In which I abandon my main story and fall down a rabbit hole
I have spent far too much time over the last week working on a blog post about the Siberian Intervention: a minor American military expedition at the end of the First World War that has been crossing my path for more than a year. It just isn’t working. Even though I regularly reduce complicated stories to their essentials for this blog, I don’t seem to be able to do it this time.*
But even though I couldn’t move the big story along, I found myself fascinated by one minor question: Why were the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War called White Russians?
It turned out to be a delightful little research rabbit hole for a late summer afternoon.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is one of my regular stops for such things, the color white has long been associated particularly with royalist and legitimist causes, beginning during the French Revolution, when the white flag of the Bourbon family became the symbol of the royalist cause. Having been the symbol of royalists, white became the symbol for many counter-revolutionary, anti-communist, reactionary, or conservative parties. (For example, the Finnish White Guard.) The White Russians were all of the above.
White Russian propaganda poster, depicting the Bolshevik army as a fallen red (!) dragon and the White Russians as a dragon-slaying white knight. Nothing subtle about the imagery there.
Interestingly, the use of red as the color of revolutionary groups, including the Bolsheviks, also has its roots in the French Revolution, in the form of the bonnet rouge or Liberty cap—a complex bit of symbolism that might be worth a blog post of its own.
*Often when I bang my head against the wall of a story, it means that I don’t have a solid grasp of the material. When that happens, I have two choices. Buckle down and do more background work, or walk away from the story. In the case of chapter three on my current book, I have chosen door number one and am now reading my way through a stack of books on the revolutions at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, happy as a clam.** In the case of the Siberian intervention, it makes more sense to walk away.
***Though I am uncertain as to just how happy a clam might be, now that I think about it. More accurately, I am as happy as a historian who has settled into the groove of the work and has several uninterrupted hours to devote to it. Which is pretty dang happy.
For those of you who are interested in learning about the Siberian intervention, I recommend the following:
The episode dealing with it in Elizabeth Lunday’s excellent podcast, The Year That Was: Eggshells Loaded with Dynamite: Allied Intervention in the Russian Revolution
Anthony Brandt. First Shots of the Cold War.
Airships, Blimps, Dirigibles, and Zeppelins
In the weeks since we got home from our Big Road Trip back in June,* I’ve been immersed in the years between the end of World War I and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. One of the things that has captured my imagination is how fascinated people were by aviation in those years.
The two big aviation stories from this period are the ones you’ve heard about: Charles Lindbergh’s non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927 and the crash of the zeppelin the Hindenburg at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in 1937. (Sigrid Schultz wasn’t in the right place at the right time to report on either event directly, but two days after the Hindenburg disaster she had a front page story reporting Germany’s response to the crash, and their intention to resume air service to the United States by year end. The headline screamed across the page: RUSH NEW GERMAN AIRLINER. )
Lindbergh’s success and the Hindenburg disaster were not the only aviation stories to make international headlines in the period between the wars. There were other attempts to sail across the Atlantic, to the Arctic, around the world. (The Chicago Tribune sponsored one such flight in 1929: the round trip flight from Chicago to Berlin of the ‘Unting Bowler. The airship went down in the Hudson Straits on the first leg of the journey. The ship was lost; the crew survived. ) Aviators went missing. Even the release of new airships was news.
Robert McCormick, the Chicago Tribune’s owner and publisher, was a huge aviation booster, so Sigrid Schultz reported lots of stories on aviators as they went through Berlin and on German advances in aviation technology. (Helped by the fact that her father was a friend of Graf von Zeppelin, the inventor of the eponymous zeppelin.) She even took a spin in the air with World War I ace, Ernst Udet, early in her career. **
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- Franco-Prussian War hero and aviation pioneer Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin
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- Oberleutnant Ernst Udet with his Fokker DVII.
After awhile, I realized that I wasn’t quite clear on the difference between airships, blimps, dirigibles, and zeppelins. Assuming that some of you might be in the same hot air balloon, I offer you the following:
- An airship is a gas-filled aircraft that is steerable. (Unlike, say, a hot air balloon.) A dirigible, from the Latin dirigere, to direct, is an airship with a classical education. It started as an adjective—as in dirigible aircraft. (And in fact, dirigible is still used as an adjective meaning steerable, though not by anyone I know personally.)
- Both blimps and zeppelins are airships/dirigibles. But blimps are not zeppelins, and vice versa, though they look a lot alike to my untrained eye:
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- United States Navy zeppelin 1931
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- United States Navy blimp, 1944
- A blimp does not have a rigid internal structure. Blimps get their shape from the pressurized gases that fill them and make them lighter than air.
- A zeppelin has a rigid metal frame, so it keeps its shape whether filled with pressurized gas or not. The rigid frame made them suitable for longer trips and zeppelins because a important form of commercial transportation between the wars. They routinely made transatlantic flights. One enormous zeppelin, the Graf Zeppelin, flew around the world in 1929. (As you can probably guess, this was a huge newspaper story.)
Just to add to the confusion: the famous Goodyear blimps are in fact now zeppelins. The company switched out its fleet in 2014, though the company, and everyone else, still calls them blimps. There are some cases where being technically correct is more trouble than it’s worth.
*Stops to check calendar. Yep. June. Time flies when you’re sitting at your desk writing.
**He offered to turn that metaphorical spin into a literal spin and fly some aerobatics with her. She declined.
NOTE: If you’re reading this in email, click on the title and go to the browser if you want to watch the footage of the Hindenburg crash, click on
From the Archives: Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor
Yesterday I was walking home from the library with a bag of research books, considering how to spend the long Labor Day weekend. I am working on building the habit of taking Sundays off. (Radical, I know.) And I was musing over whether I could stretch my developing time-off-muscles to include Labor Day. After all, what better way to honor the memory of the people who fought for time off and other benefits for working people? Then it occurred to me that a story from the American labor movement would be a perfect blog post as we slide into the weekend. Turns out I had the same idea in 2018.
It’s Labor Day here in the United States. A day that many of us celebrate by firing up the grills, hitting up sales, and attending outdoor festivals. In short it is a day off. Something we can thank the American labor movement for, along with child labor laws, the forty-hour week, paid vacations, etc. (1)
One of the major players in the early labor movement in the United States was Samuel Gompers.
Gompers (1850-1924) was born in East London. His family immigrated to America when he was thirteen and settled in the Jewish community on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. For eighteen months, Gompers and his father rolled cigars in their small apartment before finding better job in cigar workshops.
In the evenings, Gompers attended free lectures and classes at Cooper Union. He received an education on the floor of the cigar workshop as well. Unlike many other skilled trades, cigar rolling was quiet work and talking was allowed. Sometimes one of the men in the shop would read to the others.
Gompers and his father soon joined a branch of the United Cigar Makers’ Union. Gompers was not very active in union business until the early 1870s, when the position of skilled cigar makers was threatened by the proposed introduction of a cigar mold that simplified an important step in the cigar-making process. He joined other union members in a series of strikes protesting the use of the mold, with its threat of making skilled workers less necessary.
During this period, Gompers also attended socialist meetings and demonstrations. He was drawn to Marx’s critique of capitalism, but came to the conclusion that socialist goals of long-term transformation were in conflict with the desire of most workers for immediate change. He described his own labor philosophy as “bread and butter unionism.”
After the failure of a 107-day strike, Gompers and fellow union member Adolph Strasser decided to reorganize the Cigar Makers’ Union. The new Cigar Makers’ International Union charged relatively high dues, which allowed them to build a strike fund and offer a benefits program. The idea was to build a sense of identity among union members based on their shared skills and bind them to the union through an extensive benefit system.
In 1881, Gompers was instrumental in creating another level of union strength in the form of a national federation of trade unions, the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions, which became the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886. By 1900, the AFL had roughly 1 million members. (2)
(1) Benefits that not all Americans enjoy even today.
(2) This post is drawn from a chapter on socialism in America from my first book for adults: The Everyday Guide to Understanding Socialism.