From the Archives: Why I Want to Go to Omaha
Omaha has been on my bucket list for a while now. (The post below first ran in 2012,) Today I’m packing my bags for a trip to Nebraska City, which is close enough to Omaha to make no difference. I suspect a blog post or three will come out of the journey. Later, y’all.
Why is Omaha on my travel list? Two words, okay three: The Bodmer Collection.
In 1832, German naturalist Prince Maximilian zu Weid-Neuweid led one of the earliest expeditions to the American West.* As anyone who has snapped a picture of the Grand Canyon or the Grand Bazaar knows, expeditions need to be recorded. Instead of a Canon Powershot, Prince Maximilian brought along Karl Bodmer, a young Swiss artist with a talent for watercolor.
Prince Maximilian and Bodmer traveled the rivers of the American West for two years, going from Saint Louis to North Dakota and back. They saw an Indian raid, a wild prairie fire, and herds of buffalo and elk at close range. They suffered through a harsh winter in North Dakota, trapped by snow and bitter cold. At one point their boat caught fire.
Bodmer painted through it all, even when it was so cold that his paints froze solid. He captured images of the landscape, the animals, and. most notably, the Native American peoples they met. Bodmer’s depictions of the early American West have been described as the visual equivalent of Lewis and Clark’s journals. Although originally intended as “notes” to Prince Maximilian’s account of their journey, Bodmer’s paintings and sketches are now seen as the most important work of the expedition.
Today the Bodmer Collection is housed at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Put it on your list.
*Prince Maximilian wasn’t just a rich man with a yen for travel. He had a bee in his bonnet. He thought the native peoples of the Missouri and Mississippi river basins would help him prove that humankind developed from a single set of parents, presumably Adam and Eve.
Dorothy Sayers, Black Cat Cigarettes, and WWI
My second favorite novel by British mystery author Dorothy Sayers is Murder Must Advertise,* in which her dashing sleuth Lord Peter Whimsey goes undercover as an entry level copy writer at an advertising agency where evil is afoot. He solves the murder of course, because that’s the way these things happen. But he also gets caught up in the advertising business and creates the idea for an advertising campaign for a cigarette company called Whifflets that takes off in a big way: people collected coupons and used them first to travel and later to collect all manner of worldly goods. Except coffins, it not being “admitted that any Whiffler could ever require such an article.”
The campaign, and the clever language in which Sayers describes it, always amuses me. So imagine my amazement when I discovered something similar on a smaller scale in the form of Black Cat cigarettes while tracking down a factoid for my latest article for MHQ:The Journal of Military History.
Black Cat cigarettes were first introduced in 1904. The company began to use their cigarette packages as a vehicle for promotion almost immediately. At various points in the years prior to World War I they offered a program similar to S & H Green Stamps,** the Black Cat Library of Short Stories (a series of forty adventure tales), and a popular coupon program not unlike Whimsey’s Whifflet promotion.
If that was all Black Cat did, I would have just enjoyed the moment when fiction and history collided, but in the First World War, Black Cat stepped up. The company sent gift packages to British troops, with French phrase books inside the Black Cat cigarette packs. In 1914, they offered miniature cardboard Allied flags. And in 1916 they produced the first cigarette cards–similar to baseball cards in bubblegum packs.*** These cards didn’t celebrate anything as innocent as the national pastime–they were produced in alliance with the British wartime propaganda effort. The first set of cards was a series of 140 political cartoons by Dutch cartoonist Louis Raemaekers, with the motto “Lest we forget” on the reverse. But it was the second set that caught my fancy: a series of fifty cards illustrating “Women on War Work.” Each card showed a smiling woman doing a job that women would not have done before the war, including ambulance driver, postal carrier, tram conductor, and furnace stoker. The reverse of each card described the work involved.
A small and engaging illustration (literally) of women’s history.
*My absolute favorite is Gaudy Night. This does not make me unique.
**For those of you too young to remember Green Stamps, you can look it up here: http://www.al.com/living/index.ssf/2016/04/whatever_happened_to_sh_green.html
***I assume those of you who are too young to remember this can figure it out.
How Much Did It Cost?
It’s been the kind of writing day where I chase peripheral ideas, as easily distracted as a puppy that sees its own wagging tail–though hopefully more productive.* A section on the nature of queenship led me first into the Japanese Shogunate and then into the double bind of women’s voices in politics. Several (hopefully) fascinating footnotes later, I found myself calculating how much a reward of 25,000 German marks in 1914 would be worth today. It is not an easy question. And ultimately there is no right answer because there is more than one way to measure value.
The easiest to understand (and the one I tend to fall back on because it usually works best for my purposes) is the changes over time in the cost of a “bundle” of goods–the idea behind the Consumer Price Index. Even this is tricky if you are looking at changes over a long period of time because the items in the bundle themselves change. Cars replace carriages, for example.
But changes in simple purchasing power are not the only way to measure the relative value of money. For example, you could measure the cost of an important project (say the Erie Canal or the Great Wall of China in terms of its opportunity cost.**
If this is a rabbit hole you are inclined to go down, I refer you to my tool of choice for historical currency conversion: https://www.measuringworth.com/ Measuring Worth not only includes handy-dandy currency calculators, but an excellent essay on the different measures of worth and what I suspect are very useful tutorials that would keep me from flailing around the site in search of answers. It won’t help you figure out how much it cost to build the Great Wall of China, but it’s the on-line place to go if you need to know the relative value of the wages of someone who helped build the Erie Canal.
And now, if you will excuse me, I’ve left a Dutch political cartoonist with a price on his head–worth somewhere between $146,000 and $2,980,000–and I need to get him safely to Britain before someone collects it.
*I’m at a point where I need to be more like a cat staking out a mouse hole–focused and patient. Not that I’ve ever seen a cat do this outside of cartoons and early twentieth children’s books. But I digress. Again.
**Though realistically, you probably can’t measure the cost of the Great Wall of China since many of those costs happened outside the monetary economy, and it’s not clear what the monetary equivalent of the coin of the day was, etc. There are times when the answer is simply “lots”.