People-Works

Editor’s Introduction What would the history of transportation look like if the stories were about people rather than machines? About the constant presence of human power instead of the rise, expansion, and decline of transportation networks? The exhibits that follow tell the histories of the people without whom transportation systems would not function. From brick setters to aviation meteorologists, People-Works: The Labor of Transport examines the essential labor that makes transportation possible. People-Works approaches the history of transport labor in a particular fashion. Scholarly and popular works generally divide the history of transport labor into stories about discrete regions or modes of transport. We decided to do something different – we juxtaposed histories of transport labor from the medieval period to the present day, from Ghana to Singapore to France, and from feet to ships under sail to roads to airplanes. Why? Too often, histories of transport labor subsume the story of labor to the story of the transport technology or the dominant economic system – they tell the story of transport labor as the story of the rise and decline of particular industries and their particular modes of labor. But transport labor has existed throughout human history. People-Works recuperates some of that labor in its many forms, showing that while technologies may rise and fall, human power remains constant. Our juxtaposition seeks to achieve another goal as well. The history of transportation, and the history of technology more broadly, still struggles to address the residual consequences of imperial history writing – of the division of the world into technologically advanced and technologically undeveloped places (Bray 2013; Edgerton 2011). In the context of a global modernity that imagines its primary characteristic to be its embrace of speed and circulation, this division is often articulated in terms of a division between places where transport is largely human powered and places where transport is generally mechanized. Instead, we examine the work of Chinese seamen alongside the work of American automobile safety regulators and Ghanaian mammy truck drivers. The result is two, interrelated global histories: one, a global history of technology that shows how transport labor shapes politics, economics, and culture around the world, rather than a teleological history of transport modernization; and two, a global history of labor that illuminates how cultures of work and movement shape ways of thinking about technology. This approach required a certain flexibility in how we defined the concept of labor. The primary way that we define labor is by drawing a distinction between “labor” and “technological artifact.” Treating labor as the many forms of work that humans do to make transportation technologies and systems functions differs from more standard models, which define labor in opposition to capital or management (Bellucci et al 2014; Lucassen 2006; Bagwell 1974). We are conscious of the challenges that this approach presents. On the one hand, defining labor capaciously underscores our larger point about the role of the human in the history of transport. On the other hand, it runs the risk of flattening out the different stakes of different kinds of labor. Chinese seamen lived under threat of jail and poverty; brick setters were often prisoners. Medieval university messengers faced dangerous conditions in transit, but were richly compensated through tax exemptions, while federal safety regulators enjoyed secure employment and generous benefits. Rather than flattening out differences between types of transport labor, however, we found that in the end that our juxtaposition served to highlight them. Each module explores the costs and consequences of the transport labor it analyzes. From the stakes of automobility in Ghana under colonial rule to the racial politics of street paving, the modules show how each transport labor shaped and was shaped by the larger political, economic, and social structures of its time and place. We hope that you enjoy the exhibit. Before you depart, we would like to thank our team of experts, who double-blind peer-reviewed each module. Thank you for your excellent and insightful feedback. We would also like to thank Michael Bess, Editor of the Mobility in History Blog, for his enthusiastic support of this project. Off we go! Kate McDonald University of California, Santa Barbara October 2018

References

Bagwell, Philip. The Transport Revolution from 1770. London: Batsford, 1974. Bellucci, Stefano, Larissa Rosa Corrêa, Jan-Georg Deutsch, and Chitra Joshi. “Introduction: Labour in Transport: Histories from the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America), c. 1750 to 1950.” International Review of Social History 59, no. S22 (2014): 1-10. Bray, Francesca. Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered. London: Routledge, 2013. Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Lucassen, Jan. Global Labour History: A State of the Art. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) and co-director of the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History project. Her work on mobility history in modern Japan and the Japanese Empire appears in Mobility in History, Transfers, and Technology and Culture. Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.

Robin B. Williams, Savannah College of Art and Design

Table of Contents

1. Street Pavements before Asphalt
2. The Labor of Street Paving
3. Cleaning Streets
4. Heritage Work
5. Notes

Introduction

The paving of streets with macadam, blocks or bricks represented a vital development in the modernization of cities beginning in the nineteenth century. It also represented the product of extensive and often highly skilled human labor. Images of anonymous work crews installing pavement frequently appeared in the pages of municipal reports, underscoring a city’s commitment to invest in such labor-intensive and costly public works. Occasionally the labor involved in street paving generated surprising public acclaim for individual craftsmen, most notably James Garfield “Indian Jim” Brown, whose skill and efficiency defied belief. But making street pavement successful went well beyond its installation. From the preparatory harvesting and transporting of materials and their shaping into usable pavements to their maintenance through the prominent efforts of street cleaning crews, human labor was the historical agent shaping the interrelationship of advancements in modes of transit and the evolution of surface pavements. That tradition gained renewed importance with the spread of the historic preservation movement to street pavement in the 1970s, which highlighted the importance of skilled labor needed to restore historic street surfaces.

Street Pavements Before Asphalt

Before modern synthetic sheet asphalt assumed its dominion over streets and highways in the 1920s, North American cities employed a wide array of street pavement materials. The remarkable breadth of materials was matched by the labor skills required to create and install them. Beginning with cobblestones in New York in the seventeenth century and in Philadelphia by the early eighteenth century, most cities experimented with diverse materials beginning in the 1800s depending on their geographic location, economic resources and needs.^[1] Early nineteenth-century use of macadam (a kind of layered gravel) led to midcentury experiments with wood blocks, granite or sandstone Belgian blocks, and later asphalt blocks and vitrified bricks, among others, sometimes all at the same time in the same city.

The earliest municipal efforts to pave streets in American cities sought the most expedient and affordable materials and involved more brute muscle than skilled craftsmanship. Beginning in the seventeenth century, East Coast port cities made use of cobblestones, irregular naturally rounded stones that arrived in the holds of ships as ballast. To make room for the heavy loads of raw materials for export, the ballast stones were manually removed from the ships and typically deposited on a wharf, where they became a ready resource for street pavement. Princess Street in Alexandria, Virginia, believed to have been installed by Hessian soldiers, is typical in comprising a wide variety of stone types and sizes laid in a loose and random pattern (figures 1 and 2).^[2] By the mid-nineteenth century, however, cobblestones began to fall out of favor as pavement experts like William Gillespie, a professor of civil engineering at Union College in Schenectady, New York, considered them a “common but very inferior pavement which disgraces the streets of nearly all our cities.”^[3]

Achieving road surfaces better suited to the growing number of wheeled vehicles in industrial cities would require more skilled and intensive labor. Scottish inventor John Loudon McAdam developed a layered pavement, macadam, as it came to be known, that involved workers breaking stones to a consistent size able to be passed through a two-inch ring (figure 3). The rule of thumb for laborers was that no rock should be too large to fit into their mouth. Constructing the roadbed itself was equally labor intensive, with a layer of broken stone followed by a binder layer of some kind, such as sand, lime or bitumen, then compacted with a roller. Some macadam roads involved multiple such layers. First used in London in 1820 and in the United States by 1823, macadam enjoyed extensive use throughout the nineteenth century and even into the first decades of the twentieth century due to its relative affordability.^[4] It remained in 1904 the most common type of pavement in some major cities, including Boston, New York and St. Louis (figure 4).^[5] Macadam, however, was far from permanent and prompted complaints about dust.^[6] In response, municipal engineers in each city experimented after 1850 with more expensive block, brick and cylinder pavements of wood, stone, asphalt and fired clay to solve the pavement problem.

Perhaps because of the relative ease with which it can be shaped and its availability in many regions across North America, wood enjoyed early widespread use as a pavement material beginning in the 1830s. Whether cut into planks or rectangular or hexagonal blocks, wood pavements required not only the labor of loggers to fell trees and workers at saw mills, but were the first North American pavements to require the craftsmanship of carpenters or masons at the point of installation (figure 5). The use of wood cylinders, such as those in Detroit (figure 6), simplified the shaping process, but necessitated careful sorting and placement of pieces of differing diameters to minimize the spaces between them. Wood pavements were smooth, affordable and “noiseless,” but struggled, however, with durability, even when later coated in creosote (figures 7 and 8), which limited their use in most cities to streets with relatively light vehicular traffic or where reducing noise was essential, such as by court houses.^[7]

Rectangular Belgian blocks, usually of granite but also of sandstone in the Midwest, emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as the pavement of choice for industrial areas where heavy traffic was most common (figure 9). Shaped by arduous hand chiseling, Belgian blocks are generally rectangular in shape and often vary in size, reflecting the manual-labor nature of its production – as seen in the paving of The Esplanade in Toronto in 1905 (figures 10 and 11). Introduced in the early 1880s, vitrified brick gradually became the most widespread and versatile pavement for both city streets and early automobile highways prior to the introduction of synthetic asphalt in the 1920s due to its combination of durability, smoothness and being waterproof (figure 12). Unlike all previous pavement types, vitrified brick was industrially produced in brick-making factories, which nonetheless required extensive human labor to collect the clay, form it into molds, place the clay into and remove it from ovens and stack for shipment. Its introduction coincided with the rising popularity of bicycles, whose promoters launched the Better Roads Movement to advocate for smoother pavement, which helped spread the use of vitrified brick by the end of the century.

The Labor of Street Paving

The labor-intensive work of installing block or brick pavements was the public face of the whole pavement production cycle. Municipal engineering or public works department annual reports, as well as pavement manuals, frequently included images of large crews of workers, a vivid testament to the significant financial and human investment permanent pavements represented. The ethnicity of the anonymous laborers varied, with crews of all African Americans (though usually under the supervision of a white foreman) being very common (figure 13). Yet, even in the era of Jim Crow with racial segregation, whites and blacks appear working alongside each other (figure 14). Minneapolis documented both mixed crews and all-white crews, including this 1907 view depicting workers installing pavement in decidedly cold weather, to judge by their heavy coats (figure 15). In Toronto, a range of ethnicities and an equal diversity of hat styles can be seen in the workers laying gravel pavement, likely macadam, on Bloor Street in 1903 (figure 16).

While most manual laborers documented in photos of paving projects were anonymous, occasionally a worker was so exceptional that he received acclaim and individual recognition. Arthur Hurd, a native of Louisiana, moved to Nebraska the early 1920s and quickly distinguished himself as “the fastest bricklayer in the state” (figure 17).^[8] To facilitate his bricklaying, “Ten men, five on each side, carried the bricks in tongs, five bricks to a tong, and piled them on either side of Hurd who laid them in the street.”^[9] In an interview with his widow, Dollie, in 1973, journalist John McNeil learned that “Being the fastest bricklayer in the state meant so much to Arthur Hurd that during the bricklaying season he changed his diet. Kneeling down and bending over to lay brick paving is hard work on a full stomach, so Arthur ate his big meal in the evenings. For breakfast he had only toast and a small bowl of cereal, and for lunch one sandwich and a hard-boiled egg.”^[10]

Likely the most famous American street brick layer of all time was James Garfield Brown, more commonly known as “Indian Jim.” A Native American born in the 1880s on the Oneida Reservation in central New York state, “Indian Jim” Brown (figures 18 and 19) garnered notable press attention during his lifetime and commemoration with a marker and a documentary film after his death. Already considered a “champion bricksetter,” he participated in a head-to-head competition in Olathe, Kansas, on September 12, 1925, against Frank Hoffman of Eldorado, Kansas, to help complete the Kansas City Road. Press coverage reported that “The work of the Indian, who was a discovery of The [Kansas City] Star, was a demonstration that brick-setting may be made an art, not a drudgery. When Indian Jim stretched up from his completed task to hear the cheers of the crowd in his ears, he knew he had been working.”^[11] Indian Jim set 46,644 bricks, 1,755 more than Hoffman, in six hours and 45 minutes. According to a monument in Olathe commemorating the day’s events, Senator Charles Curtis, Kansas Governor Ben Paulen and prominent local citizens laid ceremonial bricks as well.

No matter where he worked, Indian Jim attracted attention. Two years later, in Texas, the Pampa Daily News ran articles on him, including a “Paving Edition” of their paper on November 13, 1927, which extolled his prowess as the “world’s champion bricklayer” able to lay three bricks per second!^[12] In 1937, a WPA publicity film, “A Better Illinois,” documented an unnamed worker rapidly setting bricks from short stacked piles who may in fact be Indian Jim, with the narrator noting “one of the men engaged in this project is said to be the champion bricklayer of the world; at least he gives the younger hands something to think about” (figure 20). The filmmaker clearly had fun documenting his unusual expertise, speeding up the footage while the narrator wryly intones “this is about how he looks to the greenhorns.” By 1939 his reputation merited inclusion in a Ripley’s Believe or Not cartoon that appeared in newspapers around the country. The cartoon proclaimed “Indian Jim Brown – Full blood Oneida Indian – Lays 58,000 bricks a day – 207 tons. This is his daily average. He challenges any man” (figure 21).^[13] His reputation lives on: a marker erected in 2007 in Olathe commemorates Brown’s achievement in the completion of the Kansas City Road;^[14] and in 2011, filmmaker Gregory Sheffer cast the actor Raw Leiba to portray Indian Jim in a documentary short film called “The Bricklayer: Indian Jim and the Kansas City Olathe Highway,” part of a documentary series called “Olathe – The City Beautiful” that premiered at the AMC Kansas City Filmfest in April 2011; out of a total of 135 films it won first place in its division for “Best Heartland Documentary Short film.”^[15]

Cleaning Streets

Human hands also played a critical role in keeping streets clean. New, permanent street pavements were seen as critical to the progress and health of a modern city, but so too was street cleaning. At a time when horses and other draft animals still filled the streets and regular residential garbage collection did not yet exist, trash, animal urine and excrement, and even dead animals could quickly make newly paved streets objectionable, if not a health hazard. Recognition of the human labor involved in street cleaning appears in a unique graphic using broom sizes to represent the amount of labor required based on the relative cost of cleaning different kinds of pavement in New York (figure 22). No city took greater pride in their street cleaning crews than Detroit, which introduced its highly influential “White Wings Brigade” in 1897 – a force of fifty white men dressed in white suits, each accompanied by a pushcart with a receptacle (figure 23). Leaders in the city’s Public Works department boasted that “Detroit is one of the cleanest of cities. Broad avenues of asphalt and brick and lovely residence streets of cedar block would be given scarcely a passing notice by the visitors were it not for the fact that brush and broom in the hands of expert workers make the streets as scrupulously clean as it is possible for them to be.”^[16] The idea immediately proved successful, spawning similar crews within that first year in twenty other cities.^[17] By 1902, the brigade had grown to 100 men and continued to be proudly illustrated in the pages of reports.^[18] As late as 1923, the city of Los Angeles used the same term “White Wings” to describe their street cleaning workers.^[19]

Heritage Work

The arrival of synthetic asphalt in the 1920s gradually curtailed the use of bricks or blocks for new streets, and most old streets disappeared under blacktop before long. Yet, an appreciation for old, hand-made pavements helped some communities keep their old streets intact. For example, streets in Wilmette, Illinois, saw their bricks “Relayed by WPA” (as noted by embedded plaques) – a potentially unique project of that Depression-era government make-work program that involved workers inverting the bricks so that their worn tops were placed face down (figures 13 and 24). One intersection involves obliquely oriented brick rows meeting at a large triangle, displaying a remarkably high level of care and attention to detail. Multiple varied iterations of similar triangular patterns exist around eight of the squares in downtown Savannah, where T-shaped intersections prompted their installation. Early twentieth-century asphalt blocks – a historic paving material that survives in very few cities – form the triangles by having blocks rotated 45 degrees to keep them perpendicular to the turning wheels of two-way traffic. Although movement around the squares is now one-way only (like a round-about), the city maintains the triangles, which require careful attention to detail, as can be seen in the various shades of blocks, with the darker ones being oldest (figure 25).

The rise of the historic preservation movement nationwide for buildings in the 1950s and 60s spread to pavement preservation and restoration in a few cities by the 1970s. The City of Tampa has been a leading city in protecting and maintaining its vitrified brick streets. The restoration of a small section of Morgan Street in 1974 garnered newspaper coverage, which lamented that “although brick-laying probably is a lost art by now, these men chiseled, paced and pounded the bricks with astonishing efficiency.”^[20] Like the brick layers of the 1920s, most of the workers are anonymous in such reports, but one street restoration master craftsman, Woodrow Pippin of Tampa, enjoyed a level of recognition that recalls Arthur Hurd and Indian Jim Brown. A 1978 Tampa Times article profiling Pippin characterized him “Like some whiz-bang mathematician sizing a row of five-digit figures… with the eyes of a calculating mathematician.”^[21] In Philadelphia, the National Park Service’s restoration of cobblestone pavement on Library Street in the 1970s as part of the Independence Mall project evidently privileged craftsmanship over authenticity, with large pavement stones neatly arranged down the middle of the roadway and much smaller stones laid in elegant sets of arcs along the sides (figure 26), rather than the random irregularity of historic cobblestone pavement, as in Alexandria.

As more cities consider restoring brick and block streets, skilled craftsmen and supportive crews of laborers will be needed once again, a vivid reminder of the central role manual labor has played in the creation of our transportation networks.

Notes

1. Regarding New York, see Niko Koppel, “Restoring New York Streets to Their Bumpier Pasts,” The New York Times (July 18, 2010); regarding Philadelphia, see “Historic Street Paving Thematic District” nomination form, Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, 1998, Description section, page 2, accessed June 10, 2018, from https://www.phila.gov/historical/PDF/Historic%20Paving%20Thematic%20District.pdf.
2. A marker at the intersection of Princess Street and North Washington Street reads “In the 1790’s many Alexandria streets were paved with cobblestones. According to legend, Hessian soldiers provided the labor to cobble Princess Street.”
3. W. M. Gillespie, A manual of the principles and practice of road-making: comprising the location, construction, and improvement of roads (common, macadam, paved, plank, etc.); and railroads (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1848), 216-17.
4. “1823 – First American Macadam Road,” The Paintings of Carl Rakeman, U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration. Accessed April 25, 2018 from http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/rakeman/1823.htm.
5. John W. Alvord, “A Report to the Street Paving Committee of the Commercial Club on The Street Paving Problem of Chicago” (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Printers, 1904), exhibit no. 2. Macadam represented 50.1, 30.1 and 28.35 percent of all street surfaces in Boston, New York and St. Louis, respectively.
6. Daily Morning News [Savannah], October 25, 1859, p.2, col. 1.
7. An early use of this term is “A Noiseless Pavement,” Daily Alta California (September 16, 1876), 1.
8. “Downtown streets were paved by ‘fastest bricklayer in the state’,” North Platte Bulletin (Oct. 29, 2010), posted on the Save the Bricks in Downtown North Platte website. Accessed online: http://www.savethebricks.com/2010/11/17/downtown-streets-were-paved-by-fastest-bricklayer-in-the-state/.
9. John McNeil, “NP brick streets have special meaning to Dollie,” North Platte Telegraph (May 23, 1973).
10. Ibid.
11. “Olathe Celebrated a New Brick Road Saturday—and `Indian Jim’ Wins,” The Olathe Mirror (September 17, 1925), 5, reprinted in Pat Davis, “’Indian Jim’s’ victory recalled as K.C. brick road is removed,” The Daily News [Olathe, KS] (October 22, 1971), 6A.
12. Mike Cox, Texas Panhandle Tales (History Press Library Editions, 2012).
13. Ibid.
14. For information on the marker, see The Historical Marker Database, https://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=20270.
15. The almost two-minute short film can be viewed online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyLWNlMXDEU. See also “Olathe Film Series,” Kansas City Area Historic Trains Association website, https://www.kcahta.org/our-history-1/olathe-film-series/.
16. “Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Board of Public Works of the City of Detroit, 1897-8,” in Annual Reports of the Several Municipal Commissions, Boards and Officers of the City of Detroit, for the Year 1897-8 (Detroit: The Richmond & Backus Company, 1898), 48 (Detroit Public Library).
17. Ibid., 49.
18. “Twenty-Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Public Works of the City of Detroit, 1901-1902,” in Annual Reports of the Several Municipal Commissions, Boards and Officers of the City of Detroit, for the Year 1901-1902 (Detroit: The Richmond & Backus Company, 1903), 60 and accompanying image between pages 57 and 59 (Detroit Public Library).
19. John Griffen, “Annual Report of the Engineering Department of the City of Los Angeles, July 1st, 1922, to June 30th, 1923,” 19 (City Archives and Record Center, Los Angeles).
20. “Streets of Brick,” The Tampa Tribune (August 16, 1974), 6-Metro. Copy in the “Tampa-Streets / (1800’s – 1970’s)” vertical file, Special Collections, Tampa Public Library.
21. Dale Wilson, “Brick laying doesn’t put them on easy street,” The Tampa Times (June 5, 1978), section B Copy in the “Tampa-Streets / (1800’s – 1970’s)” vertical file, Special Collections, Tampa Public Library.

Robin B. Williams, Ph.D., chairs the Architectural History department at the Savannah College of Art and Design.  His research focuses on the history of modern architecture and cities, currently focusing on the evolution of street and sidewalk pavement in North America.  He is the lead author of Buildings of Savannah (University of Virginia Press, 2016), the inaugural city guide in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series.

Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.

Martina Hacke, University of Düsseldorf

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The labor of transport of the messengers of the nations in the sources
3. The messengers and their labor of transport
4. The hazards of the labor of transport
5. Compensation for transport services through privileges
6. Attempts to reduce the number of messengers
7. The founding of the fraternity of the messengers of the French nation
8. The importance of the transport services of the messengers of the nations
9. Sources

In the Middle Ages there was no postal service in the modern sense of one that was public and available to all. Instead, private persons were responsible for their own transport operations. Major institutions such as the monarchy or the church, and also merchant associations such as in the Hanseatic League, had organized transport services available. These were not purely public, and not available to private persons, because only the members of the relevant institutions were permitted to use them.

The universities also had need of transport services. Of course one immediately thinks of books for the course of study, but also stone was required for the construction of new university buildings. Overall, medieval universities used many different types of people for transport, depending on the goods, who was ordering, and who was financing. The sources are not always sufficient to research these various forms of transport. However, they are adequate in the case of one university messenger institution, namely the messengers of the nations of the University of Paris. They appear for the first time after the middle of the fourteenth century, or more than a century after the founding of this university, which together with Bologna was, the prototype of the medieval university.

In medieval university sources, a messenger was normally referred to as a nuncius, the middle Latin form of the ancient nuntius. This person was an office holder of one of the four nations of the University of Paris, namely the French, Norman, Picard and English-German nations, which together formed the Arts faculty. Within these nations, which were constituted in the middle of the thirteenth century, the members of the Faculty of Arts organized themselves on the basis of their geographical origin. In contrast, the messengers of nations did not necessarily hold any biographical connections concerning their origins to the nation in which they held their office. They acquired their office by offering their services to a nation of their choice, after which they were appointed to the office through a special procedure and then admitted by members of the nation.

The messengers of the nations carried out transport operations for the private needs of the students and teachers. Tasks of this type could also be handled by free messengers who were hired by members of the university for individual commissions and paid privately. However, in contrast to messengers of nations, it is much more difficult to find references to these free messengers in the university sources. It should also be noted that messengers for the nations and free messengers, who handled transport for private needs of the masters and scholars, were distinguished from another type of messenger, namely, those who were active on the official commission of university institutions, hence of the nations, the faculties, the colleges and the university itself. They were also made use of for single commissions, such as the transporting of letters, but the relevant university institution took care of the relevant financing. Overall, all the types of messengers described here can be delineated with respect to the emissaries who handled negotiations in their capacity as representatives of the university institutions. Such a person was ever more frequently also called ambassiator from the beginning of the fifteenth century, but in the sources of the University of Paris the most frequent term for him was likewise nuncius. The spectrum of the word nuntius ranged from someone who was in effect no more than a courier up to an emissary with full authority to negotiate. An emissary could also take on the function of a messenger, but not vice versa. Only a close analysis of the textual context clarifies whether a nuntius was a simple courier or an envoy. Messengers of nations were officers of their nations. But they were not responsible for the official transport needs of the nation. Instead they were responsible for the private needs of teachers and students.

The labor of transport of the messengers of the nations in the sources

The documents that report on the work of the messengers include official deeds such as royal privileges, municipal records and the files of law courts. The leading sources from the university are the Libri procuratorum, the books of the procurators, who were the leaders of the nations. They contain the minutes of university gatherings and sometimes lists of messengers as well. The “second list” of messengers of the French nation, the beginning of which is shown here, contains eighty-five entries, mainly from the years 1445-1456. It shows the administrative work that the nation performed concerning the labor of transport of its messengers. Due to the fact that the members of a nation were split up on the basis of their home dioceses, a messenger was responsible for members from the relevant diocese. Thus in 1454 Jacobus Bellot took up the office of messenger for the students and teachers of the diocese of Paris.

The messengers and their labor of transport

The messengers were officials and servants of their respective nations. The messenger is on the right in this miniature of the Picard nation from 1476. There is a banner above him with the words: Jehan Le Queux, messagier de guyse en therasse, ou dyo[cè]se de Lan. He was the messenger for Guise en Thiérache in the diocese of Laon in northern France. This means that he undertook messenger services for those teachers and students who came from the town of Guise.

The illustration shows the messenger in dark travel garments with his coat, cap and boots. He is carrying a spear over his right shoulder, this being his means of defense. On the left, the procurator holds a package in his hand, and to the right of him is a servant with a sealed letter. Either the messenger has just handed over the two objects, or he is about to receive them.

It is not possible to tell today if the illustration reflects the reality. We know, above all from the Libri procuratorum, that the messengers frequently carried money in addition to letters and packages. Many students were young and needed funds to live and to study, and at that time the banking system was not as prominent in Paris as it was in Italy. Money and objects such as packages with clothes, towels, books and parchment, and medicine and wine, and also news came from the families of the students, primarily the parents.

The length of the journey depended on the distances and the terrain. Johannes Castinerii, messenger for the French nation, was responsible for the diocese of Nevers, which is around two hundred and sixteen kilometers (as the crow flies) to the south of the capital. On the other hand, Gaufridus de Marnef, messenger of the German nation and from 1489 to 1492 nuntius for the diocese of Turku (Åbo) in Finland, which belonged to Sweden at that time, had to cover eighteen hundred kilometers (as the crow flies). The messengers usually traveled on foot, but some also on horseback.

The hazards of the labor of transport

Travel was dangerous in the Middle Ages. We learn of the robbing of a messenger of the German nation for 1491:

“Secondly, a certain messenger of the Picard nation hereby supplicated:

While he was on the way to Paris with some teachers and students they were held up and robbed of their goods and money in Thérouanne, so that they were forced to come to Paris without any money, which is major damage to the university and a wrong.

The nation has therefore decided that the wrong is to be made good as common costs from the university funds and to do this, the nation has decided to give any type of help.”

(Secundo supplicuit quidam nuntius nationis Piccardie qui, cum Parisium veniret cum quibusdam magistris et scolasticis, in civitatem Morinensem omnes captivi ducti sunt et suis rebus et pecuniis spoliati, Parisium sine pecuniis sunt coacti accedere, quod quidem est in magnum prejudicium Universitatis et injuriam. Placuit nationi ut communibus expensis ex erario Universitatis prosequatur talis injuria et ad hoc faciendum placuit omni modam dare assistentiam.)

(Excerpt from the “Liber procuratorum” of the German nation from 1491, Nov. 21).

Hence the messenger of the Picard nation traveled with a group, which was a matter of course at that time for safety reasons. In this case his companions were teachers and students of the university itself. In November the group was held up and robbed in Thérouanne in northern France, around two hundred kilometers from Paris.

The fact that the messenger could provide witnesses out if his own circles undoubtedly played a role in his plea for material compensation. For who was liable in such a case? As the quotation shows, the nation wanted the university to reimburse the messenger from its own funds. But the higher faculties did not agree to this, so that ultimately the treasurer of the Arts faculty started up a collection for the messenger, in other words, a voluntary donation.

Compensation for transport services through privileges

The messengers did not get any money per se from the university or nation for their transport services. They probably received money from the persons for whom they performed the transport services, but no proof of this can be found in the university sources. Instead, they were granted privileges. These privileges came from the pope and the king and they were due to the messengers because they were officers of the nations and hence officers of the university. The most important of these was the privilege of clergy, which was given by King Philipp Augustus in 1200 to the Parisian masters and scholars and their servants. Most of the privileges of the messengers derived from this privilege. The financial privileges were the most important of these. They were exempted from the tax on revenues (taille), the transaction tax on imports and exports (aides), the tax on salt (gabelle), and tolls, and in addition to this, they were freed from having to perform guard duty on the walls at night.

The financial privileges were important for merchants. Indeed, an investigation of the biography of the messengers, a prosopography, shows that some of them had another profession in addition to their work as messengers. Some of them, for example, were laboureurs, or people who “tilled the earth” (possibly a laboureur de vignes), and craftsmen like weavers and cobblers. Another belonged to the ars fabrilis, presumably a blacksmith. But there were also messengers who were merchants to an even greater extent such as a butcher, an innkeeper and a pharmacist. The largest group of messengers was from the book trade, namely printers, booksellers and publishers.

Persons with these professions had to undertake long journeys to sell or obtain their products. Thus the book dealers sold their books at the trade fairs and markets, and the innkeepers provided themselves with wine from the wine-producing areas – all without needing to pay taxes or tolls on their products. The linking of private commercial business with official work as a messenger was extremely practical. A synergy of this kind was typical for that time, in which it was generally the case that anyone who went anywhere on a journey conveyed letters or goods with them for other people.

The extensive privileges gave the merchants among the messengers a considerable competitive advantage. It is said that some of the messengers of the University of Paris were among the wealthiest citizens of Paris at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Attempts to reduce the number of messengers

The messengers attracted envy, not only from their competitors but also from the citizens of Paris, who complained that the messengers did not have to stand watch on the city walls at night, unlike them. They did not understand why the messengers enjoyed the privileges of the clergy, even though many of them were not clerics. It also became increasingly clear to the king that he would lose tax revenue if many messengers obtained these privileges. As a rule there were 160 messengers of the University of Paris at any one time in the last third of the fifteenth century. In addition, there were many people who made themselves out to be messengers, but who in fact were not, being so-called “false messengers” (falsi nuncii). It was above all the tax authorities who attempted from the middle of the fifteenth century to reduce the number of recipients of privileges among the messengers of the nations. They started to harass messengers on the streets, at bridges, in the markets, in all places where tax collectors were active. They asserted that they were false messengers and demanded that they pay taxes and tolls even though these persons could produce a letter from the university confirming their status as messengers.

This resulted in a considerable number of legal proceedings at the court for extraordinary taxes, the Cour des Aides, the files of which are in the French national archives. They include summaries of the court cases in the form of “minutes.” An example of such a case is provided by the appeals proceedings of Lambert Pongoyse, who was the messenger for the diocese of Troyes, before the Cour des Aides in 1507. The tax collectors demanded that he pay the amount that he had been exempted for from the tax on revenues (taille) because he was so rich and did so much trade. However, in the last resort the privileges of the messengers were not really a matter for debate within the perceptions of the time and these could not be withdrawn. Pongoyse won in court, as did most of the other messengers as well.

The founding of the fraternity of the messengers of the French nation

The messengers of the nations found themselves in an anomalous position as a result of the legal and personal attacks on them. This was also true at the university, because unlike the other servants they often were not there but instead were traveling. Their special position is one of the reasons why they joined together in a fraternity in 1479. This was a professional association, and it was only open to the messengers of the Gallic nation, who evidently wanted to promote their business interests in this way. The fraternity was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Charlemagne, who at that time was viewed as the founder of the university. Perhaps there was also the assumption that the emperor himself had created the office of messenger at the University of Paris, as people believed in the sixteenth century.

The fraternity of the messengers was headed by three colleagues. New members had to pay an entry fee amounting to sixteen sous and also make an annual payment. The center of the fraternity was the church of the Trinitarians in Saint-Mathurin in the Quartier Latin. The gatherings of the French nation took place here, and in the Middle Ages most of the messengers were taken here into this nation.

According to a source from the seventeenth century, the members of the fraternity of messengers celebrated Mass there on Sundays at the altar of Charlemagne. It was the custom as that time to organize such things with a religious connection that had its basis in faith and a church service. In addition, a fraternity fulfilled social functions, it looked after the sick and the needy, and commemorated the dead. The fraternity also provided a religious and social focal point for those messengers who did not come from Paris when they were in the city.

The importance of the transport services of the messengers of the nations

The organization of transport services on the basis of dioceses, which reflected the administrative structure of the church, and also their extension deep into the far corners of Europe, which reflected the regions of origin of the university members, made the labor of the messengers of the nations very important. It should come as no surprise, then, that the later messageries of the nations, which developed from the institute of the messengers of the nation in the beginning of the sixteenth century, were taken over into the French royal mail in early modern times through leasing.

The transport services that the messengers provided for members of the university were perhaps sometimes infrequent. But they did permit a basic level of communication, which was of fundamental importance, especially for the poorer members of the university, because the messengers were refunded with privileges. Though today we can no longer determine the number of people who derived a benefit from messengers of the nations, we can say that their services were available (at least in theory) to a large number of people. An estimated three thousand members of the university could have used messengers of the nation. Moreover, their relatives, their parents, friends and acquaintances could also use their services. In comparison to other transport systems of this time, an unusually large number of people could have participated in the institution of messengers of the nations of the University of Paris. For this reason, it was of great importance. These messengers bridged long distances, and maintained a communication network through the greater part of Europe.

Sources

Arch. Sorb., Reg. 1, f. 224v-225r
Arch. Sorb., Reg. 9, f. 1r
Arch. Sorb., Reg. 91, f. 84v

Arch. Nat. Z1a 35 f. 364v

Auctarium Chartularii Universitatis Parisiensis:
1-2 Liber Procuratorum Nationis Anglicanae (Alemanniae) in Universitate Parisiensi1-2, ed. H. Denifle and A. Chatelain, 2 Bde., Paris 1894-1897, Neudruck1937
3 Liber Procuratorum Nationis Anglicanae (Alemanniae) in Universitate Parisiensi, ed. C. Samaran, A. van Moé and S. Vitte, Paris 1935 (Auctarium Chartularii Universitatis Parisiensis, 3)
4 Liber Procuratorum Nationis Picardiae in Universitate Parisiensi, 1: 1476–1484, ed. C. Samaran and A. v. Moé, Paris 1938
5 Liber Procuratorum Nationis Gallicanae (Franciae) in Universitate Parisiensi, 1, ed. C. Samaran and A. v. Moé, Paris 1942
6 Liber Receptorum Nationis Anglicanae (Alemanniae), Bd. 1: 1425–1494, ed. A. L. Gabriel and G. C. Boyce, Paris 1964

Secondary references

M. Auger, Traité sur les tailles et les tribunaux qui connoissent de cette imposition 1/3, Paris 1788, p. 199.

Antoine Destemberg, Les messagers de l’université de Paris à la fin du Moyen Âge: jalons pour une histoire à faire, in: Revue historique 678 (2016), p. 267-295.

Martina Hacke, Aspekte des mittelalterlichen Botenwesens. Die Botenorganisation der Universität von Paris und anderer Institutionen im Spätmittelalter, in: Das Mittelalter 11 (2006) 1, p. 132-149.

Martina Hacke, Das Botenwesen der Universität von Paris im 15. Jahrhundert, in: Rainer Babel (Hg.): Aspekte der frühneuzeitlichen »Kommunikationsrevolution«, in: Francia 34/2: Frühe Neuzeit. Revolution. Empire 1500-1815. Atelier, Ostfildern 2007, p. 217-232.

Martina Hacke, Die Boten der Nationen der Universität von Paris von den Anfängen bis zum Ende des Mittelalters. Entstehung und Ausgestaltung eines universitären Kommunikationsinstituts, Husum 2019 (Historische Studien 513) (in print)

Martina Hacke, The Messengers of Nations of the University of Paris and the Book Trade (late 15th – early 16th cent.), will appear in: Mordechai Feingold, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Glyn Parry (Hg.), Worlds and Networks of Higher Learning: Universities, Academies, and Colleges, 1450-1750.

Martina Hacke, Wer partizipierte am Kommunikationsinstitut der »Boten der Nationen« der mittelalterlichen Universität von Paris?, in: Diotiama Bertel u.a. (Hg.), Junge Perspektiven auf Partizipation in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Beiträge zur ersten under.docs-Fachtagung zu Kommunikation, Wien 2016, p. 209-220.

Eugène Vaillé, Histoire générale des postes françaises, Paris; 1: Des Origines à la fin du Moyen Âge, p. 220-260; 2: De Louis XI à la Création de la Surintendance Générale des Postes (1477–1630), p. 231-247.

Martina Hacke researches the history of the University of Paris, and the history of communication (messengers, envoys) in the Middle Ages.

Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.

Lee Vinsel, Virginia Tech

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. How Can Danger Go Unnoticed?
3. Crash Tests as Necessary Work
4. Instrumenting a Car for Crashing
5. How to Standardize a Wall
6. Fiat’s Non-Conforming Testing Grounds
7. Keeping Dangerous Technologies Off the Road
8. Notes

Introduction

Ashley Parham was eighteen-years old and had just graduated from high school in 2009, when she went to pick her younger brother up from football practice. She was driving around the parking lot looking for a space when she accidentally bumped into another car. The minor collision was just significant enough to deploy the airbag. But something went wrong. Not only did the airbag fail to inflate correctly, it also threw metal shrapnel at Parham, slicing her carotid artery, leaving her bleeding to death. When police found her, they thought she may have been murdered. Instead, she was likely the first victim of defective airbags produced by the Takata corporation that, in time, led to one of the largest recalls in history. In April and May of 2013, BMW and a range of Japanese automakers recalled millions of vehicles containing these airbags. A year later, Ford, Chrysler, and several other companies announced that they too were recalling millions upon millions of cars. Eventually, these defective airbags would be linked to at least 12 deaths and hundreds of injuries in the United States alone. Over 60 million cars would be recalled before it was all over, and in 2017, Takata folded in bankruptcy. Later investigations uncovered that some automakers knew the airbags could be defective for more than a decade. This discovery led some people to ask, how could defective technologies that violated federal law be sold for so long without the authorities becoming aware? Answering that question requires us to think about all of the work regulators do to enforce safety standards—work that is at best imperfect and whose successes and failures often hinge on luck. Regulators and contract firms that work for the U.S. government regularly conduct crash tests and other enforcement activities to ensure that automobiles sold in the United States live up to existing rules. These activities take place out of sight. They involve largely anonymous individuals. They are messy, on-going work that is never done. And yet the safety of the transportation systems around us depend on such mundane, nameless labor. How do we bring it into view?

Crash Tests as Necessary Work

One answer is that activities come into view when something goes wrong. When things go awry in regulation—when we discover that products do not conform to safety rules—regulators and others create paper trails that we can use to reconstruct enforcement efforts. A safety enforcement and vehicle recall effort involving Fiat cars that the U.S. federal safety agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), conducted from 1969 to 1971, helps illustrate some general structures of regulatory work. On September 24, 1969, four NHTSA staff members traveled to Los Angeles, California, to witness crash tests run by the Digitek Corporation, a private firm that did contract work for the agency.^[1] They planned on testing a 1969 Fiat 850 Sedan, but their purchasing agent had accidentally sent an 850 Coupe instead. They decided to crash the car anyway, and the test did not go well for the Fiat Coupe. It badly violated a federal safety standard. This test—which was a matter of luck—began an investigation that lasted for a year and led to Fiat recalling thousands of vehicles.

Instrumenting a Car for Crashing

The Fiat car had violated Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 204—Steering Control Rearward Displacement. Standard 204 set a threshold for the distance that the steering wheel could “displace” backwards towards the driver’s body in a front-end collision. The basic test for Standard 204 involved driving a car into an immobile wall at thirty miles per hour and measuring the rearward displacement of the steering wheel. In the picture above, which was found in federal records, we can see a tester demonstrating how cars are instrumented for testing under Standard 204. Preparing the car for testing required a great deal of labor. In this case, staff members at Digitek attached a measuring device to the steering wheel and an anchor in the back windowsill. They removed both front seats and mounted metal frames that held a high-speed camera and the measurement grid that can be seen behind the steering wheel. The high-speed camera recorded the steering wheel moving in front of the grid, as car smashed into the crash barrier. Finally, when the car was successfully instrumented, they crashed the car into the barrier and began the long process of examining the resulting data, including the high-speed film, before preparing a report on the test. Standard 204 limited rearward displacement of the steering wheel to 5 inches. In the initial test, the Fiat Coupe’s steering wheel displaced 6.75 inches.^[2] In a later test, another Fiat Coupe’s steering wheel displaced backwards 9.21 or nearly twice the limit.^[3] The steering wheel moved backwards so far it left the frame of the high-speed camera. It would have badly injured or killed the driver going into his or her upper-chest or head, possibly even leading to decapitation.

How to Standardize a Wall

Crashing cars may be the most dramatic aspect of federal regulatory enforcement, but the vast majority of enforcement involves white collar labor: filling out forms and producing paperwork, attending meetings and making phone calls, writing, editing, and publishing reports. When NHTSA staff members returned from observing the crash test in California, they began the work of examining the results and producing the documents that would eventually support their case against Fiat. Federal regulators were faced with a question: Fiat had claimed in official filings that its cars met US federal safety standards, so what had gone wrong? The investigation quickly came to focus on how Fiat had done its own tests at its headquarters in Turin, Italy—most directly, the company’s failure to follow federal standards properly. Technical standards are often complex. U.S. federal automotive safety standards brought together a variety of standards from other places to define how testers should do their work. In this way, regulatory enforcement depended on concatenations—or long chains—of paperwork developed over years, in this case, involving both committees within the Society of Automotive Engineers and regulators within federal agencies. Standard 204 included a standard from the Society of Automotive Engineers, Recommended Practice J850, which standardized the dimensions and characteristics automotive crash test barriers should have.^[4] It mandated that crash test barriers should be concrete walls backed 200,000 pounds of compacted earth or the equivalent thereof. The key point is that the barrier should be immobile, pushing all of the force in the crash test into the crashing vehicle itself. The Fiat cars were failing this test dramatically. Regulators found that, because Fiat’s cars had rear engines with trunks in front, steering wheels moved upwards at an extreme angle during crash tests, directly at a driver’s head. The injuries in such an accident would have been gruesome and catastrophic.^[5]

Fiat’s Non-Conforming Testing Grounds

The regulatory investigation uncovered that Fiat’s crash test barrier and, therefore, its tests did not come anywhere near U.S. government rules. The issue was that Fiat did not have a dedicated testing facility.^[6] Instead, Fiat’s leaders decided to use the runways at the company’s private airport as its test area. However, they still wanted to use the airport as an airport, flying in and out of it with private jets for company business. Having crash test barriers on the runway would be a problem for planes. For this reason, the labor of testing worked differently at Fiat than it was supposed to according to the U.S. government: testers at Fiat built temporary crash test walls out of concrete cubes. They would use forklifts to form a wall with the cubes, and then take the wall back down after the tests. U.S. regulators found that the temporary walls in fact moved during the tests, thereby absorbing some of the energy during impact. Fiat’s cars had, in effect, “passed” its own tests because Fiat employees were doing the tests wrong. In 1970, NHTSA pushed Fiat to recall and modify 9,000 vehicles which had been sold in the United States, and the agency fined the company $100,000, the largest fine to that date. Newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, hailed the fine as a success for the federal agency with titles like, “Italian Auto Firm Allegedly Didn’t Meet Federal Steering-Column Standards; Fine is Highest Yet.”

Conclusion—Keeping Dangerous Technologies Off the Road

In the end, NHTSA staff members found that, because Fiat had done the tests incorrectly, it had claimed its steering-columns to be “safe” when they were quite dangerous. So-called “energy-absorbing steering-columns” had existed in the US since the early 1960s, and Fiat had its own version, which featured three-segments that collapsed into each other upon impact. However, the company had continued importing steering-columns that consisted of single steel bars, which sometimes impaled drivers during frontal collisions.^[7] The Fiat case has several important lessons to teach us. First and most simply, it draws our attention to the crucial, ordinary work of regulatory enforcement—the labor of ensuring technologies live up to our legal expectations. Second, the Fiat case shows us how regulatory enforcement involves not only seeing if technologies conform to standards but guaranteeing that testers at different times and different places and within different organizations follow standardized procedures. It’s about standardizing the testing work as well as the regulated object. Fiat had failed to follow procedure. And, finally, the Fiat case reminds us that budgets for regulatory agencies and other government organizations matter. Enforcement and testing cost money. When we cut federal budgets, as we are doing again these past few years, we do fewer tests and have less bandwidth to enforce rules. The chances go up for dangerous technologies to be sold on the market without being discovered.

Notes

1. Safety Standards Engineers to Chief of Validation Division, “Trip Report, September 24-27, 1969, to Digitek Corporation, Los Angeles, California,” October 7, 1969, 1, General records, Records of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 1966-91, Record Group 416, National Archives at College Park, MD.
2. Robert Gardner, “CIR Background Synopsis,” October 7, 1969, General records, Records of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 1966-91, Record Group 416, National Archives at College Park, MD.
3. Robert H. Gardner, Safety Standards Engineer, to Chief, Validation Division and Chief, Vehicles Branch, “Trip Report, October 29-31, 1969, to Dynamic Science, Phoenix, Arizona, and Digitek Corporation, Los Angeles, California,” November 24, 1969, 1.
4. Federal Register, Vol. 32 (February 3, 1967), 2414.
5. Digitek Corporation, “Vehicle Test Report FMVSS 204 1969 Fiat Model 850 VIN 0242771,” November 5, 1969.
6. Letter, Robert Brenner, Acting Director, to V. A. Garibaldi, President, Fiat Motor Company, “Subject: Fiat Model 850 Coupe,” October 29, 1969, 1.
7. Memorandum, David E. Wells, Chief Counsel, to F. C. Turner, Federal Highway Administrator, through Douglas W. Toms, Director, NHSB, “Fiat Civil Penalty 850 Sedan and Coupe,” March 3, 1970, 1.

Lee Vinsel is an assistant professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and a co-organizer of The Maintainers, an international, interdisciplinary research network focused on maintenance, repair, and mundane labor with things. His book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in spring 2019. Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.

Jennifer Hart, Wayne State University

Table of Contents

1. Body work
2. Mammy trucks
3. Training drivers
4. Testing officers
5. Local transport cultures
6. “Modern men”
7. Trotro – a “proper” car
8. Urbanization and technological change
9. New models, old business
10. Economic crisis and creativity
11. Conclusion
12. References

Introduction

This exhibit uses a technological object – the “mammy truck” – as a framework to explore the various forms of labor that shaped a mobility system in twentieth-century Ghana. Motor transportation is a frequent topic of conversation on the streets of contemporary African metropolises and rural villages. Passengers and politicians bemoan the frequent traffic jams, dangerous road conditions, and accidents that plague their communities – conditions that are often assumed to be timeless. The heated public commentary and persistent attempts to reform the transport industry implicitly acknowledge the importance of motor transportation across the continent even as they dismiss these transport networks as part of the “informal economy.” Yet the negativity of the present belies a much more complex history of entrepreneurial innovation, creative adaptation, and economic independence. Motor transport technologies arrived on the continent through networks of imperial trade, and colonial officials frequently viewed motor transportation as a symbol of European superiority that would inspire awe in colonial subjects. However, Africans who embraced the social and economic possibilities of motor transportation in colonies like the Gold Coast often did so on their own terms. Africans built infrastructure, adapted technology, and constructed mobility networks that simultaneously built on older systems of circulation and exchange and responded to the unique possibilities and challenges of the early twentieth century. Like colonial administrations elsewhere on the continent, British officials in the Gold Coast sought to restrict African mobility and access to technology. Their efforts were stymied by the colony’s class of prosperous African farmers and traders, who invested their profits in the new technology as a way to preserve their economic autonomy, facilitate social mobility, and control terms of trade. The cosmopolitanism and economic dynamism of early twentieth-century Gold Coast society was, in many ways, embodied in the mammy truck. The mammy truck adapted older networks of trade and cultures of movement associated with the head carriers and cask rollers who had transported cash crops like palm nuts and cocoa from interior farms to coastal ports as part of long-distance trade networks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The vehicle itself also required various levels of assembly – assembling the metal chassis, building the wooden body, painting the vehicle. This act of assemblage, which drew on both local and global technological skill, expertise, and labor, cast the mammy truck as a sort of hybrid vehicle. African entrepreneurs like farmers and traders invested in these vehicles soon after their introduction in the early years of the twentieth century, adapting the vehicles to reflect the needs of owners and passengers. As the name “mammy truck” implies, these vehicles were closely associated with market traders – predominantly women – who utilized the speed, convenience, and autonomy of the truck to expand their control over local and regional trade. Vehicle owners soon saw the economic potential of automobility – hiring out their vehicles to carry a wide range of goods and/or passengers within and between rural and urban areas, within and beyond the boundaries of the British colony of the Gold Coast. By the 1930s, Africans from all parts of Gold Coast society utilized the mammy truck to move. Vehicle owners and drivers continued to adapt as social, political, and economic conditions changed. By the 1960s, drivers were using wooden-sided vehicles to transport passengers in the capital city, Accra. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, persistent economic crisis meant that drivers and vehicle owners had to employ creative methods to keep their vehicles on the road even as they faced increasing governmental and public criticism. Market liberalization brought a flood of second-hand vans and buses into the country in the 1990s, which drivers quickly adapted to serve the needs of the passenger-public. The adaptability of transport workers in the face of significant economic change is a testament to their economic creativity. However, these same economic changes also drove increasing numbers of young men into the motor transport industry, flooding the labor market and undermining systems of training and professionalization that had long defined drivers as respectable men of status and skill. Economic change also meant that new kinds of vehicles appeared on the road, as mammy trucks and later trotros competed with municipal and omnibus systems, taxis, and articulated trucks for control over the motor transport system. The images, sound, and video in this digital exhibit highlight the different forms of labor and technology at the center of Ghana’s transport industry, as well as the changing cultural meaning attached to drivers and their vehicles over the course of the twentieth century. It concentrates, in particular, on dominant forms of mass transportation like the mammy truck and the trotro. These histories are critical to our understanding of African social, cultural, and economic history. The movement of populations and the processes of urbanization, political mobilization, and economic and cultural exchange that their mobility made possible shaped much of the history of the twentieth century in countries like Ghana. However, the experiences of Ghanaian automobile workers also provide a powerful challenge to dominant narratives about labor, technology and mobility within and beyond Africa. In contrast to western narratives of automobility, dominated by the American culture of the open road and the family car, African automobility in the Gold Coast/Ghana was organized around cultures and practices of public transportation that sought to connect communities, create economic opportunities, and decrease distance. The history of motor transportation in Ghana reminds us that while technologies might move through global networks they do not have universal meaning. Local transport workers – fabricators, mechanics, drivers, apprentices – and their passengers gave motor transport technology meaning through use.

Body Work

The first motor vehicles were imported into the Gold Coast Colony at the turn of the twentieth century. Government officials and coastal elites often used early vehicles as part of public displays of wealth and status. However, the poor conditions of most early roads made it nearly impossible to use these vehicles. The introduction of more durable vehicles with higher clearance, sturdier frames, and interchangeable parts – qualities most closely associated with the Model T Ford, which began production in 1908 – opened up new possibilities. British companies like Bedford and Austin dominated the early market to such an extent that “Bedford” became a widely-embraced nickname for these vehicles. Import restrictions were relaxed slightly in the context of World War I to allow for the import of highly durable and popular Ford trucks. Dockworkers transported disassembled vehicles from cargo ships on surfboats to sheds along the coast in cities like Accra. There, mechanics assembled the engine and chassis, carpenters constructed the wooden body, and artists painted the vehicle body and its colorful inscriptions.

Mammy Trucks

Early vehicles were used primarily for cargo transport. Farmers and traders used the wooden-sided lorries to transport produce from rural production zones to regional markets and coastal ports. These sorts of practices were extensions of local cultures of entrepreneurialism and commerce, but they were also expressions of resistance. In embracing the motor vehicle and financially investing in motor transport technology, African entrepreneurs sought to maximize their profits and secure some control over export-oriented cash crop economies. The British colonial government invested heavily in railways in the early twentieth century. Built primarily in regions that were rich in agricultural and mineral products, railways were supposed to centralize resource extraction, increasing European authority over almost all parts of the export-oriented trade sector. African farmers and traders invested their profits in motor vehicles and local communities constructed their own roads in order to bypass these systems and preserve their role in long-standing local and long-distance trading networks. The names associated with these vehicles reflected the ways that they were used and the meanings ascribed to them in local social and economic networks. Among members of the general public, these vehicles were often known as “mammy trucks” (also “mammy wagons” or “mammy lorries”) – a reference to the market women (e.g. “Makola mammies”) who frequently used the vehicles to trade. Other terms like watonkyene (“you have gone to get salt”) also referenced the long-distance trade connections through which these traders exchanged salt for tomatoes and fish. Still others (“boneshaker,” for example) referenced the uncomfortable conditions of the wooden seats on rough, unforgiving rural roads.

Testing officers

Master drivers determined when mates were sufficiently qualified to go for a license test, which involved assessments of both practical skill and temperament. Many drivers have vivid memories of their examinations. Masters would take them to a hill outside of town, park, and shut off the vehicle. Mates were instructed to place a piece of chalk behind the back tire, start the vehicle, and move forward up the hill without breaking the chalk. Mates who were successful were allowed to go to the licensing office for a formal test. Young men often saved up pocket money to pay the testing fees. Early drivers were assessed only on the technical knowledge associated with the vehicle itself. However, by 1934, new forms of regulation also required drivers to pass literacy tests and meet other standards that defined “the type of man suited to be a driver,” engendering new debates about expertise and professionalism. In the context of colonialism, these debates often took on paternalistic and racialized tones, as British colonial officials sought to regulate African engagements with technology and mobility. After independence, debates about driver training and licensing were often intimately connected to concerns over accidents and debates about public safety and the public good. Regardless, the licensing test itself was considered a rite of passage for drivers, who often could still easily recall the names of their testing officers and the details of their examination decades later.

Local transport cultures

Increasing government regulation in the mid-1930s prompted drivers to organize themselves into unions, which could help define standards of professionalization and enable drivers to better negotiate with colonial government officials over regulatory standards, fees, and fares. Drivers’ unions adapted the British trade union tradition, relying on local models of chieftaincy and economic organization to create meaningful models of authority and solidarity. All early unions had a “chief driver,” whose manner of dress and ceremony often echoed the cultures and practices of local political authorities. However, particularly in Ga communities like La and Teshie, where there were large concentrations of drivers and driving families, these unions formed tight-knit social organizations with unique forms of cultural expression. Unions in La and Teshie not only had a Chief Driver, but they also had elaborate swearing-in ceremonies and a “linguist” (spokesman of the chief) who carried a wooden staff topped with a mammy truck. In La, drivers created a unique musical form, which built on work cultures among long-distance drivers who would honk horns and beat tire rims to chase away animals while repairing their vehicles in rural areas. La drivers adapted these instruments to play local musical styles, including highlife music, in what they refer to as “por por” music (mimicking the sound of a horn).

Modern men

Drivers also cultivated cultures of cool associated with the cosmopolitanism of their mobile work. By the 1950s and 1960s, drivers were highly respected as “modern men,” defined by their steady incomes, mobile lifestyles, and standards of professionalism and skill. Popular highlife songs of the period like the Kakaiku Band’s “Driver Ni na Meware no” talked about how women “want to marry a driver.” Drivers and passengers alike argued that the steady income of drivers made them desirable mates. Daily income and flexible work meant that the family would always get their “daily bread.” However, drivers also used that income to purchase imported goods, build houses, dress in fashionable clothing, and send their children to school. For many of these men who did not have access to formal education and the cultural and economic resources of elite colonial society, driving represented an alternative path to respectability. The worldliness attached to physical mobility facilitated a broader socioeconomic mobility for many drivers, their families, and their passengers. In the process, these mobile workers cultivated a culture of distinctively African automobility. These processes are embodied in scenes from the classic film The Boy Kumasenu, produced by the Gold Coast Film Unit in 1952. In the clip below, a young man grapples with the desire to know a broader world and the excitement of the city – something he encountered directly by observing the lorry drivers who spent time in the village store where he worked.

Trotro – a “proper” car

As British colonial rule came to an end, drivers frequently used their positions to further the nationalist cause, participating in strike actions as part of Kwame Nkrumah’s “Positive Action” campaign and championing decolonization and political participation. This explicitly political action echoed the role of the mammy truck as a symbol of economic autonomy and ingenuity in the new nation. By the 1960s, some vehicle owners in the capital city, Accra, began using the mammy truck in a new way: to transport passengers around the city. Known as “trotros” – after the Ga word for three, a reference to the original fare – these vehicles had their roots in the practices of mammy truck drivers who British officials condemned for operating “pirate passenger lorries” in the 1930s and 1940s. Trotros became cultural icons, closely associated with the market women who frequently used them in their daily work, but also facilitating the movement of a wide swath of other African residents in the cultural, commercial, and political capital. Passengers climbed in through the open sides of the wooden-bodied vehicle, sitting close together on wooden benches. The tarpaulin that was frequently rolled up on the sides of the vehicle provided protection for passengers during the rainy season.

Urbanization and technological change

Demonstrated in the two images below (taken of the same lorry park, from nearly the same angle), between the 1960s and the 1970s, competition within the industry and the technology available to drivers changed significantly. Some of that change reflected the rapid urbanization in cities like Accra after independence. A city that had 133,192 people in 1948 had more than doubled to 337,828 by 1960. Independence also brought a relaxation of import controls and an expansion of opportunities available to African urban residents. Drivers responded to this demand, expanding passenger services in the city and developing new routes within emerging neighborhoods and suburbs. Urbanization increased demand for transportation, which enabled drivers to charge higher fares and guaranteed regular business. Drivers used their profits to participate in the expanding consumer culture noted above (see module 6), but they also used accumulated profits to purchase their own vehicles, establishing themselves as small-scale owner-operators. The most successful drivers owned multiple vehicles and employed a number of mates and drivers. When commodity prices declined in the late 1960s and 1970s, the motor transport industry was one of the few viable spaces of economic opportunity for young men in the city. As more men embraced the possibilities of driving work, increased competition made it more difficult for drivers to profit from their work or enforce standards in the profession.

New models, old business

The importation of wooden-sided vehicles was banned in 1966. While many of these vehicles remained on the road, government officials encouraged drivers to embrace new technologies. The wooden bodies were said to splinter in the case of crash, causing further injuries among passengers. Many drivers continued to operate mammy trucks as cargo transport, particularly in rural areas and small towns, and many children still rode mammy trucks to school through the 1980s. Increasingly, however, the wooden trucks found themselves in competition with new imported buses. Today one rarely sees the wooden-sided trucks – they have been replaced by imported, second-hand buses and vans – and the transport industry remains the subject of significant controversy in Accra and around the country. Drivers in the late twentieth century faced new challenges as the cost of vehicles increased and mechanics struggled to find spare parts to maintain the existing vehicle stock. Modern novelty quickly gave way to nostalgia for the old vehicles and the period of relative prosperity that they represented. Even in the midst of technological change, the labor practices of drivers, which privileged small-scale car ownership and the apprenticeship models of training persisted at the center of a transport industry that was dominated by the motor vehicle.

Economic crisis and creativity

As the country’s economic conditions began to deteriorate in the late 1960s, drivers faced increasing questions about their economic practices. Like market women and other entrepreneurs, government officials and the general public frequently targeted drivers, who were seen to profit off of the suffering of others, providing an essential public service for personal gain. Newspapers are full of complaints about drivers who engaged in “profiteering” that was widely viewed as both immoral and criminal. While the industry’s reputation suffered within this broader context of social and economic decline, young men continued to flock to the industry, seeking low barriers of entry and the promise of a steady wage. In 1983, as the country grappled with the repatriation of thousands of Ghanaians who had been expelled from Nigeria and a persistent drought that crippled the country’s economy, a combination of foreign currency shortages and oil shocks meant that petrol, tires, and spare parts were also in short supply. Drivers continued working during this period, taking advantage of their strategic position within the broader economy to sustain their households and using their knowledge of the vehicle to invent creative ways to keep themselves and their passengers moving. Demand, however, remained high and many passengers, such as those seen below, resorted to more extreme measures in order to get around.

Conclusion

The history of motor transportation in Ghana is one of creativity, adaptation, and resistance. Over the course of the twentieth century, drivers and their passengers creatively adapted both the imported technology of motor transportation and indigenous practices of mobility, circulation, and exchange to forge a uniquely Ghanaian culture of automobility. The trotro can be seen as a local expression of global technological forms. But a close reading of the history of this technology through the lives of the drivers and passengers whose actions gave meaning to technological form suggests that it was much more than that. Mammy trucks and trotros connected Africans in twentieth-century Ghana to global networks and cultures, but they also challenged and often defied the imperialist impulses of technological and technocratic regimes of colonial and postcolonial governance. At the same time, however, we must be careful not to romanticize a system that presents profound challenges and insecurities for both drivers and passengers. This persistent defiance – a working outside of the system – often means that the motor transport industry in Ghana is labeled and dismissed as part of a demonized “informal economy.” But as these stories suggest, there may be much we can and should learn from the networks, cultures, and practices that develop alongside the grassroots infrastructures and public services that mammy trucks and trotros provide.

References

Jennifer Hart, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 2016. Jennifer Hart, “Motor Transportation, Trade Unionism, and the Culture of Work in Colonial Ghana” (Special Issue: “Labor in Transport: Histories from the Global South [Africa, Asia, and Latin America] 1700 to 2000”), International Review of Social History 59 (2014): 185-209. Reprinted in Labor in Transport: Histories from the Global South, c. 1750-1950, Stefano Bellucci, Larissa Rosa Correa, Jan-George Deutsch, and Chitra Joshi, eds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2014. Jennifer Hart, “’One Man, No Chop’: Licit Wealth, Good Citizens, and the Criminalization of Drivers in Postcolonial Ghana,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46:3 (December 2013): 373-96. Jennifer Hart, “’Nifa Nifa’: Technopolitics, Mobile Workers, and the ambivalence of Decline in Acheampong’s Ghana,” African Economic History 44 (2016): 181-201. Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2012. Ato Quayson, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 2014. Lindsey Green-Simms, Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 2017. Jennifer Hart is an Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University, where she teaches courses in African History, Digital History, History Communication, and World History. Her 2016 book, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press) was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize. Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.

Roger Turner, Science History Institute

Table of Contents

1. Knowing Weather
2. Theorizing a Three-Dimensional Atmosphere
3. A Model Airline Weather Service
4. The Weather Man at Washington
5. Meteorological “Labor?”
6. Pilots Observe the Upper Air
7. The Labor behind Instruments
8. Airline Meteorologists at Work
9. Aviation Meteorologists during World War II
10. Advertising Airline Meteorology
11. Aviation Shapes the TV Weather Report
12. Jet Age Meteorology
13. Weather Working Without Windows
14. References

Knowing Weather

Airlines need to “keep schedule” to be commercially viable. That is, they need to fly to and from pre-set destinations on a consistent basis. But changing weather makes this challenging. Flights can be disrupted by a wide range of atmospheric conditions, including fog, cloudbanks, storms, turbulence, icing conditions, and headwinds.

Over the course of the twentieth century, people involved with aviation devised ways deal with changing weather conditions. One strategy was to overcome weather by creating sturdier aircraft, new instruments, and so-called “all-weather” flying systems that allowed pilots to navigate and land in a much wider range of weather conditions (Morrison 2003; Conway 2006).

A second strategy involved trying to better understand, monitor, and predict the weather. Airlines hired weather forecasters to brief pilots and route aircraft in ways that minimized exposure to hazardous conditions (Turner 2010). To improve those forecasts, airlines sometimes created networks of weather observers. More often, they leaned on national governments that already ran weather services to measure different aspects of the atmosphere and disseminate those observations (Thomas 1996; Walker 2012; Henry 2017). Meteorologists also wrote training manuals and taught pilots how to apply meteorology in flight.

Collectively, these advances transformed aviation into an infrastructure, a transportation system safe and reliable enough that many have come to depend upon it to move people and goods around the world. This module explores the symbiotic development of meteorological labor and commercial aviation from the 1920s into the jet age.

Theorizing a Three-Dimensional Atmosphere

Meteorology changed as the development of aviation became a priority for governments of many nations. When the Wright brothers asked about a place with strong, steady winds for their flight experiments, the US Weather Bureau recommended Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. But as airplanes and airships became more capable, particularly during World War I, aviators recognized how different conditions aloft could be from those measured at the ground. Aviators’ needs began to outstrip the meteorological theories that guided the work of government weather services around the world.

Twentieth-century meteorologists increasingly studied the physics of the free atmosphere—the behavior and structure of the atmosphere that moves largely free from the frictional effects of the ground – rather than the weather that we experience on the ground. Pioneering this effort was a group of Scandinavian physicists who developing new methods for understanding the behavior of the atmosphere in three dimensions. Led by Vilhelm Bjerknes, the so-called “Bergen School” (named for its location in Bergen, Norway) sought to improve weather prediction by applying thermodynamics and classical physics. During 1917-1918, they developed the concepts of air masses and storm fronts, inspired by the Great War’s battle maps. Cold, dry Arctic air masses clashed with warm, moist air masses from the tropics along the “polar front,” leading to sloped interfaces that produced distinctive patterns of cloud, precipitation, and flows of air in three dimensions. As these concepts were refined in the 1920s and 1930s, they offered the potential to predict changes in visibility at different altitudes, as well as the location of violent “squall lines” particularly dangerous for dirigible airships.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Bergen School methods began to spread around the world, often touted as the foundation of “modern meteorology.” Bergen School students emigrated or spent extended fellowships with national weather services across Europe and North America. The US Navy’s leading aerologist, Francis Reichelderfer, visited Bergen for six months in 1931-32, producing a report that circulated widely, if informally, amongst military meteorologists. (The Navy called its weathermen “aerologists,” because they focused on conditions aloft.) By 1933, the former head of the British Meteorological Office would call the graphic representation of the Bergen School’s model of storm formation in three dimensions “the most widely known illustration of modern meteorology.” It was reproduced in meteorology textbooks and pilot training manuals, thus becoming an icon of the new theory of weather.

But the adoption of Bergen School theory and new methods of forecasting was not automatic or easy. A high-level delegation from the British Met Office endorsed the new methods after a visit to Bergen in July 1920, but fronts did not appear in the public Daily Weather Forecast until 1933, in part because analysts across Europe had trouble agreeing on where fronts actually were without better observations of the upper air (Walker 2012: 228). In the Soviet Union, the foreignness of Norwegian methods was part of the accusation that led to the purge and eventual execution of Alexei Wangenheim, the director of the national Hydro-Meteorological Service (Rolin 2017). The civilian Weather Bureau in the United States did not adopt Norwegian methods until the late 1930s, largely due to the difficulty of retraining its forecasting staff and reorganizing their workflows (Whitnah 1961).

A Model Airline Weather Service

In 1927, Bjerknes student Carl-Gustav Rossby was recruited to establish a private weather service in California for Western Air Express, which the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics was helping to develop as a model airline. The airline planned to connect Los Angeles and Oakland with three-hour flights using new tri-motored passenger airplanes.

Rossby created an areal network, recruiting observers at stations to the east and west of the airway, as well as directly along the flight routes. (To this point, the U.S. Weather Bureau had established aviation weather stations mainly at airports directly along airways.) The observers were given a cloud atlas to better identify cloud forms in a consistent way, which helped the forecasters get a sense of the humidity and visibility conditions aloft. During flying times, observers reported on a set schedule (first spaced an hour and half apart, later every three hours) and could be called upon to make supplemental observations when conditions were expected to change rapidly. Observers were asked to report: the wind direction and intensity (on the Beaufort scale); a one- to three-word description of the air conditions at the ground; the amount of clouds; the cloud forms; the ceiling; the visibility; the temperature; and the atmospheric pressure. When read in code by a disciplined observer, this information could be communicated in about twenty seconds. By the end of the summer of 1928, reports from over thirty-five stations were being gathered and plotted in under an hour. In addition, six pilot balloon stations were eventually established to create a vertical profile of windspeed and direction.

All forecasting and analysis of observations was made by Rossby or his handpicked men at the Oakland and Los Angeles terminals. One forecaster was Horace Byers, a University of California, Berkeley undergraduate who soon became Rossby’s indispensable righthand man.

The airline mapped out three possible flight routes, choosing which to use based on current weather reports. The pilot received a weather report fifteen minutes before take-off, as well as updates by radio every fifteen minutes while in flight. These reports contained information on ceiling, visibility, and general condition of the sky (cloudy, overcast, broken clouds, clear, etc.), which was crucial since these planes were flying in visual contact with the ground, at altitudes varying from five hundred feet above ground level up to a few thousand feet. The model weather service was a moderate but somewhat narrow success. WAE suffered no weather-related mishaps during 1928 and 1929. Other US airlines embraced integrating weather observations, forecasting, and keeping pilots informed by radio. Rossby assisted Transcontinental Air Transport as it set up its meteorological service in the fall of 1928; Horace Byers helped expand WAE’s system geographically when he returned in the 1930s to build up a meteorology department at the reorganized airline now named TWA.

But areal weather observing networks and pilot balloon stations were expensive to run. The Weather Bureau initially refused to take over the observing network. When the Guggenheim Fund stopped its subsidy in early 1929, the entire system nearly collapsed. Only a last-minute intervention (probably at the behest of incoming President Herbert Hoover, whose son worked for WAE) secured Weather Bureau cooperation.

Pictured here is WAE operations staff member and radio specialist Herbert Hoover Jr. Barely legible at left is the location of each observing station.

 

The Weather Man at Washington

“As much as a pilot fears anything, he fears fog!” exclaimed Ford Motor Company in 1929. But fortunately, “the weather man at Washington” was now “lifting his eyes to the pathways of the sky.” Although the ad visually implied it was the hand of God that guided pilots, the text described how government meteorologists were soon going to provide “guidance to clear flying and safe landing.” This was a wildly exaggerated claim when it was published in 1929. But over the coming decades, government did play a pivotal role in making the skies navigable and known.

In the United States, the Department of Commerce largely took responsibility for aviation, developing a system of radio navigation beacons as well as licensing pilots and certifying aircraft designs. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 subsidized the nascent commercial airlines through generous air mail contracts. The Commerce Department, in a series of moves of dubious legality, then pushed airlines into mergers with airplane manufacturers and engine makers, ensuring that the mail would be flown in technologically advanced planes that had extra space for passengers.

The Weather Bureau, located since 1891 in the Department of Agriculture, moved with considerably less boldness in supporting aviation. The Weather Bureau (today known as the National Weather Service) maintained a nation-wide network of observing stations, and a centralized staff of forecasters who produced predictions and weather information for the entire nation. The Bureau also coordinated the international exchange of weather data. Since 1870, the Bureau had focused on the weather at ground level, in support of shipping safety, farmers, commodity traders, and the broad public interested in tomorrow’s weather. The Bureau’s most prominent product was the daily synoptic weather map, a snapshot of surface conditions across the country, which forecasters relied upon in predicting the weather. Adjusting the Bureau’s working processes to gather data about conditions aloft was slow, particularly since that new mission was rarely accompanied by adequate new appropriations by Congress. Still, the head of the upper air division was promoted to Chief in 1934, and he was succeeded by the Navy’s flying meteorologist Francis Reichelderfer in 1938.

 

Meteorological “Labor?”

The role of government is a reminder that aviation is more than aircraft. It also includes airports and navigation beacons, government regulators, schools of aeronautical engineering, administrative techniques for managing airlines, and much more. Historians call assemblages like this “technological systems.” Understanding the role of workers in aviation means paying attention to the less noticeable kinds of labor that happen across the system necessary to keep passengers and cargo moving.

It may seem curious to connect meteorology with “labor.” Weather work is generally cognitive and administrative. It is not usually physically arduous, like laying bricks for roads, though sometimes observers did exert themselves in difficult environments. But transportation systems require diverse kinds of labor, in the sense of work done by humans. By paying attention to the weather workers, we can see that aviation is more than sleek machines slipping through the air; it’s also a complex collection of humans trying to make a living, using their judgement, and going to work each day as part of a system upon which other people have come to depend.

 

Pilots Observe the Upper Air

The US Weather Bureau collected only a tiny amount of information about the upper air before 1931, mainly using instruments mounted on kites that rarely reached above five thousand feet.

Beginning on July 1, 1931, the Weather Bureau commissioned daily flights to record conditions aloft, with simultaneous take-offs at five a.m. eastern time from Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas and Omaha. Private pilots flew their own planes, after Weather Bureau technicians attached aerometeographs to measure temperature, pressure and humidity aloft. Pilots earned twenty-five dollars only if they reached at least 13,500 feet, plus a ten percent bonus for every additional one thousand feet. In cooperation with the military, airplane observations were expanded to twenty-two stations in 1934, and to thirty stations by 1937 (Whitnah 1961: 187-89).

Pictured here is Johnny Starr, celebrated as the “Best Flying Weatherman” since he often reached two to three thousand feet higher than other pilots. Starr is wearing a fur-lined flight suit and wool gloves to insulate him from temperatures that could reach forty degrees below zero at high altitude. The resident cat of the Omaha, Nebraska airport greeted him after every flight.

By 1938, when the Weather Bureau required pilots to reach 16,500 feet to be paid, some pilots carried cats, dogs, or even squirrels aloft with them. As oxygen dwindled, the animal’s head would droop, warning the pilot to descend before his judgment was impaired by hypoxia. Twelve pilots were killed making airplane observations between 1931 and 1938.

 

The Labor behind Instruments

The US Weather Bureau switched from using airplanes to radiosondes to collect upper air observations in 1938. These electronic instruments broadcast measurements of temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure as they ascended at a constant rate. The balloons burst around 70,000 feet, and a small parachute carried the instrument safely to the ground.

Though the newspapers called them “robot balloons,” these instruments still required a considerable amount of labor. Filling and launching the hydrogen-filled balloon required a two-man team, while an observer checked the data as they were printed at the receiving station. The observer or other “sub-professional” staff then plotted the data on a skew-T, log-p chart, a kind of thermodynamic diagram with distorted axes that simplified the tedious calculations involved. Interpreting these charts helped forecasters track air masses across the country, since an air mass retained its thermodynamic character as it moved.

Radiosondes reduced costs. But upper air observations remained much more expensive to collect than surface observations. There were thirty-four radiosonde stations taking observations once a day in 1940, which was doubled to twice a day as a defense measure just before the United States entered World War II. Radiosondes cost about nine dollars in 1938 (about one hundred and sixty dollars in current funds), affordable enough to be lost, but worth reusing if they could be retrieved. Instruments carried a post-paid address label and a reward was promised if returned to the Weather Bureau.

 

Airline Meteorologists at Work

By the late 1930s, every major U.S. airline had a meteorological division. But unlike pilots or flight attendants, meteorologists were not directly visible to the flying public. Weather workers were back-stage, part of the operations staff that included dispatchers and traffic managers. Domestic airline meteorologists were largely recruited from the US Weather Bureau or the Army Air Corps (Pan Am monopolized ex-Navy men), or hired directly after graduating from one of the two new graduate programs in meteorology at MIT and Caltech. Small programs at the Boeing School of Aeronautics and Parks Air College also graduated a few airline meteorologists. Airline meteorology was not a large occupation; an informal census counted ninety-four airline meteorologists in July 1940, about one quarter of all the trained weather forecasters in the United States. They typically worked 48-hour weeks and started at two to three hundred dollars a month, with good job security.

Daily work began by translating a long string of coded weather observations from across the United States delivered by Weather Bureau teletype circuit, and plotting them on surface and upper air charts, so that an air mass analysis could be performed. Mapping and analysis typically took two and a half to three and a half hours of an eight-hour shift, wrote a meteorology instructor in the 1939 article, “So You Want to be an Airline Meteorologist?” The maps and analysis were updated four times a day, leading one author to joke that the meteorologist was “probably the most dissatisfied man in the airline.”

Next a meteorologist would predict the atmospheric conditions each flight would experience. He (airline meteorologists were all men, until a couple of women were hired during World War II) paid particular attention to fog, areas of significant vertical movement in the air column, headwinds and tailwinds. Also of major concern were patches of air with liquid water that could freeze on contact with an airplane; wing icing diminishes lift and led to many crashes.

He then briefed the pilots and dispatchers. When flying conditions were potentially dangerous, the dispatcher, pilot and meteorologist would collaboratively decide whether a plane could take off and its optimum flight levels. The meteorologist was an advisor; ultimate responsibility for flight safety lay with pilots. Forecasts and current weather conditions were printed on clearances and flight plans carried in the cockpit. Meteorologists and pilots both signed these documents to legally acknowledge them.

Airline meteorology was primarily focused on safety, as pilots needed minimum visibility distances and adequate cloud ceilings in order to land. Meteorologists could improve efficiency as well, for instance by finding a route longer by statute miles, but faster because of tailwinds. Meteorologists did their best with sparse upper air data during the 1930s, but weather still caused many delays, and worse, fatal crashes.

 

Aviation Meteorologists during World War II

The vast expansion of military aviation to fight World War II demanded weather observers and forecasters. United States training programs produced more than six thousand new weather forecasters, up from just four hundred forecasters in the United States in 1940. More than ten thousand military weather observers were trained as well. The profusion of air bases and weather stations around the world also increased the collection of weather data, leading to advances in meteorological theory and forecast accuracy.

While aviation meteorology had been uniformly male before the war, World War II created new opportunities for many women. Several hundred women served as observers, while about one hundred went through college level programs preparing them for professional roles in meteorology. Recruitment policies required these women to have master’s degrees in science prior to starting training, thus making them better qualified than most of the male trainees. Military rules prohibited these women from being deployed overseas. Some forecast for squadrons of submarine-hunting blimps and pilot training bases, though most worked as instructors and meteorology researchers.

Most of these women were pushed out of professional roles in meteorology after the war, though some women stayed on as observers and map plotters. Exceptions included Florence Van Straten, a researcher for the U.S. Navy, and Joanne Simpson, who became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology in the United States in 1949.

 

Advertising Airline Meteorology

After World War II, airlines sought to rebuild their commercial traffic by convincing potential passengers that flight was safe and comfortable. Meteorologists were among the experts featured in advertisements. Continuing a pre-war trend, the preflight weather briefing was probably the most common situation in which airline meteorologists were depicted. Photographs of this moment were published in popular books describing air travel and promotional brochures.

This 1950 advertisement for American Airlines touted the meteorologists and flight dispatchers who served as the “weather eyes” of the airline. “This is the team that defines the ‘comfort level’ for your trip—the route around or above unfavorable weather,” American claimed. A United Airlines ad from 1962 advised readers to carry an umbrella whenever an airline meteorologist did, since he was never wrong. These claims were mostly puffery, of course. While airline meteorology departments were hard at work, they had a far from complete view of what was going on in the atmosphere. Observations made by the Weather Bureau were supplemented by “pireps,” the inflight reports made by pilots that were radioed back to airport towers and then transmitted to forecast stations.

 

Aviation Shapes the TV Weather Report

Aviation meteorologists invented the TV weather report in the decade immediately after World War II, transforming how Americans learned about daily weather. Men like US Air Force officer and American Airlines meteorologist Harold Taft presented weather reports and forecasts on local TV stations across the country. “We thought it would be a good idea to use the briefing techniques that we used for pilots during the war for television,” he remembered later. They combined the briefing’s narrative form with a simplified synoptic map, sometimes drawn live on camera to add additional visual interest. Emulating the success of ex-Navy forecaster Louis Allen in Washington D.C., several meteorologists sketched cartoons on screen to give away to viewers. From about 1948 until 1952, military veterans represented meteorology from nationally prominent cities like New York to smaller regional centers like Tulsa and New Orleans.

The Federal Communications Commission lifted its freeze on new stations in 1952, stimulating new experiments in presenting the weather. Some stations dispensed with meteorological experience and hired personable cartoonists. Others sought ratings by hiring “weather girls,” generally young actresses, beauty queens, or models. The American Meteorological Society responded by creating a “Seal of Approval” available only to experienced meteorologists who presented the weather with a suitably “professional” persona, as judged by an all-male board. Ninety-five men received the seal before the first woman was granted a seal in 1972 (Turner 2009). But the Seal of Approval never succeeded in securing TV weather reports exclusively for educated, experienced meteorologists (Henson 2010).

TV “weathercasters” became local celebrities, visiting schools and engaging in public outreach more than any other group of meteorologists. While broadcasters acknowledged the Weather Bureau as a source of observational data and forecasting guidance, TV weathercasters had become the public face of meteorology by the 1960s.

 

Jet Age Meteorology

Beginning in the 1950s, pressurized planes powered by jet engines shifted the weather problems confronting airlines. Jets like the British Comet and the American 707 and DC-8 cruised in the stratosphere. Airlines and jet manufacturers liked to claim they flew “above the weather,” but tropospheric conditions remained important during take-off and landing, and for shorter-range feeder aircraft that delivered passengers to airline hubs. And jets introduced new weather problems. Much higher landing speeds made jets vulnerable to overrunning wet runways. Clear air turbulence reached into the stratosphere, leading to injuries when passengers took off their seatbelts during cruise. Fine volcanic ash, invisible to the naked eye, could fuse to hot turbine blades and disable engines, sometimes all four at once. After ash nearly brought down a 747 in 1982, and then another in 1989, the International Civil Aviation Organization worked with national weather services to establish nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers to track eruptions around the world.

Radars mounted in planes gave pilots a new tool for seeing the weather immediately ahead. United Airlines began to experiment with airborne weather radar in 1953, mounting a set in a DC-3 that was soon nicknamed “Sir Echo.” While valuable, pilots and first officers had to learn to recognize weather conditions in the reflections on their scopes (Harrison 1954).

 

Weather Working without Windows

By the end of the twentieth century, weather services collected vastly more data about all levels of the atmosphere. This data came from automated versions of long-established instruments like barometers, thermometers and hygrometers, plus new instruments including radar, lidar, and satellite-based remote sensing. Computers mediated the flow of these observations to initialize the numerical models used for forecasting (Edwards 2010). While skillful weather forecasting retains a crucial human element, automation and computerization have transformed the kinds of labor done by meteorological workers (Fine 2007).

The new nature of meteorological data changed the working conditions of meteorologists. As this information was gradually integrated digitally, meteorologists increasingly worked in windowless spaces surrounded by screens, rather than racks of paper maps. Telecommunications advances and efforts to cut costs meant that in-person weather briefings were disappearing by the early 1970s, replaced by phone calls from pilots to forecasters in a central office, or even by “self-briefings,” where pilots read the weather situation for themselves, from synoptic charts and route forecasts distributed via facsimile to each originating airport.

Meteorologists thus became less visible even to the transport workers who continue to depend upon their work and expertise. Meteorologists rarely if ever appear in airline advertisements today, as airlines compete on price and convenience, not safety or comfort. While weather work remains essential to the infrastructure of air transportation, it has receded deep into the cultural background.

 

 

References

Erik M. Conway, Blind Landings: Low-Visibility Operations in American Aviation, 1918–1958 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

Gary Alan Fine, Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

James Rodger Fleming, Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology (MIT Press, 2016).

Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Cornell University Press, 1989)

John F. Fuller, Thor’s Legions: Weather Support to the US Air Force and Army, 1937-1987 (American Meteorological Society, 1990).

Kristine C. Harper, Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology (MIT Press, 2008)

Henry T. Harrison, “Highlights of United Air Lines Weather Radar Evaluation,” Weatherwise v. 7 n. 4 (1954): 92-95.

Matthew Henry, “Assembling the Weather: Expertise, Authority and the Negotiation of trans-Tasman Aviation Forecasts,” History of Meteorology 8 (2017): 179-201.

Robert Henson, Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology (American Meteorological Society, 2010).

Matthew H. Hersch, Inventing the American Astronaut (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Tom Morrison, Quest for All Weather Flight (Crowood, 2003).

Morley Thomas, Forecasts for Flying: Meteorology in Canada, 1918-1939 (ECW Press, 1996).

Roger Turner, “Teaching the Weather Cadet Generation: Aviation, Pedagogy, and Aspirations to a Universal Meteorology in America, 1920-1950,” in Intimate Universality: Local and Global Themes in the History of Weather and Climate, edited by James R. Fleming, Vladimir Jankovic, and Deborah R. Coen (Science History Publications, 2006): 141-173.

Roger Turner, “Keeping Meteorology Masculine: The American Meteorological Society’s Response to TV ‘Weather Girls’ in the 1950s,” in Weather, Local Knowledge and Everyday Life: Issues in Integrated Climate Studies, edited by Vladimir Jankovic and Christina Barboza (Rio de Janeiro: MAST, 2009): 147-158.

Roger Turner, “Weathering Heights: The Emergence of Aeronautical Meteorology as an Infrastructural Science,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 2010).

Malcolm Walker, History of the Meteorological Office (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Donald R. Whitnah, A History of the United States Weather Bureau (University of Illinois Press, 1961).

Kenneth A. Willard, “So you want to be an Airline Meteorologist?” Flying Magazine (May 1939): 38-41.

Kathleen Williams. Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II (Naval Institute Press, 2001).

Roger Turner is a research fellow and public historian at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. His research interests include the use of environmental surveillance and prediction in industrial societies, and how story-telling can engage various publics in scientific, technological, and environmental issues. He curates the blog Picturing Meteorology and recently completed work on Instruments of Change, a playful multimedia exhibit about five surprising scientific instruments.

Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.

Andrew Urban, Rutgers University

Table of Contents

1. Immigrant or Sailor? Assigning Legal Status in the Era of Exclusion
2. Asian Labor and Global Shipping During the Long Nineteenth Century
3. Wages, Nativism, and Chinese Seamen
4. Regulating and Policing Sailors’ Shore Leave
5. Intermediaries: Brokers, Bondsmen, and Other Service Providers
6. Anti-Chinese Activism in San Francisco and Great Britain: Shared Agendas
7. Refusing to Stay on Ship
8. World War II and the Changing Politics of Chinese Restriction
9. Conclusion
10. Archives and Works Consulted

Immigrant or Sailor? Assigning Legal Status in the Era of Exclusion

When “Ah” Kee submitted a habeus petition to the federal Court for the Southern District of New York in November 1884, demanding his release from prison, legal precedents determining how government officials were to enforce the 1882 Chinese Restriction Act were scarce. Born in post-annexation Hong Kong as a British colonial subject, Kee had sailed from Kolkata (Calcutta) on the American bark, the Richard Parsons. How Kee had ended up in Kolkata went unreported, but court documents did note that he had been “following the high seas” for some time. Kee likely understood New York to be a global port that was “free” insofar as a seaman could come ashore and negotiate the terms of their next contract without government restrictions on their participation in the local labor market. Upon the Richard Parsons’ arrival in New York, however, the ship’s captain claimed that the new law prohibiting the immigration of Chinese laborers meant that Kee was forbidden from disembarking. When Kee snuck ashore, he was detained by a federal marshal monitoring the piers.

The court freed him. Justice Addison Brown wrote in his opinion that “The well-known use and meaning of… ‘Chinese laborers’ have no reference to seamen in the ordinary pursuit of their vocation on the high seas, who may touch upon our shores, and may land temporarily for the purpose only of obtaining a chance to ship for some other foreign voyage as soon as possible, and who do not intend to make any stay here, or enter upon any of the occupations on land within this country.”^[1] Brown believed that the Chinese Restriction Act was not intended to hamper commerce in American ports by putting onerous regulations on how ships handled the hiring and discharge of seamen. It was in the United States’ interest, free trade advocates and backers of Brown’s line of thinking maintained, to accommodate vessels regardless of what country they were registered to or whom they hired as crew. With freight and passenger routes connecting New York to Europe, South and Central America, the Caribbean, and East and South Asia, by 1900 the city’s open-for-business attitude toward imports and exports had helped it surpass London as the world’s busiest port.

Despite Brown’s optimism that local labor markets favorable to the conduct of global maritime trade could coexist with restrictive immigration laws, to anti-Chinese exclusionists bent on closing legislative loopholes, Chinese sailors remained a dangerous source of potential unauthorized entries. As John Hager, Collector of Customs for the Port of San Francisco underlined, in an 1886 letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, Chinese “seamen individually are recruited from the very element which the law prohibits from entering the country. When ashore, they are soon lost sight of in the vast throng of their countrymen in this city.”^[2] To Hager and other exclusionists, permitting Chinese sailors to come ashore was akin to inviting them to remain in the United States illegally.

* * *

Chinese sailors helped make late-nineteenth-century globalization possible by providing an experienced and geographically dispersed source of maritime labor that was available for hire for relatively low wages. Economists estimate that the tonnage moved in international shipping increased by four hundred percent between 1870 and 1913. Trade ballooned at the same time the world was becoming a more restrictive place to non-white migrant laborers. Globalization produced new inequalities, highlighted by the greater freedom of movement that goods enjoyed in comparison to human workers.

As this exhibit documents, rather than granting Chinese and Asian sailors the liberty to come ashore and “ship for some other foreign voyage as soon as possible,” as Brown put it, the United States instead introduced controls that limited seamen’s access to labor markets in American ports. Immigration policies placed Chinese seamen under the control of employers who, after 1902, were required to take out security bonds indemnifying them against unauthorized immigration. Alternatively, ship captains could deny Chinese sailors shore leave altogether. When Chinese seamen arrived in American ports on contracts that had ended, they were still not free to come ashore – unless they could finance their participation in the American labor markets by arranging for security bonds on their own accord.

While historians have acknowledged that racism against Asian and other non-white sailors permeated the ideologies of unions representing seamen in the United States and Britain, the main thrust of these studies has been to weigh this racism against the progressive reforms that maritime workers simultaneously pursued. White sailors racialized Asian laborers as “coolies” who were immune to the appeal of better wages, working conditions, and rights that white seamen demanded. Yet it was immigration policies rather than any innate predisposition to exploitation that transformed Asian seamen into the very thing that white seamen feared: unfree labor.

Asian labor and global shipping during the long nineteenth century

From the 1870s until the Second World War, economic historians estimate that British-flagged vessels shipped more than half of all international cargo. Shipbuilders in Great Britain were quicker to shift production to the manufacture of screw propeller-powered steamships, and competitors who were latecomers to this transition struggled in the face of comparative advantages that British firms had gained. William Wallace Bates, a shipbuilder who served as United States Commissioner of Navigation from 1889 to 1892, lamented in an 1893 book on the “shipping question” that in his first year as commissioner, twenty-one of the thirty vessels exporting 37,974 tons of American flour to foreign markets were British-flagged, with American-flagged and -built boats accounting for only three of the shipments.

Even though American shipping companies involved in the transpacific passenger and freight trade had been reliant on Chinese sailors since the late 1860s, Bates blamed British companies for the spread of what he considered to be insidious employment practices. “Suppose we buy our ships in Liverpool,” Bates asked, “shall we get our sailors from Hong Kong?”^[3] Critics claimed the disappearance of American sailors and boats was also a matter of naval capability in times of war, which made the United States’ reliance on foreign seamen and ships an issue of national security. Even though naval officers commended Chinese seamen for their combat roles on warships in the Philippines during the War of 1898, exclusionists continued to allege that Chinese seamen could not be trusted to be loyal during times of war.

The vessels featured in this exhibit demonstrate the reach of British shipping. More importantly, they demonstrate how Chinese sailors had become a labor standard in all fleets, in all oceans. The S.S. Harfleur, whose Chinese crew clashed violently with immigration officials in Texas, was a British-flagged vessel in the Louisiana-based Union Sulphur Company’s fleet, shipping sulfur to sales offices and distribution centers that the company maintained in Rotterdam, Marburg, Cette, and Marseilles. The S.S. Bones Castle, an American-flagged vessel from which a group of Chinese sailors deserted in New York harbor in 1923, shipped cotton from the Atlantic Coast to Shanghai on the Barber Steamship lines regular freight route to the “Far East.” Chinese sailors were also employed on “tramp” steamers, which made on-demand deliveries of freight. The S.S. Tinhow, for instance, was a British-flagged steamer owned by Andrew Weir and Company based out of London. Between 1912 and 1914, however, the steamer was subcontracted to at least three different shipping companies and moved lumber from Mobile, Alabama, to Havana, Cuba, and fruit from Central America to New Orleans and Boston. Even though the jobs and routes changed, the use of crews that included Chinese sailors remained consistent.

After three Chinese seamen deserted the Tinhow in Boston, immigration officials sought payment on bonds that had indemnified the United States against the sailors’ unauthorized entry. A letter from the New Orleans-based attorney to the Vaccaro Brothers Company requests additional time to sort the matter out, stating that the London owners of the vessel had an insurance policy that would cover penalties associated with desertion.

Wages, nativism, and Chinese seamen

The transition from sail to steam, which occurred gradually over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century, helped to devalue the labor of all seamen. Steamships deskilled maritime labor, especially when it came to the creation of new positions such as firemen, where the primary element of the job was to ceaselessly shovel coal into a furnace. Changes in maritime technologies and labor needs were not the fault of Asian sailors, who had worked on American and British sail ships as well. But to white seamen their increased employment became a visual symbol of how white mariners had lost control over the means of production.

White seamen directed animosity and mistrust at Chinese sailors who, regardless of how much time they had spent in American and British ports, were depicted as foreign competition. These representations ignored the real factors that determined maritime labor costs. The most significant factor determining labor costs was where a boat hired crews and what the prevailing wage in those ports was. Wages in Asian ports were less than wages in American ports, but so were wages paid to seamen – regardless of their race – shipping from British and European ports as well.

Foreign ships that called on American ports contended with higher prevailing wage rates that might lure crews away. To prevent this, shipping companies withheld wages until the roundtrip voyage was completed. Desertion still occurred in considerable numbers, even if it meant losing promised pay. Andrew Furuseth, a Norwegian immigrant to the United States and the influential president of the International Seamen Union (ISU), wrote in a 1915 editorial calling on Congress to regulate (white) foreign sailors’ right to shore leave that when the crew of a boat receiving twelve to sixteen dollars in monthly wages docked next to a vessel where sailors received thirty to forty dollars a month, “The men receiving the lesser wage, if they be free to do so, will leave the vessel paying the lesser wage and obtain the higher wage in that port.”^[4]In Furuseth’s vision, if foreign shipping companies faced widespread desertions, they would have no choice but to increase wages across the globe as a preventative measure. Furuseth’s calls for desertion coexisted with his simultaneous commitment to the complete exclusion of Chinese seamen from American job markets, whether they demanded higher “American” wages or not.

While Chinese seamen could be found working in any number of jobs on vessels, they were disproportionately employed as stewards, cooks, and firemen – positions that white sailors shunned for more skilled positions that earned higher pay. Freight and passenger lines prized Chinese sailors as workers who could be enlisted to do grunt work for low wages, a willingness that they attributed to race rather than to economic need and discrimination. Anti-Chinese activists invoked the familiar stereotype that Chinese seamen, like their counterparts who worked in land-based occupations, were “coolies.” As scholars of Chinese migration have highlighted, white commentators’ use of the term “coolie” only rarely referred to workers held in actual states of indenture or bondage. The prevalent use of the word calls attention to whites’ belief that Chinese laborers were racially incapable of resisting oppression and exploitation, and uninterested in being free. Chinese sailors’ willingness to live unfree and in degraded conditions, the white seamen’s unions claimed, meant that they would tolerate brutal working conditions and accept wages and victuals that white sailors could not survive on.

Figures 2-a through 2-f. Tables on discharges, nationality, and wages for seamen shipping in and out of U.S. ports. Source: U.S. Commissioner of Navigation, Report of the Commissioner of Navigation to Secretary of Treasury. 1898 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1899), 90, 91, 97, 100, 103, 104. Rights status: Image, courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library.

According to figures from the 1898 Report of the Commissioner of Navigation, which covered international trade for the fiscal year ending on June 30, 1898, American vessels moved approximately 11 million tons of goods into and out of American ports, with foreign vessels accounting for 36 million tons. Because most of the shipping to and from the United States was conducted on foreign-flagged vessels based outside the country, it followed that foreigners of all nationalities constituted the bulk of seamen employed in maritime labor. European immigrants rather than Asian immigrants represented most of the foreigners working American ports. Immigrant seamen based in the United States were also counted as foreign workers, even when they shipped from American ports.

The Commissioner of Navigation also tabulated comparative wage rates for seamen working American and British vessels making the same routes. The statistics were not broken down further by nationality or race. While Chinese sailors shipping from San Francisco to Hong Kong might be hired for Hong Kong wages, as was the case with crews on the Pacific Mail steamships, a Chinese sailor shipping between Cardiff and New York was likely to demand close to what a white sailor working the same route and position would demand.

Regulating and policing sailors’ shore leave

Even though the question of whether Chinese sailors might be considered immigrant laborers upon taking shore leave was raised almost immediately after the passage of the 1882 Chinese Restriction Act, Congress did nothing to further address the issue until 1902, when a draft version of what would become that year’s Exclusion Act required that each Chinese seaman taking shore leave be indemnified by a two-thousand-dollar surety bond. Republicans in Senate ultimately had the clause removed from the bill, out of concern that it would undermine the party’s commitment to pro-business policies supporting free trade. Republicans favored instead giving Treasury officials the case-by-case discretion to determine when a Chinese sailor needed to be bonded.

In practice, immigration officials used their discretionary powers to harass Chinese seamen while tacitly permitting foreign sailors who were white to desert and become immigrants. Beginning in 1903, under the leadership of Frank Sargent, a Roosevelt appointee who hailed from the ranks of organized labor, the Bureau adopted internal rules to regulate foreign sailors’ shore leave and to determine when bonds were to be issued. The Bureau emphasized distinguishing between “bona fide alien seamen” taking shore leave before reshipping, and sailors using this as cover to immigrate.^[5] That this distinction could even be made was an oversimplification of how shore leave, labor markets, and migration worked. Foreign sailors might go ashore with plans to reship and end up remaining in the United States for any number of reasons, even though this had not been their intent.

From 1903 to 1917 only Chinese sailors were scrutinized by inspectors when seeking to go ashore, and only Chinese sailors were required to be indemnified, typically with five-hundred-dollar bonds, before landing. The money was forfeited if they failed to reship within thirty days. Foreign sailors from other nationalities were exempted from the bonding requirement. Moreover, immigration inspectors were ordered to instruct white sailors on how to seek admission as immigrants if they chose this course of action, so long as they were not ineligible to enter for the medical, political, or moral reasons that existed in the statutes as reasons for possible debarment.

In response to lingering legal challenges as to whether the Bureau of Immigration had the authority to regulate shore leave, the 1917 Immigration Act stipulated that immigration officials were to inspect all foreign seamen being discharged from vessels and to require bonds or other security measures in cases where they had reasonable suspicion to believe a sailor intended to desert. Shipmasters were liable for a one thousand-dollar fine if they failed to “detain on board any such alien” that an immigration officer had declared inadmissible.^[6] The 1917 Act also created an “Asiatic Barred Zone” from which immigration was prohibited, meaning that immigration officials would subsequently require all sailors classified as Asian to be bonded before landing – even though the legal question of whether immigration officials had the power to require “bona fide” seamen to take out bonds before coming ashore remained unresolved into the 1920s. To go ashore, Asian seamen were required to submit photographs, fingerprints, and biographical information to officials so that they could be monitored while in port and their departure compelled. It was only with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which first introduced quotas on European immigration, that the pathway from sailor to immigrant was blocked for European seamen as well.

Intermediaries: Brokers, bondsmen, and other service providers

Emigrants from China to North America hailed from the same areas that Chinese seamen working on British, American, and European ships did: the Guangdong province and the Pearl River Delta region. Along with the nearby city of Hong Kong, these were the areas most transformed by European imperialism and the international export of local commodities and labor migrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Ethnic civil war in Taishan and the Siyi region of Guangdong, between Hakka migrants and the established Cantonese-speaking population, lead to over a million deaths and massive displacement that further drove migration. Proximity to British-run Hong Kong and the treaty port of Guangzhou meant that migrants from Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta region had access to shipping companies, labor recruiters, and creditors who brokered both emigration and maritime employment. Migrants from the area also went to Singapore in considerable numbers, where maritime jobs abounded.

Mutual-aid associations in the United States and other places where the Chinese migrated were based in family, clan, and village connections, and coordinated the hiring of laborers locally. Bondsmen affiliated with mutual aid associations also brokered the temporary entry of Chinese seamen, as well as other classes of in-transit Chinese laborers – workers in Mexico and Cuba, for instance – who sought passage through the United States. Chinese intermediaries also brokered illegal entries. They sold false certificates of legal residency, organized illicit land and sea border crossings, and fabricated “paper” families that migrants used to deceive officials. Middle men conducted these businesses with the understanding that smuggling and the production of forged papers were accepted by Chinese communities as justified responses to unfair and explicitly discriminatory immigration policies.

White officials and journalists claimed that Chinese bondsmen were sinister “crimps” who undermined white sailors by making low-wage Chinese seamen available for hire on the cheap. This is what officials alleged was the case with Charles Ashow (also spelled Ashowe and Arshowe), the Chinese-born proprietor of a boarding house at 67 Cherry Street in Lower Manhattan, which he ran with his wife Mary, the American-born daughter of Irish immigrants. Ashow’s “Chinese hotel” – as inspectors called it – catered to Chinese stewards, cooks, and firemen temporarily in port. Frank Sargent, the Commissioner General of Immigration, accused Ashow in 1904 of possessing the “full authority and control of Chinese of the nautical class in New York City.”^[7] The reality was more ambiguous. Ashow may have profited from his role as a housing provider, bondsman, and labor broker, but officials provided no specific evidence indicating that he held Chinese sailors in a state of indenture. Still, in 1907, when Ashow prepared to depart for China and filed for the paperwork that would allow him to reenter the United States as a merchant upon his return, immigration officials rejected his application.

Anti-Chinese activism in San Francisco and Great Britain: Shared agendas

San Francisco was the epicenter of anti-Chinese activism in the late-nineteenth century United States, and exclusionists railed against the fleets of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, Dollar Steamship Company, and Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company, which employed Chinese crews almost exclusively. It is estimated that between 1879 and 1906, the Pacific Mail and Occidental and Oriental Steamship companies employed at least eighty thousand Chinese seamen on their transpacific routes. Chinese sailors who signed articles of employment in Asian ports were paid fifteen dollars a month, which was half of what white seamen shipping from San Francisco would earn on a transpacific voyage.

To prevent shipping companies from hiring their crews on the Asian legs of journeys, white sailors lobbied Congress to regulate in racial terms who could work on American-flagged ships. As early as 1904, the ISU submitted a memorial to President Roosevelt asking him to issue an executive order classifying Chinese sailors as among the classes of laborers designated for exclusion.^[8] The 1915 Seamen’s Act, which outlawed criminal punishments for deserters and guaranteed seamen’s right to shore leave, included measures designed to prevent Chinese sailors from being the beneficiaries of the reforms. The Act mandated that seventy-five per cent of crew members on a ship had to be able to communicate in the language of a vessel’s officers. Robert La Follette, the Progressive Republican Senator from Wisconsin who sponsored the bill that would become the 1915 Seamen’s Act, claimed during a Congressional debate that the language provision would mean that passengers on a vessel in distress would not have to rely on “Chinese stupefied by opium” for their rescue.^[9] Enforcement of this measure was lax, however, and the Act only applied to vessels that sailed under the American flag.

In Britain, white seamen organized in the National Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union (NSFU) sought to prohibit Chinese, Malay, and “Lascar” sailors – the general and at times indiscriminate term applied to South Asian seamen – from hiring onto ships in British ports. Although white sailors working on British ships had little ability to control how labor was employed in Asian ports, they were adamant that they had the right to bar the importation of colonial labor practices into job markets they defined and defended as domestic. As historian Sascha Auerbach documents, the three-year period of 1905 to 1908 saw a sharp rise in the number of Chinese seamen signing articles of employment in British ports. In London, 448 Chinese seamen shipped in 1905, but by 1908 that number had risen to 1,700. Whereas in 1905, 1,424 Chinese sailors departed from Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff, Barry, and Newport combined, by 1908 the numbers for those ports had increased to 5,600. Chinese sailors represented only a small percentage of the total number of foreign seamen shipping from British ports. Still, this did not stop the NSFU and allies from ramping up efforts to exclude Chinese sailors from employment. Like American trades unionists, British seamen argued that Chinese seamen, lacking sufficient English language skills, endangered passengers on steamships. The 1906 Merchant Shipping Act that Parliament passed required that sailors take a language test, but Chinese sailors from Hong Kong and Singapore were able to claim exemption as British subjects – a loophole that the NFSU vehemently protested. In 1908, when the Huddersfield sank off the Cornish coast, the NSFU blamed a Chinese sailor whose lack of English and mutinous attitude for the botched rescue that ensued – even though the seaman in question was Brazilian.

White British seamen also used violence to drive Chinese sailors from jobs. In May 1908, a series of riots broke out in London in which mobs prevented Chinese seamen from boarding the vessels that had hired them. The 1911 Seamen’s Strike in Cardiff resulted in attacks on Chinese sailors and on Chinese laundries and boarding houses in the city. In 1919, white mobs rioted in sea ports across Great Britain. Vigilantes targeted non-white seamen from Asia, Africa, and the West Indies whom they accused of having stolen jobs from white mariners conscripted into the navy during the First World War. In 1925, Parliament passed the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, which required seamen of color to register as aliens while in British ports, unless they could prove they were British subjects. This proved challenging for sailors who were not regularly issued passports when shipping from colonial ports.

The exclusion of Chinese and other Asian sailors from labor markets was a political cause that white sailors across the world embraced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Antipathy toward Asian seamen provided a source of solidarity for white sailors who, in other contexts, might see themselves in nationalistic terms as economic antagonists. As historian Lauren Tabili argues, when seamen of color from Asia, Africa, or the West Indies sought employment in British ports, their goal was to “obtain employment under European contractual conditions, with vastly improved wages and rations, shipboard living conditions, and chances of surviving the voyage.”^[10] This was the same motivation that drove white British and European sailors, as well as Asian sailors, to desert in American ports, where higher wages could be found. In Asian ports, the interwar period saw Asian sailors engage in strikes and work actions aimed at shipping companies and local subcontractors, and against British colonial authorities who governed trade. In 1922, for instance, an estimated 30,000 Chinese seamen went on strike in Hong Kong. Indian sailors formed unions in Mumbai and Kolkota in the 1920s and 1930s, which in addition to advocating for better working conditions and pay, also tried to eliminate the pernicious influence of serangs who acted as labor brokers.

Refusing to stay on ship

Despite being racialized as servile and exploitable, Chinese sailors were forceful in asserting their rights. When immigration officials tried to deny shore leave to Chinese sailors who had been confined to cramped quarters for weeks and months, the result was often mutiny. An inspector from the Galveston station, for instance, reported in August 1913 that when the British-flagged Harfleur arrived in Sabine, Texas, he had been unable to stop the vessel’s Chinese crew from going ashore without inspection or bonds. When the inspector conducted a headcount of the Chinese sailors upon their return to the Harfleur, he reported that “one of them kicked me in the stomach and one assaulted me from behind.” Although the ship’s captain temporarily restored order, after the muster was completed the Chinese crew began throwing “large chunks of sulphur” at the inspector and a watchman assisting him, which the ship’s officers only halfheartedly attempted to stop. As the Harfleur’s white British captain explained, he was indemnified against any legal costs associated with crew members’ desertions by insurers in London and he had no interest incurring the wrath of his crew by denying them the liberty to go ashore.

Tracking the number of sailors entering and exiting ports was difficult to do with accuracy. Immigration officials lobbying for more stringent restrictions seem to have exaggerated the number of Chinese sailors shipping from American ports, as was the case in 1913, when the Bureau’s annual report listed 40,000 active Chinese seamen. During the 1920s, as figures compiled by historian Anna Pegler-Gordon show, immigration inspectors administered between four and eight thousand examinations of Chinese seamen seeking to land – numbers that would include repeat entries by the same individual sailors. In 1920, 1,637 Chinese sailors were recorded as having deserted in New York, with an additional 135 deserting in San Francisco. That year, the two ports processed a total of 361,066 and 31,687 foreign seamen respectively. In comparison, in 1925, after quotas on European immigration were in place, 23,194 non-Chinese foreign seamen deserted in all U.S. ports out of a total number of 1,004,226.^[12]

When Chinese sailors were granted shore leave and remained in the United States past the allotted time they were allowed – which by 1924 had increased to sixty days – they became subject to deportation. Deportation could occur years later after an arrest for opium possession – a common vice among sailors of all nationalities – or during an immigration raid on a laundry or restaurant business.

Immigration officials may have been limited in their power to stop bona fide foreign seamen from taking shore leave when ship captains took out bonds, but in cases where shipping companies enlisted immigration officials to assist in acts of detention – the gloves came off. On June 29, 1927, “armed with razors, wrenches, capstan bars and belaying pins,” the Chinese crew of the Rotterdam engaged in a mutiny and rushed the piers in Hoboken, New Jersey, where, after a battle with police, 54 were placed in the local prison. As the New York Chinese Seamen’s Institute would subsequently protest, the 84 sailors who had tried to come ashore wanted to leave their contracts after discovering that they had been duped into employment as strikebreakers. Transferred from the Hoboken jail to holding cells on Ellis Island, under the cover of secrecy the Chinese sailors were sent back to the Netherlands. When asked to explain the decision to hold the men, The Nation reported that the Commissioner of Ellis Island, Byron Uhl, had admitted that the act had not been done in accordance with any formal law or policy, but as a “friendly” gesture to the Holland American company.^[13]

World War II and the Changing Politics of Chinese Restriction

During the Second World War, British merchant ships, their ranks depleted by naval conscription, hired more than 10,000 Chinese sailors to transport supplies back-and-forth across the Atlantic. Until September 1942, captains uniformly denied Chinese sailors shore leave upon arriving in New York, even though this violated both American and British maritime law. A series of violent mutinies and a rash of bad publicity put pressure on the British government to change its merchant navy’s policy. Anxious about Chinese deserters, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the title the organization had assumed in 1933) joined with the U.S. War Shipping Administration to create the Alien Seaman Program. As historian Heather Lee has shown, the establishment of this new program meant that Chinese inspectors now served both the British and American governments when tracking down seamen who failed to return to their vessels. On January 9, 1943, inspectors interrogated over 1,500 Chinese residents of New York in a series of raids that disrupted restaurants and other businesses across the city in their search for 74 sailors who had absconded from the Empress of Scotland.^[14]

Downplaying officials’ zealous enforcement practices, the U.S. Office of War Information sought to parlay the British government’s decision to permit shore leave into wartime propaganda showing good will between allies. This coincided with Congress’s passage of the Magnuson Act in 1943, which allotted Chinese immigrants an annual quote of 105 visas, ending outright exclusion. The photographs displayed here portray Chinese sailors seemingly at liberty in New York, without any reference to the long and sometimes violent struggle that these seamen had engaged in to win their rights.

Conclusion

The restrictions that nations like the United States and Britain imposed on Asian sailors’ entry into domestic labor markets prevented these seamen from being able to command higher wages through the free contract of their labor – even though their exclusion was ostensibly based on economic and cultural hazards that their “cheapness” posed. Free trade interests staved off white seamen’s ambitions to exclude Chinese and Asian sailors from employment altogether, since this would be too burdensome to the conduct of business.

It is doubtful that the increasingly strict restrictions that Congress and immigration officials placed on the Chinese and Asian seamen’s freedom of mobility had any real effect on the wages that white American sailors and white immigrant seamen were able to demand. As a spectacle of white supremacy, the harassment of Chinese seamen seeking to take shore leave did serve as a stark and visible public reminder of Asian workers’ place in the global economy, and the lengths that countries like the United States were willing to go to deny liberty of contract to certain classes of racialized labor – under the auspices that they were threats to become illegal immigrants.

Today, the dominance of container ships in global shipping has led to the further automation of maritime labor and reduced the number of seamen transporting goods around the world. Goods still enjoy a freedom of mobility – customs inspections and tariffs notwithstanding – that crewmembers on those vessels lack. In the United States, the State Department requires all sailors (and flight crews) arriving in the United States to have crewmember visas if they are to enter the United States on a temporary basis, which are only good for 29 days.

In recent years, there have been numerous incidents where officials have discovered crews working in conditions that commentators have described as tantamount to modern-day slavery. Sailors have reported being denied potable water and food, wages they were promised, and the right to go ashore. Rarely do writers on this topic acknowledge how immigration policies enable exploitation, by denying foreign shipping crews the right to enter and participate in labor markets where they might escape an employer attempting to keep them captive on ship. Immigration restrictions have become so commonplace and accepted that the free mobility aspect of free labor rarely gets mentioned at all.

The author would like to thank Janet Urban for her work editing and formatting the images that appear here.

Notes

1. In re Ah Kee, 21 Federal Reporter 520.
2. Hager to Daniel Manning, Secretary of Treasury, July 26, 1886, Custom Case Files no. 3358d, NARA, DC, Box 9, Folder 3.
3. William Wallace Bates, American Marine: The Shipping Question in History and Politics (Boston: The Houghton Mifflin Co., 1893), 267; 356-7.
4. Furuseth, “The Campaign Against the La Follette Bill,” Survey, July 31, 1915, 399.
5. By 1910, Rule 22 pertained to the governance of seamen’s landing. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization, Immigration Laws and Regulations of July 1, 1907, Eleventh Edition, December 12, 1910 (Washington: G.P.O., 1910), 43-7. The history of how immigration officials governed the entry of Chinese sailors at different points in time can be found in a detailed internal research paper that attorneys working for the Bureau drafted while preparing to appeal the decision in U.S. v. Jamieson (1911), 185 Fed. 165. In Jamieson, Judge Learned Hand of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York questioned whether immigration officials had the authority to hold shipmasters legally and financially responsible in cases where they had no reason to suspect Chinese seamen granted shore leave were planning to desert, and whether the bonding of seamen was a power that Congress had formally extended to immigration officials. The appeal was eventually withdrawn due to a technicality. A. Warner Parker, “Memorandum to the Attorney General,” March 3, 1911, File 52157/9, Subject Correspondence Files, NARA, DC.
6. 1917 Immigration Act (An Act to Regulate the Immigration of Aliens to, and the Residence of Aliens in, the United States), 39 Stat. 874, sec. 31.
7. Arshowe Family, 1900 U.S. census, Manhattan, New York, New York, roll 1080, page 10B, enumeration district 0017, FHL microfilm 1241080; digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed September 21, 2014. According to the 1900 census, the couple had been married since 1888 and had three children, although only one son, Charles Vincent, was still living. H.R. Sisson, Chinese Inspector, to F.W. Berkshire, Officer in Charge, November 7, 1903; Frank Sargent, Commissioner-General of Immigration, to Berkshire, April 25, 1904, File 34/182, Box 230, Chinese Exclusion Acts Case Files, NARA, NY.
8. The memorial was entered into the Congressional Record in 1913. 50 Cong. Rec. 5672 (1913). On the politics and aim of the 1915 Seaman’s Act, see Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, and Jackson, “‘The Right Kind of Men.’”
9. Cited in Fink, Sweatshops at Sea, 107.
10. Tabili, “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925,” Journal of British Studies 33, no. 1 (1994): 66.
11. Palmer, Immigration Inspector, to Immigration Service, Galveston, Texas, August 18, 1913, File 52516/5A, Subject Correspondence Files, NARA, DC.
12. Pegler-Gordon, “Shanghaied on the Streets of Hoboken,” 232-4.
13. “Hoboken Takes a Joke,” The Nation, Aug. 3, 1927. See also Pegler-Gordon’s discussion in “Shanghaied on the Streets of Hoboken.”
14. Lee, “Hunting for Sailors.”

Archives and Works Consulted

Archives

Custom Case Files no. 3358d, 1877–1891, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, Record Group 85 (Custom Case Files no. 3358d, NARA, DC).

Subject Correspondence Files of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, Record Group 85 (Subject Correspondence Files, NARA, DC).

Chinese Exclusion Acts Case Files, 1880–1960, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Record Group 85, National Archives and Records Administration–Northeast Region (Chinese Exclusion Acts Case Files, NARA, NY).

Works Consulted

Auerbach, Jerold. “Progressives at Sea: The La Follette Act of 1915.” Labor History 2 (1961): 344-60.

Auerbach, Sascha. Race, Law, and “The Chinese Puzzle” in Imperial Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Balachandran, G. “Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: ‘Globalizing’ Labour in the Late-19th and Early-20th Centuries.” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 3 (2011): 266-96.

Barde, Robert Eric. Immigration at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2008.

Becker, Bert. “Coastal Shipping in East Asia in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 50 (2010): 245-302.

Chang, Kornel. Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Fink, Leon. Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Frost, Lionel. “The Economic History of the Pacific,” in The Cambridge World History, Part IV – World Regions. Edited by J.R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomerantz. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Hsu, Madeline. Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Hyslop, Jonathan. “Steamship Empire Asian, African and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine c.1880–1945.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 44, no. 1 (2009): 49-67.

Jacks, David S., and Krishna Pendakur. “Global Trade and the Maritime Transport Revolution,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 14139, June 2008, http://www.nber.org/papers/w14139.pdf.

Jackson, Justin. “‘The Right Kind of Men’: Flexible Capacity, Chinese Exclusion, and the Imperial Politics of Maritime Labor Reform in the United States, 1898–1905.” Labor 10, no. 4 (2013): 39–60.

Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Lee, Heather. “Hunting for Sailors: Restaurant Raids and Conscription of Laborers during World War II,” in A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965. Edited by Maddalena Marinari and Madeline Hsu. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018.

Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

McKeown, Adam. “Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China.” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 377–403.

Moya, Jose C., and Adam McKeown. “World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century,” in Essays on Twentieth-Century History. Edited by Michael Adas. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2010).

Ngai, Mae. The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America. New York: Haughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010.

Oyen, Meredith Leigh. “Fighting for Equality: Chinese Seamen in the Battle of the Atlantic, 1939-1945.” Diplomatic History 38, no. 3 (2014): 532–33.

Pegler-Gordon, Anna. “Shanghaied on the Streets of Hoboken: Chinese Exclusion and Maritime Regulation at Ellis Island.” Journal for Maritime Research 16, no. 2 (2014): 229-45.

Ransley, Jesse. “Introduction: Asian sailors in the age of empire.” Journal for Maritime Research 16, no. 2 (2014): 117-23.

Tabili, Laura. “The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925.” Journal of British Studies 33, no. 1 (1994): 54-98.
Tate, E. Mowbray. Transpacific Steam: The Story of Steam Navigation from the Pacific Coast of North America to the Far East and the Antipodes, 1867-1941. New York: Cornwall Books, 1986.

Urban, Andrew. Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor During the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

Young, Elliott. Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Andrew Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His first book, Brokering Servitude (NYU Press, 2018), examines how federal immigration policies and private entrepreneurs shaped labor markets for domestic service in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States, and dictated the contractual conditions under which migration occurred. His current research explores the history of Seabrook Farms, a frozen foods agribusiness and company town in southern New Jersey that recruited and employed incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, and European refugees and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s. @AndyTUrban

Return to People-Works: The Labor of Transport.

The Contributors Martina Hacke Martina Hacke researches the history of the University of Paris, and the history of communication (messengers, envoys) in the Middle Ages. Jennifer Hart Jennifer Hart is an Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University, where she teaches courses in African History, Digital History, History Communication, and World History. Her 2016 book, Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press) was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize.  Kate McDonald Kate McDonald is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (University of California Press, 2017) and co-director of the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping the Spaces of Japanese History project. Her work on mobility history in modern Japan and the Japanese Empire appears in Mobility in History, Transfers, and Technology and Culture. Roger Turner Roger Turner is a research fellow and public historian at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. His research interests include the use of environmental surveillance and prediction in industrial societies, and how story-telling can engage various publics in scientific, technological, and environmental issues. He curates the blog Picturing Meteorology and recently completed work on Instruments of Change, a playful multimedia exhibit about five surprising scientific instruments. Andrew Urban Andrew Urban is an Associate Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His first book, Brokering Servitude (NYU Press, 2018), examines how federal immigration policies and private entrepreneurs shaped labor markets for domestic service in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States, and dictated the contractual conditions under which migration occurred. His current research explores the history of Seabrook Farms, a frozen foods agribusiness and company town in southern New Jersey that recruited and employed incarcerated Japanese Americans, guestworkers from the British West Indies, and European refugees and stateless Japanese Peruvians during the 1940s. @AndyTUrban Lee Vinsel Lee Vinsel is an assistant professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech and a co-organizer of The Maintainers, an international, interdisciplinary research network focused on maintenance, repair, and mundane labor with things. His book, Moving Violations: Automobiles, Experts, and Regulations in the United States, will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in spring 2019.  Robin B. Williams Robin B. Williams, Ph.D., chairs the Architectural History department at the Savannah College of Art and Design.  His research focuses on the history of modern architecture and cities, currently focusing on the evolution of street and sidewalk pavement in North America.  He is the lead author of Buildings of Savannah (University of Virginia Press, 2016), the inaugural city guide in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States series. Click “back” in the browser window to return to the table of contents.

Below you will find all of the Media Metadata Inventories for each of the articles organized by the last name of the author. These files are essential to showing the rights permissions and sources of each of the pieces of media displayed in this online exhibit. The inventories are saved as spreadsheets and provide a detailed description for each of the items on display in People-Works. In addition, if you have a question about these inventories or are one of the rights holders and would like to contact the editors, you can do so by clicking this link.

Hacke, Media Metadata Inventory

Hart, Media Metadata Inventory

Turner, Media Metadata Inventory

Urban.Media.Metadata

Vinsel, Media Metadata Inventory

Williams, Media Metadata Inventory

Click “back” in the browser window to return to the table of contents.

Citing this exhibit

McDonald, Kate, ed. People-Works: The Labor of Transport. 2018. https://t2m.org/publications/people-works-the-labor-of-transport. Accessed [MONTH] [DATE], [YEAR].

Citing an exhibit module

Hart, Jennifer. “African Automobility: Mammy Trucks in Twentieth-Century Ghana.” In People-Works: The Labor of Transport, ed. Kate McDonald. 2018. https://t2m.org/people-works/the-labor-of-transport-of-the-messengers-of-the-nations-of-the-university-of-paris-in-the-fifteenth-century/  Accessed [MONTH] [DATE], [YEAR].

Citing a specific page

Williams, Robin. “Street Pavements Before Asphalt.” In People-Works: The Labor of Transport, ed. Kate McDonald. 2018. https://t2m.org/people-works/hand-made-streets-the-role-of-labor-in-making-installing-and-maintaining-street-pavement-prior-to-the-dominance-of-asphalt/ Accessed [MONTH] [DATE], [YEAR].

A Note about Licensing and Images

The original intellectual content of this exhibit is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives International 4.0 license. The images included in the exhibit should be considered in-text citations, that is, they are not covered by the site’s CC license. We have made every effort to clarify the rights status of images in the image metadata and, where appropriate, in the caption. Users are responsible for ascertaining the rights status of images before reproducing them elsewhere.

If you hold the rights to an image in this exhibit and find that your image has not been properly credited, please reach out to Guest Editor Kate McDonald or Editor-in-Chief Michael Bess so that we can make the necessary adjustments.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.