Daniel E. Bender

Perils of Degeneration: Reform, the Savage Immigrant, and the Survival of the Unfit

This article focuses on settlement house work and social reform as efforts to reconcile concerns about the survival of the unfit with the desire for reform and charity. Self-described progressives regarded themselves as shaping the evolution of the race and their work as an expression of civilization. While the social history of reform is rich, historians know less about its intellectual underpinnings. This article shifts the focus from the methods of reformers to their fears of failure and their desire for racial progress. Settlement house workers worried about the perils of degeneration. To understand degeneration, they turned to a language of civilization that historians generally associate only with imperialism to divide populations into savage and civilized. When settlement house workers advocated organized play and boys clubs and began milk stations and better baby contests, they believed that they were civilizing the immigrant urban savage. They believed that the acquired characteristics of civilization could be passed on to a new generation. Yet reformers still worried that their efforts were also preserving the unfit who, in a more savage society, would have perished. Their concern about saving the fit while helping the extinction of the degenerate opened the door to eugenics.

Eating in Class Gastronomy, Taste, Nutrition, and Teaching Food History

In May to July 2010, food historians from across the world gathered virtually (as a Google group) to share experiences of teaching food history. The forum that follows is an edited version of our discussion. The complete, unedited version of our conversation will remain available for public view at www.groups.google.ca/group/rhrradicalfoodways. We encourage Radical History Review readers, students and teachers alike, to continue these discussions online. Food history classes have become increasingly commonplace in history curriculums, yet they are still rare enough that they illicit comments and occasional laughter and derision. While exciting, innovative, and likely to fill a lecture hall, food history classes, as comparatively recent and unexpected offerings, carry a greater burden of pedagogical proof. As our forum suggested, in a range of academic settings, food historians, unlike other scholars, must demonstrate the academic merit of their classes — long before they walk into the classroom door. Despite (or maybe because of) obvious student demand, we cannot depend on presuppositions of significance.

Inspecting Workers: Medical Examination, Labor Organizing, and the Evidence of Sexual Difference

�� In 1914, the largest and most important union in New York’s garment industry, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), decided to conduct a systematic survey of the health of Jewish immigrant garment workers. Through their role in the Joint Board of Sanitary Control (JBSC), the body charged with the sanitary inspection of New York’s garment workplace, the union’s leadership requested the assistance of the United States Public Health Services (PHS). The union decided on the survey shortly after Congress passed an important piece of progressive legislation increasing the role of the PHS in the study of “industrial hygiene” and the “health of workers.” In the first such study, between April 13, 1914, and November 1, 1914, doctors of the PHS with the help of JBSC officials and ILGWU leaders examined the 2,000 male and 1,000 female workers. Over 90 percent of the examined workers, all of whom volunteered for examination, were Jewish.1 The medical inspections produced two significant conclusions. First, the PHS discovered that garment workers were desperately and dangerously unhealthy. PHS doctors diagnosed on average 4.36 defects or diseases per worker, with approximately the same numbers for men and for women.2 Second, they found that male and female garment workers faced very different forms of occupational illness. Women’s most common defects involved their gynecological and reproductive sys

Everybody was boodle fighting: military histories, culinary tourism, and diasporic dining

Abstract This article examines how Toronto’s Filipina/o food establishments have engaged with military practices of eating together across rank through the boodle fight, in which diners eat with their hands, sharing heaps of rice and viands on a central table covered in banana leaves. It asks: what negotiations do urban ethnic restauranteurs make with the Philippines’ history of US imperialism and militarism when they advertise and host boodle fights in their establishments? This study excavates the boodle fight from its West Point origin to its appearances in Philippine militarized civic education and its entry into transpacific diplomatic gatherings and urban diasporic culinary tourism initiatives in North America and the Middle East. It further anchors itself by means of oral histories with restaurateurs and diners—around a boodle fight meal—and explores the entangled narratives of militarism across generations in the Philippine diaspora. While the boodle fight is advertised as a break-down of ranks in favor of a collective Philippine culinary nationalism, it is argued that it never rids itself of military histories and social inequalities reinforced by militarized culture.

The Delectable and Dangerous: Durian and the Odors of Empire in Southeast Asia

Abstract The durian, for turn of the twentieth century Euro-American travelers in Southeast Asia, seemed a strange fruit – exotic, but unattainable in metropolitan centers. Durian was different than the banana, for example. Colonial companies never grew them in plantations. Even if durians crowded marketplaces from Singapore to Sumatra, the business remained in the hands of native peoples. The fruit matters because the peoples and animals who lived in Malaya and the rest of Southeast Asia loved the durian, enough that tourists – visitors, not colonizers – all noticed it. When Euro-Americans first encountered durians, they were not disgusted; they developed that disgust as the lines of empire hardened. The durian became a spiny site where indigenous tastes and the American and European distaste and suspicion that they brought with them to the colonies clashed. The encounter around durian, the explanation for the fruit’s aromas, the experience of westerners as they forced themselves to overcome its stench, and the way natives openly enjoyed watching the stranger’s first taste of strange fruit all encapsulated in the sensorium the experience of empire: conquest, the articulation of difference, and the careful hidden ways colonized peoples talked back.

Book Review: Alimentary Tracks: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial

PARAMA ROY, Alimentary Tracks: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial, Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 277.

A Nation of Realtors®: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class (review)

had connections of some kind to Americans who exemplified “success”). For example, Born Losers has little to say about ordinary American workers—the many blue-, white-, and pink-collar ones who emerged with the expansion of capitalism, and either supported or challenged the “ideology of achieved identity.” Regardless, Sandage makes a cogent case for studying more of these “forgotten” men and women, and for thinking more deeply about the costs of employing “business as the dominant model for [judging] outer and inner lives” (p. 265). By concluding that failure “is not the dark side of the American Dream [but rather] the foundation of it” (p. 278), Sandage challenges historians to re-examine the socalled “losers” and “winners” in American life. That alone makes Born Losers a significant contribution to the expanding literature on failure. But he also raises other important questions about the less-than-lovely side of American culture and global market relations, including those centered on the “going-to-smash” side of financial booms and busts; the “psychology of denial” about impending ruin that fuels giddy speculation, over-capitalization, and credit dependence; the vicissitudes of downward mobility and unequal opportunities; and the nervous conditions resulting from the living-to-work and living-to-keep-up mentalités that flow from ceaseless, thundering ambitions to get ahead, to outspend and out-maneuver competition by any means possible, to outdistance failure, and, above all, to avoid the taint of “averageness,” of standing still, of “sinking in the world,” and of the “low ambition [that now] offends Americans even more than low achievement” (p. 2).1