the leading practitioners of this form. Among his creations were a number of illustrations to merchandise a variety of alcoholic beverages, including champagne, cognac, liqueurs and beer. Through this post I have brought the images of these Mucha creations to one place on the Web. Note too that many Mucha illustration depict bottles.

His Wikipedia biography gives details of the life of Mucha, who died in 1939: "Alphonse Maria Mucha was born in 1860 in the town of Ivanice, Moravia (the present Czech Republic). Although his singing abilities allowed him to continue his education through high school in the Moravian capital of Brno, drawing had been his main hobby since childhood. He worked at decorative painting jobs in Moravia, mostly painting theatrical scenery.

"In 1879 he relocated to Vienna to work for a major Viennese theatrical design company, while informally augmenting his artistic education. When a fire destroyed his employer’s business during 1881 he returned to Moravia to do freelance decorative and portrait painting. Count Karl Khuen of Mikulov hired Mucha to decorate Hruaovany Emmahof Castle with murals and was impressed enough that he agreed to sponsor Mucha’s formal training at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. “Mucha moved to Paris in 1887 and continued his studies at Academie Julian and Academie Colarossi. In addition to his studies, he worked at producing magazine and advertising illustrations.

"About Christmas 1894 Mucha happened to go into a print shop where there was a sudden and unexpected need for a new advertising poster for a play featuring Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous actress in Paris. Much volunteered to produced a lithographed poster within two weeks and on 1 January 1895 the advertisement for the play was posted in the city where it attracted much attention.

“Mucha produced a flurry of paintings, posters, advertisements and book illustrations, as well as designs for jewelry, carpets, wallpaper and theater sets n ha was termed initially the Mucha Style but became known as Art Nouveau (French for “new art). Mucha’s works frequently featured beautiful young women in flowing, vaguely Neoclassical-looking robes, often surrounded by lush flowers which sometimes formed halos behind their heads. In contrast with contemporary poster makers he used pale pastel colors.

“His Art Nouveau style was often imitated. The Art Nouveau style, however, was one Mucha attempted to disassociate himself from throughout his life; he always insisted that rather than maintaining any fashionable stylistic form, his paintings were entirely a product of himself and Czech art. He declared that art existed only to communicate a spiritual message, and nothing more; hence his frustration at the fame he gained by his commercial art, when he most wanted to concentrate on more artistic projects.”

Mucha’s concerns about his commercial art seem ludicrous in light of the many of his wine and liquor prints that decorate many homes, apartments and college dormitory rooms. They celebrate products, many of which are still sold today. They include Moet & Chandon and Heidsieck champagne, Bisquit Cognac, La Trappestine liqueur, and my favorite, Benedictine. Bieres de al Meuse seems to have dropped off the French brew map long ago, however, while the Mucha poster goes on and on in sales.