alternatehistory.com

--- Supplemental: Early-to-Mid 20th Century Pop Culture ---

Cinematic Animation is today a massive part of the cinematic industry worldwide, with creations geared both at children and adults, and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year. This medium grew from humble origins in America and Europe, starting around the turn of the 20th Century. In the United Kingdom, Eddie McMurry created the first known animated short film in 1912, entitled, “The Queen Bee,” featured a semi-anthropomorphic queen bee ruling her hive. It lasted about 4 minutes, and was quite the novelty show in London. McMurry would go on to make many more short animated films until his death in 1924. He is seen by many as the father of European animation. In America, J.J. Addison of Pennsylvania created the first animated film in the United States in 1919, the now famous “Bear Hunt,” where three goofy hunters try to track down and kill a black bear, only to have the bear outsmart them at every turn. Addison became an early powerhouse of the animation scene, and had it not been for the ultimate success of his chief rival, his name might be the most synonymous with animation today.

That rival of course is the one and only Lauretta Parker. Born in 1890, Parker (then Lauretta Price) studied art in Manhattan, and was fascinated by Eddie McMurry’s work and began to toy with her own ideas. For a time she worked as a comic artist for Manhattan Press, with her characters appearing weekly in the Manhattan Gazette in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In 1920, she created her most enduring character, Barbara Bunny, and quickly turned that character into a short animated film entitled “Barbara Hops to Manhattan,” a 5 minute film showing the now famous anthropomorphic bunny leaving her small country burrow and going to the great city of Manhattan. Barbara Bunny would soon be joined on screen by her partner Brent Bunny, both of which are today the most cherished animated characters from the Parker Studios pantheon. Mrs. Parker left Manhattan Press in 1924 to set up her own animation studio, which found success by the early 1930s with the release of the first animated feature film, Hansel and Gretel, in 1932. In 1943, just one year after the release of New World Pictures’ Moses in color, Parker Studios released the first animated film in color, The Twelve Princesses, based on the Grimm fairy tale of the same name.
Jacobson, Dr. Matilda. Animation in Cinema. St. Augustine, FL: Floridian Coast Press: 2001.

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Comic strips, the precursor to the modern comic book, have been around since the mid 1800s, adding light-hearted humor and political satire to newspapers and magazines of the era. Some of these early strips, such as the Franklin Observer’s political Man at the Top and the Boston Eagle’s comic Boston Gaffes, are still in existence today. It would be out of these early illustrations in the newspapers that the modern day comic book would ultimately be born.

The first such book, Manhattan Musings, would be printed by Manhattan Press (the company that owns the famous Manhattan Gazette newspaper). With several nationally-syndicated comic strips, the owners of the Gazette decided to publish a collection of these strips in a single “book of comics,” which would be released in 1929 as the book Manhattan Musings. It was an instant success, and several other newspapers would follow suit in the next few years. Of course, when most modern readers think of comic books, their minds usually turn to one thing: Ultraheros. These men and women in fantastic costumes, endowed with extra-human powers, often with mundane alter-egos by day, are synonymous with the comic book industry in the 21st Century. But the first Ultrahero comic book character didn’t appear until 1933, when American Comics, then just a humble start-up company in Chicago, released “Professor Ultra.” Ultra, who had been a regular physics professor at Great Lakes University before he was struck by something from space and endued with extraordinary powers, became an almost overnight sensation, and the other comic book publishers scrambled to come up with their own Ultraheros. Manhattan Press found their hit with the release of “The Phoenix,” which told the story of a young solider who finds a Native American artifact that lets him fly and control fire, in 1935. From these two characters began a great rivalry that has spawned the great AC and MP comic universes so popular today, each with dozens of Ultraheros and their sidekicks.
Peters, Michael. KAPOW! Comics in America. Boston: Atlantic Press House: 2014.

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The first wireless radio operator stations began to pop up in the United States just after the turn of the 20th Century, with the founding of Boston Broadcasting Station in 1904, and the famous Franklin Radio One in 1906. In the early years of operation, these stations would not broadcast regularly, but rather work with engineers and inventors to better perfect the new medium of communication. Franklin Radio One (known by its call sign of FR01) first began regular broadcasts in 1908, with daily news and music shows starting in 1909. Also that year, FR01 had the distinct honor of broadcasting the first ever wireless address by an American president, when Cornelius Roosevelt II gave the now traditional Christmas broadcast on December 24th, 1909, wishing all Americans a “happy Christmas,” which is where historians believe the phrase finally supplanted “merry Christmas” as the most common Christmas-time greeting in the United States.

Both Cornelius Roosevelt II and his successor, President Patrick Hannah, supported the growth of the wireless radio network in the United States. The result of this interest would be the creation of the Federal Bureau of Communication in 1913, which would oversee telegraph, telephone, and wireless broadcasting systems. In the field of wireless broadcasting, the FBC would set up regulations on frequency and call-signs to make them uniform across the nation, and would also give out grants to set up new stations in what the bureau called “wireless-poor regions.” To further spread wireless communication, the FBC would set up the Federal Broadcasting Service in 1916. The FBS would be (and still is) a publicly owned and operated broadcasting company, with regular news and cultural programming. Other big-name communication companies established themselves in this early period, including the American Broadcasting Network (ABN) in 1918 and the North American Wireless Network (NWN) in 1924. It was estimated that by 1930, nearly two-thirds of American households had at least one wireless set.

While FBS focused on news and cultural productions (including the organization of what is now known as the National Symphony for regular broadcasts starting in 1929), ABN focused on entertainment, with several popular comedies and dramas that would be rebroadcast across its network. The first of these shows, the hit comedy Mr. Stanton Goes to Franklin, was a satirical success, lampooning politicians and general political news every Tuesday and Thursday night starting in 1926. Other big hits from ABN included The Pioneer (1929), Kathy’s Travels (1930), and Spaceman (1933).

With the growth of the wireless radio media, there were some that were concerned that the content of some wireless broadcasts were too unsavory and should be censored. When a guest on NWN’s evening interview show Night Talk used a slew of curse words in a 1924 show, a group of ministers approached FBC Deputy Director Walter Brennerman about the infamous outburst and begged him to have the FBC set up guidelines to prevent such foul language from being used in the future. The result of this lobbying was the issuing of FBC General Order 39, more often referred to as the Brennerman Code, which forbade a long list of “foul speech” on any broadcast, with the threat of severe fines and the possible loss of a broadcaster’s license if they broke the code. Both ABN and NWN field suit against the code, but the Supreme Court upheld the regulation in 1926. In 1927, the American Cinematic Society voted to adopt the Brennerman Code for all films made in the United States. For a studio’s film to receive the ACS’s “seal of approval,” the film had to be in compliance. Most theaters would not show movies not backed by the ACS by the mid-1930s.

An unintended consequence of the Brennerman Code has been the creation of new slang terms that broadcasters and filmmakers used to get around the regulations on what could and could not be said on the air and in film. Modern linguists agree that at least fifteen slang terms that are now considered common in the 21st Century originated after the introduction of the Brennerman Code. The most famous is the word “frick,” which was first used in 1941 on ABN’s crime drama Sleuth, where the main character, Detective Jack Peters said “Frick you, pal” in response to an insult given by one of the show’s antagonists. The FBC immediately fined ABN for the phrase, but the company took the FBC to court and won, the judge stating that, “the FBC General Order 39 lists specific words that are considered commonly known curse words and other foul language. This word used by ABN is not on that list, nor does it fall into that broader category of “commonly known” words, therefore the FBC regulation does not apply.” This decision opened the door for many more such “alternative curse words” to enter the lexicon of American English.
Frank, Dr. Samantha. Tune in! The Story of American Wireless Radio Broadcasting. Franklin: UUS Press House, 2016.

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RagTech, arguably one of the most popular genres of modern American music, began to emerge on the music scene near the end of the 1930s, and would come into its own after the end of the Global War in the mid-1940s. Its ancestor, ragtime, had been around since the late 1800s and had enjoyed wide popularity across the United States and abroad. The upbeat, African and classical fusion of ragtime made it an instant hit, all the more so thanks to the advent of wireless broadcasting in the early 1900s. However, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, younger artists were wanting to break out and create a “new sound.”

The most famous seeker of the such a new sound was Xavier Drake of Louisiana, who began experimenting with adding guitars to his ragtime mixes in 1929. Then in 1933, with the invention of the first electrically amplified guitar, Drake began to really change things up. He came up with new melodies that broke with traditional ragtime rhythms, and both wowed and shocked audiences in 1935 when he unveiled his new “technological sound” at a concert in St. Louis. Despite being unpopular with older crowds, people in their teens and twenties flocked to Drake’s new sound, and early RagTech was born. The term itself was actually coined by another artist, Sammy Miller, who came onto the scene in 1938. Miller and Drake would both take their acts overseas at the end of the Global War to tour for American troops stationed in Spain and Italy, cementing their style amongst the younger generations. This also spread RagTech abroad and helped make it the global phenomenon that it is today.
Gilroy, Benjamin. The RagTech Story. New Orleans: Crescent City Press, 2009.

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According to the Department of Transportation, it is estimated that nearly seventy percent of American households own at least one auto, a staggering figure for a device less than a century old. Julius Lowery of Pennsylvania invented the modern steam-powered autowagen in 1884, and just eleven years later he released the first such vehicle marketed towards the average man, the now famous Lowery 12. Two years later, in 1897, the Texan company Benz-Daimler Motorwagen (BDM) released their “Blitzwagen,” as their own “motor for the common man.” By the early 1910s, autos (or motors, as they are known in Texas and California), were a common site in medium and large sized city in North America.

In those early years, it seemed even money whether the Lowery design of steam-powered autos or the Benz-Daimler internal combustion engine would be the primary form of the auto. With easy access to gasoline, which powers most internal combustion engines, the machines in Texas were almost all produced by BDM or it’s chief rival, Lopez-Schultz Motoren (LSM). In the United States, where access to gasoline was harder to come by, steamer autos (usually just called steamers) were much more common. And Lowery was not the sole manufacturer of these steamers. Stark Autos was established in 1900 in Columbus, Ohio, Chandler Steamers opened up in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1902, and The People’s Wagen opened up in Indianapolis in 1907. Throughout the early decades of the 20th Century, these four auto makers, along with other smaller firms, competed for dominance across North America. Steamers, powered primarily by kerosene or ethanol, still remain fairly popular to this day, especially in New England and the Midwest, but it now seems that the pendulum is swinging towards the gasoline-powered internal combustion engines, which are far more popular in the South and West.

This swing away from steamers really is a recent development, highlighted by the poor performance of steamers in the recently concluded Global War, where military commanders found that internal combustion engines were much more reliable on the battlefield. This has been a big boost for People’s Wagen, as they are the only American manufacturer that currently makes both steam and internal combustion engine vehicles.
Jackson, Lawrence. The Autowagen in America. Chicago: Great Lakes Press, 1944.