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Sunday 20 March 2011

Flags and Guns


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Color America

Children stage a patriotic demonstration, Southington, Connecticut, May 1942: photo by Fenno Jacobs (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Color America

At Beecher Street School, Southington, Connecticut, May 1942: photo by Fenno Jacobs (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsac/1a34000/1a34400/1a34415v.jpg

Children aiming sticks as guns, lined up against a brick building, Washington, D.C.: photo by Louise Rosskam, between 1941 and 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Look at the boy's black armband, in the bottom picture.

Anonymous said...

I just wish I could believe that the actions our government is taking were the result of disciplined and considered thought and sincere, morally based beliefs. With those factors present, you can navigate in and out of all sorts of situations, acknowledge and correct mistakes, etc. Without them, it's all deception and expediency.

TC said...

The lad with the black arm band, hmm.

The possibility his father or older brother has been killed in the war does of course hang in the observant air.

The captioning on that photo in the LOC archives gives the date as "between 1941 and 1942" and the photographer as "unknown". My own independent burrowing has established that the photographer was Louise Rosskam and the date was likely Dec. 1941 or Jan./Feb. 1942.

In the upper two photos, the occasion is a May Day Celebration among Italian and Polish immigrant communities of that working class section of Connecticut.

Excised from this post in the cutting room were a number of high resolution colour shots of Tomahawk missiles being launched from Arleigh Burke class destroyers in Iraq I, Iraq II and Libya (Day I).

Also a shot of a euphoric Hillary, beaming, running across a tarmac to greet her Old World döppelganger, Nicholas Sarkozy.

No American official has been so friendly toward him since Sarah Palin invited him for a helicopter elk-shoot in Alaska.

(And of course that invitation turned out to be a mere French media hoax.)