CollectionsA p u b l i c At i o n o f t h e b e n t l e y h i s t o r i c A l l i b r A r y At t h e u n i v e r s i t y o f M i c h i g A n s p r i n g 2 0 1 5

Body of WorkPeter Sparling’s multimedia experiments are redefining what can be stored in an archive—and how.

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The Michipedia ProjectDirector’s Notes 1 – The Michipedia Project

ABriDGeMeNts2 – Sound Bites from the Stacks

1150 BeAL16 – Student Bodies17 – All the News That’s Fit to Preserve

reFereNces18 – House of Cards19 – The Value of One

cAtHoLePisteMiAD20 – War Comes to Campus22 – The Mystery Above the Pillars23 – Rock and Role

BeNtLeY UNBoUND24 – Primitive Passports

FeAtUres

4 the Gladiator outside the spotlight Hungry, underemployed workers during the Great Depression. A massive and desperate labor force after WWII. Dangerous working conditions at the Willow

Run plant. Josephine Gomon tackled these issues and more, becoming “the city’s conscience.”

8 Body of WorkHow do you archive a performance in 3-D? U-M professor Peter Sparling is using technology to pose—and to help answer—that question, and challeng-ing ideas of space, time, and perception in the process.

12 science Versus the Nazis. Full stop.At the brink of WWII, a brilliant chemistry researcher with a monumental discovery to his name finds himself on the run from Nazi persecutors. Flee-ing to England, he received a life-changing telegram that would send him stateside and change the course of his life.

Director’s Notes

c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

I’m falling in love with Elizabeth Martha Farrand, but my wife says it’s okay. And therein lies a story

that begins with Wikipedia.In some ways, Wikipedia is like the

weather: It seems everyone complains about it, but no one does anything about

it. Tell the truth, the last time you had to check a fact, where did you do go?

For historians and archivists, Wikipedia is a combination

miracle and menace. It is the largest and most accessible encyclopedia in the his-tory of the world, making information about historical events and personages more available to more people than ever before. They receive 470 million unique visits per month. Miraculously, the content is all written by volunteers, as is the “peer review” of the information presented, mostly by the 76,000 active contributors to the site.

But these same things that make Wikipedia so appealing also cause problems. Subject experts are neither recruited nor involved in the review of Wikipedia content. The inclusive-ness and accuracy of the information rests entirely in the hands of the active contributors. But this has led to both questions—who are these writers, why are they writing, and do they know what they are writing about—and controversy about the writers and content, such as a particularly troubling one right now called “gamergate.”

The Bentley Historical Library exists to keep the past alive so that we lose neither the great inspiration it provides

nor the great sense of responsibility that it demands. This means from time to time that we need to go “out” to where history is being read—and that includes Wikipedia.

So this past summer, several Bent-ley staff members, myself included, read standard histories of the Univer-sity of Michigan, collecting the names of important faculty, staff, and leaders (e.g. elected Regents) who either didn’t have Wikipedia entries, or whose en-tries could use fleshing out.

We then sorted those names ac-cording to two criteria: Each individual had to be deceased (we are writing about the past) and each had to have an archive at the Bentley so that if we were to alter or create a Wikipe-dia page, we could do it with primary source material.

The result was a list of more than 200 names of important persons in the University’s history. These included founding figures (e.g. John Monteith), famous faculty women (e.g. Margaret Bell), towering figures in 20th-century disciplines (e.g. famed sociologist Rob-ert Cooley Angell), and many more.

This past semester, 14 of us formed a kind of Wikipedia writing commu-nity. Nine of the community include wonderful undergraduate students from the course I recently taught, 22 Ways to Think about the History of the University of Michigan, and five of us are Bentley staff members. But we are all learning how to write for Wikipedia together—thanks to help from staff of the Hatcher Library—and sharing and editing our findings together. We will report back as this proceeds. And we hope it will continue. Let’s call it the “Michipedia Project.”

contents

on the coverAn image still from U-M Professor Peter Sparling’s video Ode to Boy, photographed in his 3-D Pop-Up Projectile Pavilion on U-M’s North Campus. Sparling’s work is challenging the boundaries of how performance can be stored and what it’s possible to archive (see story on page eight). Photo by Rob Hess.

photos (left) Scott Soderberg, Michigan Photography; (right) HS13575

And so, back to Elizabeth M. Farrand. She wrote a history of the University of Michigan published in 1885. She was the assistant librarian at the University Library for 14 years, probably from about 1871-1885. She graduated from the University’s Medical School in 1887 and died as a beloved doctor in Port Huron in 1900.

What an amazing, admirable life she led at a time when each and every one of these accomplishments would have been so difficult for a woman to achieve. She deserves a robust Wikipedia entry, and I’m determined to write it. Of course, I’m struggling with fragmentary sources, but I’m absolutely fascinated by this remark-able person. Perhaps a reader of this column knows more about her?

And this is how the past works on us: fragmentary sources, an admirable life, and many lessons to be learned for both author and reader from a story that deserves to be told.

Terrence J. McDonaldArthur F. Thurnau ProfessorProfessor of History and Director

Elizabeth M. Farrand (second from right) in an image from the Bentley’s Bertha Van Hoosen collection.

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Some of the U-M-related Wikipedia entries that are getting updated with the help of Bentley holdings, as part of the class 22 Ways to Think about the University of Michigan, taught by Bentley Director Terrence McDonald this past semester. Through the project, students received an introduction to the archives, as well as training in the use of primary and second-ary sources. They also got credit for an online publication, and the opportunity to help ensure U-M figures are well repre-sented on this widely used reference site.

Herman W. Mudgett, a.k.a. H. H. Holmes—who

confessed to 27 murders and who was featured in Erik Larson’s best-selling book Devil in the White City—wrote these words to fellow U-M Medical School alumnus Edward Hofma in an 1884 autograph album. Beneath the signature is “Gilmanton, N.

Hampshire,” noting the small town where Mudgett was born. He was

executed in 1896.

Ping Pong Diplomacy for the 21st Century

Boundaries of Authority

the expAtriAte experience

Number of Bentley users who signed in, on-site, to the Library’s new online registration system in its first month of use. One of the many benefits of the updated system is that it will allow patrons to request materials from the collections online, instead of having to fill out request slips by hand, and to track the status of requests in real-time.

Ally McBeal Meets

rupert Giles? The crossroads of legal issues and archives is the topic of “Managing Rights and Permissions,” an article by Aprille McKay, the Bentley’s lead archivist for university collections development, which is featured in a new book by the Society of American Archivists titled Rights in the Digital Era.

$4,820Number of dollars raised by the Bentley Historical Library on Giving Blueday, the University of Michigan’s one-day, social-media-driven fundraising cam-paign this past December. More than 70 percent of gifts to the Bentley were from first-time donors, and 91 percent of those first-time gifts were matched dollar-for-dollar. Hashtag awesome!

@JoshuaHbd: Who knew there were so many docs about early 20th-cent.-Chinese women doctors in the @umichBentley? Having a very productive research day!

John Monteith First and only President of the

University of Michigania

Alice c. lloydDean of Women at U-M (1930-1950)

Sidney Fine U-M professor of History

The color of the American Advertising Award for magazine design that Collections won this past February. The award was presented to the magazine’s designer, Don Hammond, at the annual awards gala of the Greater Flint chapter of the American Advertising Federation.

Some of the topics of study of the seven researchers who were collectively awarded more than $10,000 in funds to travel to the Bentley in order to advance their scholar-ship through the Library’s collections. Awards are given annually to scholars working on doctoral dissertations or conducting postdoctoral research in any area requiring significant use of Bentley materials.

@UmichBentley:Believe it or not, in 1913 a homemade airplane crashed right by Ferry Field, @umichfootball’s former stadium.

Alfred Hitchcock penned these words in 1972 in a letter to Michigan Theater director Gerald H. Hoag, whose papers are archived at the Bentley.

“I think there ought to be a film star named Ann Arbor. She should be blond, beautiful, and caressable.”

Abridgements

Photos (opposite page) Walter P. Reuther Library, HS12973; (this page) HS11369

By Katie Vloet

Josephine Gomon

was whip-smart, head-

strong, and a behind-the-

scenes force in Detroit

politics at a time when

women weren’t expected to do much

beyond the kitchen. Her diaries at the

Bentley show a savvy ability to get things

done when the city needed her most.

Ou

ts

ide

th

e s

pO

tl

iGh

t4 c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y 5

Josephine Gomon with Eleanor Roosevelt at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Brewster Project apartments in 1935. As director of the newly established Detroit Housing Commission, Gomon oversaw the construction of Detroit’s first public housing facilities.

6 c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

photos (previous page, left to right) HS12973, HS11369; (this page) HS4230 photos (top) BL004046, (bottom) the Eva Jessye collection

the Great Depression ravaged Detroit. With few in the country able to buy cars, the auto companies—and all the industries that supported them—suf-fered mass layoffs. With good reason,

history has looked kindly upon Mayor Frank Murphy, who vowed that nobody would go hungry—and followed through with city-supported food banks and community gardens. His housing and work-relief efforts led a biographer to call him “a New Dealer before there was a New Deal.”

But what is less well known is that Mayor Murphy sometimes needed a push in the right direction. And that is where the poorest residents of the nation’s then-fourth largest city had a friend in Josephine Gomon.

Gomon, Murphy’s executive secretary and chairwoman of the Mayor’s Unemployment Committee (MUC), wrote in her detailed and amusing diaries about having to nudge her boss, including about the opening of the Fisher Lodge. On November 25, 1932, she noted that Murphy “admitted he could open Fisher Lodge,” an idled automobile factory that he wanted to turn into a city-run Emergency Lodge for homeless people, without resubmitting the proposal to the city council. But he delayed.

A couple of weeks later, on December 7, 1932, Gomon made her views clear. “Frank still home—when he called in I told him I was going to see that Fisher Lodge was opened this week—sick of delay—they will have some place to sleep and food can be

arranged later,” she recounted in her journal. “Last week when I told him it should be opened at once he said it should have been opened two months ago. ‘It’s too late now. I wanted to open it two months ago.’”

But Gomon had made her point. And she knew it. That’s why she wasn’t surprised “when Frank got to his feet in the MUC meeting this PM with a long dew-and-sunshine speech that ended in a [resolution] for the opening of the Lodge…”

It is no wonder, after a career full of moments such as this, that the Detroit Free Press described Gomon in her 1975 obituary as “one of the most influential women in the city’s history,” as well as “the city’s conscience.”

defying Norms Gomon was a rarity from the start of her adult life. In 1913, she graduated from U-M with a mathematics degree, then taught math and physics at what would become Wayne State University. She married and had five children, but continued to work. She taught in the Detroit public school system, wrote a child education column for The Detroit News, and worked for the local Planned Parenthood league following the deaths of two of her friends in childbirth.

Given the norms of the era, those things alone would have set her apart. But Gomon’s journey in city government, the private sector, and in a variety of organizations would make her one of the most influential power brokers of the time—male or female.

She met famed lawyer Clarence Darrow in the 1920s and became friends with him. She became acquainted with Murphy when he was the judge on one of Darrow’s most high-profile tri-als. Gomon went on to work for Murphy’s mayoral campaign in 1930, then worked for him once he took office. Gomon wrote in December 1932 about the two men in a passage that highlights her importance to both of them. “Darrow didn’t want to go” to a luncheon the mayor invited him to, she wrote, “but he said he would do anything I wanted him to while he was here and if I were along.”

Murphy, Gomon, and others in the city continued to work toward the city’s salvation. They boosted the city’s welfare agencies and pushed for lower gas, electric, and telephone rates for Detroiters who were struggling to get by. Even so, the city was on the verge of payless paydays and other impending disasters, when City Hall sought help from the local business community.

The Detroit Free Press described Gomon in her 1975 obituary as “one of the

most influential women in the city’s history,” as well as “the city’s conscience.”

trailblazers iN the stacksJosephine gomon isn’t the only boundary-breaking woman the bentley has in its archives. here are a handful more whose archived papers, photographs, and correspondence showcase extraordinary accomplishments.

Elizabeth Bauer, a member of the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, has devoted her life’s work to advocating for the human and legal rights of those with disabilities (see our story on Bauer on page 19).

Geraldine Braisie, a Detroit public school teacher, traveled alone to Europe, India, China, Israel, and beyond in the 1920s and 1930s, documenting daily life through stunning photographs.

Elizabeth Margaret Chandler established the Logan Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1832 and was the first female American poet to make the topics of slavery and abolition the corner-stone of her writing.

Elzada Clover, a U-M botanist, was the first woman to catalog plant life in the Grand Canyon while simultaneously becoming the first woman to raft down the length of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River in 1938.

Jennifer Granholm, Michigan’s first female governor, was elected in 2002 and again in 2006. Today, she teaches at U-C Berkeley and campaigns for a national clean energy policy.

Eva Jessye (left), a renowned choral conductor, collaborated on groundbreaking works such as Porgy and Bess and, along with her choir, participated in the 1963 March on Washington.

Cornelia G. Kennedy, a U-M Law School graduate, was the first woman to serve as chief judge of a U.S. district court in 1977.

Henry Ford decided to offer the city a $5-million, interest-free loan. To make the offer, a top member of Ford’s staff contacted none other than Josephine Gomon. The crisis was averted, and the city was able to make its payroll.

social Justice after the Great depressionGomon assisted Murphy with the creation of New Deal programs, then became director of the Detroit Housing Commission and made a failed run for public office. Her connections continued to pay off; starting in 1941 and until the end of World War II, she was recruited by Henry Ford to be the director of women personnel at Ford’s Willow Run plant, where she fought for industrial safety and day care centers, and helped in the planning and construction of war workers’ housing. She later worked as an adviser for President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Gomon’s diaries highlight not only the economic and social devastation of the Great Depression, but also the World War II era when there was an abundance of jobs. On March 10, 1943, while she worked at Ford, she wrote about the struggle to find housing for the hundreds of new workers who arrived each day. “Our front employment office looks like the baggage room of Grand Central Station,” she wrote.

Gomon continued to fight for social justice and human rights organizations; she went on to become a founding member of the ACLU in Michigan, and, until her death in 1975, she worked with Americans for Democratic Action, the NAACP, and other like-minded groups.

In a Detroit Free Press column in 2013, the writer suggested eight Detroiters of the past whom she would like to see resur-rected to help the city with its current woes. Not surprisingly, former mayor and governor Frank Murphy made the cut. But the writer also put Josephine Gomon on her wish list.

“Where would Gomon start if we unleashed her on these problems today?” the article said, declaring that “we’d trust her judgment.”

The Josephine Fellows Gomon papers at the Bentley Historical Library include the diaries she kept for nearly 60 years, as well as the draft of her projected biography of Frank Murphy. The collection was donated by Gomon in several installments beginning in 1974; additional donations have since been made by family members.

(Opposite page) Mayor Frank Murphy eats with men at the Fisher Lodge in De-troit—a city-run lodge for homeless people—on Christmas Eve, 1932. Gomon, then Murphy’s executive secretary, had to nudge the mayor to get the lodge up and running, and at one point in her diaries wrote that she’d do it herself if he didn’t.

(This page, top) Gomon was one of the first women in Detroit to run for public office, with campaigns in 1929, 1935, and 1941. Although she never succeeded in being elected, she received substantial electoral support throughout the city. This undated photo, which appeared in the Detroit Daily Mirror, is likely from her 1929 campaign.

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Using an array of high-tech

software and hardware,

Peter Sparling creates a

3-D dance experience that

extends far beyond what’s

possible on a traditional

stage, and provides a new

challenge for where and

how such performances

are archived.

by lara Zielin

“You determine how much space the dancers have.”

Admittedly, this may all sound a little strange. But whether or not Peter’s art sits comfortably in your wheelhouse, this installment of his work is just one in a long line of innovative projects that challenge everyday ideas of dance and bodies and space, as well as the boundaries of what can be stored in an archive—and how. The Bentley has collaborated with Sparling to collect nearly 45 years of his materials from photos to letters to VHS tapes to website links. But this latest project presents a tougher archival challenge since it’s so experiential. How do you archive something that’s in 3-D, where the creator is part of the presentation?

A Composer with a Physical ScoreThe question is one that Sparling is keen to answer. He’s been pairing tech-nology and dance since he attended the Juilliard School’s Dance Division from 1969 to 1973. “My first experiences in learning dances were through film pro-jected on rickety projectors onto studio walls,” he says.

By the time Sparling was writing and performing his own dances in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, “the video camera had become portable and affordable enough to use to capture my rehearsals and performances.”

Just as a composer weaves differ-ent lines of music into a single score, Sparling says that an installment like PUPP allows him to do the same thing with bodies. “The three screens allow me to play with visuals like a composer plays with lines of sound.” PUPP also works as a teaching device for Sparling’s students across campus, including those in the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, the School of Art and Design, and those in dance composition classes.

9

among the cluster of similar-looking buildings that make up the University of Michigan’s

North Campus Research Complex is one with a long escalator that takes you to the basement, and there you’ll find a small, non-descript room with black walls. Arranged horizontally in the space are three screens, each about seven feet apart, onto which three projectors display images of dancers in various states of motion.

Music plays—sometimes a caco-phony, sometimes a symphony. As the music swells, dancers hurtle themselves directly at the closest screen, while others leap away on the farthest screen. Some of the dancers’ bodies pass through others. A few dancers perform alone. Reflections ripple along the floor. If you want, you can walk between the screens, changing your viewpoint of the action, the sound, the placement of the movement in space and time.

Your tour guide in this space is Peter Sparling, the Rudolf Arnheim Distinguished University Professor of Dance and an Arthur Thurnau Professor of Dance in the School of Music, Theater & Dance at the University of Michigan. He’s tall and lean—a Juilliard-trained dancer in his own right—and he calls this whole experience the PUPP, short for Pop-Up Projectile Pavilion.

His goal is to get you to see these bodies, this motion, differently than you would if it were presented in 2-D. His hope is that your brain gets used to the bodies morphing, to the fragmented depth perception, to the layers upon layers of sound and dance, and that your mind adjusts the more you watch. You learn this as Sparling narrates the experience, explaining everything as it’s happening—essentially becoming part of the projectile pavilion himself. “This is a moving landscape where there’s no horizon,” he says to the small audience gathered one evening this past winter.

photo lon horwedel

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photos (this page) lon horwedel; (opposite page) rob hess

“Students have an aha moment,” Sparling says, “where they have to reevaluate what depth is on a screen and how important it is to distinguish figures simultaneously but not all on the same plane.” It’s an especially important point for a generation of students who have grown up looking at iPhones and screens. “I like to mess with the ubiquitous homogenization of the screen,” he says. “Seeing two things at the same time prompts pedagogical-questions such as, ‘How do we perceive depth?’ and ‘How can one achieve a tonality of visual material?’”

But there’s also a more practical side of this, related to what Sparling calls “the relatively short life span of the dancing body as a creative generator.”

In other words, Sparling is aging—he’s 63 now—and his body can’t sustain the same level of dance performance that it once could. Technology, Sparling says, “allows defined, brief sessions of dance,” which he can then manipulate at a com-puter. He’s still creating a performance and still creating art—it’s just through a different and more sustainable mode of production.

It’s a mode that’s also unquestionably sophisticated. Sparling uses video editing software to create a single composite file with different layers, which he then separates into three different Quicktime files and loads onto his three specialized projectors. Each Quicktime file can be manipulated so that the screens contrast duration and speed as well as depth and movement. “It’s a way to manipulate both time and space,” he says.

Finding the Director’s Cut As technology evolves, so must ar-chives—and this is a point on which Sparling has collaborated closely with the Bentley beginning in 2001. “Digital recording preserves, seals, and distills a lifetime’s work,” Sparling says. So while the Bentley may already hold many of his photos, letters, and even a webpage or two, archiving this complex video production means thinking more ex-pansively about what an archive is—and what it does.

“Archivists try to mirror both the creative process and the outcome, meaning an archive tries to give its us-ers a director’s cut of the content,” says Nancy Bartlett, the associate director for academic programs and collections development at the Bentley Historical Library. “We’ll never have the perfect solution because it won’t be the in-the-moment performance of Peter Sparling. But it will be something else—the accumulation of his work over time and a way to access him that otherwise wouldn’t exist. Ultimately, the process is a compromise of sorts, which is fine as long as we’re being transparent about what we’re doing and inviting people to partner with it.”

In this case, Bartlett pictures the Bentley recording video of Sparling’s screens, “ideally with Peter’s voiceover to narrate and walk people through. It’s choreography that can be experienced in more than one way.” The file would then be stored in the Bentley’s digital ar-chives and housed in Deep Blue, which preserves the best scholarly and artistic work at the University of Michigan.

The added bonus to the process is Sparling himself, according to Bartlett. “He’s the archivist’s friend because he’s explicit about his process and he’s very interested in it.”

Sparling might put it another way. “My selfish endeavor to preserve a

legacy has a ripple effect,” he says. “It supports an upgrading and updating of a library’s holdings to be more in step with a rapidly expanding global digital culture, and it participates in a discourse of the body.”

No matter the motive, the archive will preserve the fascinating life of a Michigan artist who grew up in Detroit and was a musician and a poet before he became a dancer. Many of the short films he shows on his three screens depict Michigan scenes such as the abandoned Willow Run plant, U-M’s empty ROTC building, or a secluded cabin outside of Petoskey.

He can still remember the moment when, as a teenager, he was lying in a field in northern Michigan, watching the stars and realizing, for the first time, that the constellations were stars in 3-D. “The immense pleasure that comes from that moment is very important,” he says. “After all, art is all about pleasure.”

Moving forward, Sparling’s vision is to recreate this 3-D experience in art museums, galleries, dance festivals, conferences, and more. “I’d love to get the PUPP into other locations on campus and off,” he says.

Myriad aspects of Peter Sparling’s body of work are accessible on-site at the Bentley Historical Library and online through Deep Blue, a repository of scholarly and artistic work at the University of Michigan.

“seeing two things at the same time prompts pedagogical questions such as, ‘how do we perceive depth?’ and ‘how can one achieve a tonality of visual material?’”

(Opposite page) Sparling edits video in the Pop-Up

Projectile Pavillion in U-M’s North Campus Research

Complex.

(This page) Video stills from Sparling’s dance videos

include Last Man at Willow Run, shot in the Willow

Run Plant—located between Ypsilanti and Belleville

in southeast Michigan and constructed initially to

build aircraft during WWII—just months before its

demolition.

12 13c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

science versus the nazis. Full stop.

A telegram in the Bentley’s archives reveals a Jewish scientist on the run from Nazi persecutors,

and a U-M dean keen to recruit a brilliant mind.

nothing, not even the breakout of World War I, seemed to be able to interrupt the research of chemistry professor Kasimir Fajans. Despite being a Polish-born Russian citizen working in

Germany, Fajans had only to check in each morning to the local police station to be allowed to continue his work while the European continent was embroiled in bloody conflict. It was as if being on the cutting edge of radioactive and physi-cal chemistry made him immune to the effects of war and politics.

This charmed state continued until the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in 1933. The pall of Nazism could not be ignored.

Fajans, who was of Jewish decent, found himself abandon-ing the work of a lifetime in order to flee to England. One of the greatest minds in chemistry was out of work and on the run at the dawn of the atomic age. Or he was, until he received a lifeline from across the Atlantic, in the form of a telegram from Edward Kraus, Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan.

Kraus had heard of Fajans’s plight and wished to extend an offer of professorship of physical chemistry at the University. Fajans would bring prestige and an outside perspective to U-M’s then insular chemistry department. Time was of the essence for Kraus, who wanted to secure Fajans before other American universities could extend competing offers. The medium of telegraph messaging left little room for nuance:

“OFFER PROFESSORSHIP EFFECTIVE NEXT

SEPTEMBER INITIAL ANNUAL SALARY

FORTYFIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS FIRST

APPOINTMENT TWO YEARS EXPECTATION

POSITION PERMANENT”

By Robert Havey

The Persecution of a GeniusWhen Fajans was born in Warsaw in 1887, Poland was under the thumb of the Russian Federation. Being a native Pole of Jewish ancestry effectively barred him from entry to his homeland’s best universities.

Fajans left his home country to study biology at the University of Leipzig in Germany before receiving his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Heidelberg in 1909. He thrived in his new environ-ment, discovering a passion for the emerging science of physical chemistry.

Fajans’s postgraduate career began with a fellow-ship in the laboratory of Nobel laureate Ernst Rutherford in Manchester, England. Shortly afterwards, he moved back to Germany to accept a position at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he came up with his soon-to-be-famous “Displacement Laws of Radioactive Decay” theory. Fajans and his colleague Fredrick Soddy were the first to describe in detail the process of an atom that is changing due to radioactivity.

More profound success soon followed. While studying the radioactive decay of uranium, Fajans and his colleague Otto Göhring discovered a new element—a supreme achieve-ment for any chemist. This finding was even more impressive due to the fleeting nature of the new substance: its half-life was a scant 1.17 minutes. Because of this ephemerality, Fajans and Göhring named the element brevium. Although they received many accolades for the breakthrough, they were

photo HS7401

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photos (top to bottom) HS13524, HS13520

stripped of the title of discoverer when another pair of scien-tists found a more stable form of the element five years later. The name was changed from brevium to protactinium.

Nonetheless, news of Fajans’s work made its way across the Atlantic. In 1930, Cornell University sponsored a lecture tour for Fajans. He traveled to campuses across the United States, including his first trip to Ann Arbor. The Rockefeller

Foundation, a philanthropic group from New York, was so impressed with Fajans that it recruited him to head its new Institute of Physical Chemistry in Munich.

Shortly after his return to Germany in 1932, everything Fajans had been working for

came crashing down. Hitler had lost the 1932 presidential elec-tion but was still a rising political star, with the Nazis winning more than 200 seats in the German Reichstag (parliament) that year. Meanwhile, the Nazi Storm Troopers, Hitler’s army of brown shirts, used intimidation and violence against political adversaries and cultural groups, suppressing Hitler’s opposition and spreading terror. In 1933, Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany and, by 1934, he was Germany’s president.

At first, Fajans was able to operate under the newly formed Nazi government. His connection with the powerful Rockefeller Foundation gave him relative autonomy while other German universities were made to fire their Jewish professors and change their curricula to align more closely with Nazi principles. Soon, however, conditions in Germany made it impossible for Fajans to recruit new students or fac-ulty. Rumors of kidnappings—or worse—of Jewish colleagues settled Fajans’s mind on abandoning the institute and the fruits of two decades of research.

It was while packing for his exodus from Munich that Fajans received the telegram from Kraus in the United States via his eldest son, Edgar, who was living in England.

A Michigan LegacyFajans demurred at Kraus’s original offer, mostly because of Kraus’s insistence on summer lectures, which would detract from valuable research time in the lab. Eventually, an agree-ment was made and Fajans received a haven in the United States to conduct his work. He moved to Ann Arbor with his wife and two sons in September 1936.

Fajans stayed at Michigan until his retirement in 1957. His work on radioactive decay made many of his colleagues believe he would win the Nobel Prize in chemistry, but it was not to be. The window for Fajans to have won the award may have been during the three years the Nobel was suspended because of World War II.

In 1992, the Regents of the University of Michigan established the Kasimir Fajans Professor of Chemistry, Physics, and Applied Physics. Today, the position is held by Department of Chemistry Professor Raoul Kopelman, who runs a campus lab with more than 15 active researchers in the areas of analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, bio-physics, and applied physics.

The Kasimir Fajans papers at the Bentley Historical Library informed and inspired this article. Other sources include Kasimir Fajans (1887-1975): The Man and His Work, and Bulletin of Historical Chemistry, 1989/1990.

edward Kraus’s materials at the Bentley showcase the life of a vibrant academic with a keen interest in meeting—and

assembling—the greatest scientific minds of his time. Amid his archived correspondence, papers, and research is a scrapbook labeled “Photographs of Many Famous Scientists,” which contains images of Kraus rubbing elbows with a range of scientists—from chemists to physicists to mineralogists—both in Ann Arbor and abroad.

Kasmir Fajans can be found in these scrapbook pages. So too can a pair scientists who were once friends, but whose roles in the war would make them enemies.

In July 1939, Kraus hosted a soiree at his Ann Arbor home in honor of Werner Heisenberg, a German nuclear physicist renowned for his Nobel Prize-winning work in quantum mechanics. Also in attendance was Samuel Goudsmit, a U-M professor of physics. On that sunny afternoon, they posed for the camera together along with Enrico Fermi, who would build the world’s first nuclear reactor, and U-M Vice President Clarence Yoakum.

By mid-April 1945, Goudsmit was in the forests of Germany, advancing along-side the Allies in an effort to capture atomic scientists and intelligence in Nazi-occupied

Europe. Heisenberg was one of the scientists he hoped to detain in an operation dubbed Alsos. Heisenberg tried to escape but ultimately was captured on May 4, 1945. He was transferred to England for questioning, but he denied that he had actively attempted to build a bomb for

capturing a suspected nazi BomB-BuilderA Bentley scrapbook sheds light on the ways in which World War II fractured great minds and great friendships

Germany. Just the opposite, he said: He dragged his feet and tried to delay any atomic advancements.

Goudsmit left U-M in 1946 to teach at Northwestern and then to work at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. Heisenberg stayed in Germany, conducting research. The two never reconciled. But evidence of their once-existent friendship is pressed into the pages of Kraus’s archived scrapbook.

photos (left to right) HS13541, HS10486

(Lead image) The telegram from U-M Dean Edward Kraus to Kasimir Fajans

in July 1936 offers a teaching position starting in September.

(Previous page) A portrait of Kasimir Fajans circa 1950.

(This page, top) Edward Kraus hosted many notable scientific minds at

his Ann Arbor home, recording them in his scrapbook now housed at the

Bentley. Pictured in 1939 are, from left to right, Samuel Goudsmit, Clarence

Yoakum, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Kraus. At the end of

WWII, Goudsmit would capture German scientists suspected of building

atomic bombs, including Heisenberg.

(This page, bottom) Kasimir Fajans (middle) and his son, Stefan Fajans (far

left), pose with Edward Kraus (far right) in Ann Arbor in 1948.

(Opposite page, left) Fajans (second from left) at the technical school in

Karlsruhe, Germany in 1915. Oswald Hemuth Göhring (far left) worked with

Fajans to discover brevium. Max Ernest Lembert (far right) helped establish

the existence of isotopes.

(Opposite page, right) Fajans gives his last U-M lecture in May 1956.

16

F or the Detroit News to run its stories in the 1870s, the process required a large printing depart-

ment, specialized equipment, rolls of pa-per delivered by horse-drawn carriages, and cameras with glass plate negatives to produce a front-page picture.

From the 1850s to the 1920s, glass plates were the primary medium to cap-ture photographic images. The complex process involved a photographer pre-paring a thin glass sheet with a coating that would react when exposed to light. Depending on the type of coating, some negatives would have to be developed on-site within minutes of exposure.

Approximately 400 glass plate negatives documenting the history and

work of the Detroit News through the late 19th century and early 20th century were recently accessioned by the Bentley Historical Library. Among the negatives are depictions of day-to-day work at the newspaper, shots of the Detroit News buildings designed by Albert Kahn, and the Detroit News’s very own radio station, 8MK, founded in 1920, which is still run-ning today as WWJ.

The glass plates are only a portion of a larger and richer collection from the News at the Bentley that contains scrapbooks, a small number of pho-tographic prints, and film negatives. These 128 linear feet of materials docu-ment one of the most prominent news institutions in Michigan.

Currently, each of the negatives is being cleaned before it is rehoused from its original acidic envelope into archival-quality sleeves and boxes. This process will prepare the negatives for digitization and will allow for increased access to these historic images online.

16

1150 BeAL

c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

All the News that’s Fit to PreserveThe Bentley is the new home for journalistic history from the Detroit News

student Bodies

photos (top) BL000049 (bottom) Lon Horwedel photos (top) HS5308, (bottom) HS5294

Two U-M students are poring over diaries, letters, and early records to understand what life was really like on campus almost 200 years ago

17

By Kim Clarke

As a University of Michigan freshman in 1841, Lyman Norris wrote home to his parents with complaints that would be repeated by students for decades to come:

The campus is cold, I didn’t pack enough winter clothes, and I can’t believe how much coursework I have.

Lindsay Barnett and Claire Bartosic understand Norris’s sentiments. More than 170 years separate them and Norris, but as current first-year students they are discovering similarities with him and the first class of U-M students.

Barnett and Bartosic are exploring the Bentley’s holdings of U-M’s first students as part of the Undergraduate

Research Opportunities Program, which pairs first-year students and sophomores with faculty and research scientists. Barnett, of Fraser, Michigan, and Bartosic, of New Haven, Connecticut, are working for the U-M Bicentennial Office.

While U-M was founded in 1817 in Detroit, and offered what amounted to high school prep classes, the first class of college-level students did not enroll until 1841 in Ann Arbor.

Early campus histories differ about whether the incom-ing class had six or seven students, a discrepancy Bartosic and Barnett are working to clarify. The two students spend several hours a week at the Bentley, as well as other campus locations such as the Clements Library and the Stephen S. Clark Library of maps.

The first U-M students included George Washington Pray, whose diary provides a wealth of detail about the first class, faculty, and campus surroundings. The diary is among Pray’s papers stretching from 1844 to 1890.

Pray did not hold back in critiquing his classmates, such as this biting assessment of George E. Parmelee: “He is very lazy and therefore a very poor scholar—though he would like to leave the impression that he is something great.”

The Bicentennial Office will use the students’ research in campus programming and exhibits for 2017.

As current first-year students they are discovering similarities with the first class of U-M students.

Newsboys with a fresh supply of papers atop a

Detroit News truck, circa 1913, from the Warren

Wilkinson collection.

By Melissa Hernández Durán and Alexa Hagan

Among the negatives are depictions of day-to-day work at the newspaper, shots of the Detroit News buildings, and of the News’s very own radio station founded in 1920.

Off the RecordThis postcard depicting a Detroit News office circa

1917 is from the collection of Warren S. Wilkinson,

the entirety of which showcases the history of the

News for more than 100 years. Wilkinson is a direct

descendant of James E. Scripps, who founded the

Detroit News in 1873. Wilkinson’s collection contains

scrapbooks with material about Scripps, as well as

documentation about Wilkinson’s role as the owner of

the News, especially when it was struggling for profit-

ability in the 1960s and 1970s. His scrapbook titled

“The Twilight of the Evening News Association” con-

tains photos, correspondence, trial transcripts, and

commentary about the News’s financial perils and the

paper’s sale to the Gannett Company in 1985. These

incredible holdings exemplify the rise and fall of the

newspaper industry over just a few generations.

(Clockwise, left to right)

Lindsay Bartlett (left) and

Claire Bartosic (right) in-

spect early U-M materials;

the journals of early U-M

student George Wash-

ington Pray; a portrait of

Pray circa 1879; a close-up

of Pray’s meticulous

recordings, which span

numerous diaries.

1818

reFereNces

House of cardsHow researching Detroit’s HUD crisis transformed one student’s thesis—and life

By Lara Zielin

c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

T he idea, at the outset, seemed like a good one. In 1969, former gover-nor of Michigan George Romney

became Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under Nixon and was determined to help end housing discrimination and foster in-tegrated communities. He helped design a plan through which the Federal Hous-ing Administration (FHA), overseen by HUD, would begin offering insured loans to low-income minority neighborhoods. But predatory lending practices, plus a widespread scheme in which home prices were grossly inflated by corrupt assessors, left brand new home owners on the hook with overpriced houses. Many of the homes needed repairs the new owners couldn’t afford. In cities like Detroit, boarded-up, falling-down homes sat for years in ruin. In 1976, then Detroit City Council President Carl Levin called HUD “Hell Upon Detroit.”

By the mid-1980s, a U-M senior named John Rapaport was working on his honors thesis and ruminating on a handful of questions about the HUD crisis. Where, for example,

did Romney come up with the idea that people should own homes instead of rent them? What were Romney’s views on housing as governor of Michigan? How much did Romney know when the HUD crisis began?

Rapaport delved into the archives of the Bentley, which had acquired George Romney’s papers. “I looked at letters, speeches, testimony to Congress, and more to find the threads. You go through thou-sands of pages of material to find the 10 that are the most relevant.” The work was daunting, but Rapaport had a source of encouragement in his thesis advisor, Bentley Director Terrence J. McDonald, who was then a professor of history.

“Terry wasn’t just about the teaching and the writing—he really helped focus me. He said you have to keep pushing to find answers, you don’t just stop at the first concept, you go deeper.”

Rapaport got an A for his work, which argued that the government—Romney in particular—was concerned with getting home ownership and inte-gration numbers up, but had little to no understanding of what the realities of the housing crisis were on the ground.

The impact of his Rapaport’s work went far beyond a letter grade, how-ever. “Terry showed me I could do the work, and that has given me the confidence to do other things. It helped me get into law school, where I went deeper to understand how cases and ideas connect.”

Today, Rapaport works in the con-struction industry, where he is a voice for more progressive business prac-tices. “I’m still thinking about hous-ing,” he says, “how to get people into better buildings. There are still those connections.”

The connections continue to the next generation. Rapaport’s sons, Alexander and Nicholas, ages 13 and nine, respectively, recently visited the Bentley to see their dad’s archived thesis. They met with McDonald and explored the collections firsthand. “They were impressed,” Rapaport says. “They’d been in libraries with books before, but this was primary research. They’d never seen that.”

Today, Rapaport funds a prize in Terry McDonald’s name for the best archival research for an honors thesis. “Michigan is about learning,” he says, “and giving back to a place that has meant so much to me has been wonderful.”

He hopes to return again this spring, perhaps with his six-year-old daughter, Ava. “I hope more students are inspired to use the Bentley, to get the confidence to search primary materials, like I did.”

19

the Value of one

By Elise Reynolds

T he newspaper clippings are yellowed and worn, but the story of neglect and abuse is the same on many of the pages: A mentally disabled young man, soiled with

urine down to his shoes, is left to roam the halls at the facility that is supposed to be caring for him. An elderly woman with Alzheimer’s wanders into the cold for hours, and when she’s

finally discovered, the nurs-ing home charged with her health ignores her shivering and frostbite.

Elizabeth W. Bauer’s papers at the Bentley contain these stories—but also stories of the tireless work of Bauer herself as an advocate for the human and legal rights of people with disabilities in Michigan, nationally, and internationally. Her motiva-tion grew even stronger when

she became the mother of a child with multiple disabilities. Through professional and personal experience, Bauer gained firsthand knowledge of the challenges faced by the disabled and their families and has never stopped fighting for them. Her approach to advocacy starts with one very basic idea: every individual has value.

“The whole purpose of my work since 1958 has been to enhance the dignity and worth of every person. All people are valuable. All people deserve to live dignified, self-determined lives. Some will need more support than others to achieve that goal. Ensuring those supports are available, accessible, accept-able, adequate and affordable (5As) and that they are provided in ways that enhance the dignity of the individual has been the centerpiece of my work,” said Bauer.

Bauer walks the talk. For decades, she has worked for the cause in many ways, including founding the Michigan Pro-tection & Advocacy Service, working through the political process, and serving in government to secure rights for people with disabilities. In recognition of her efforts, Bauer was in-ducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2013.

Elizabeth Bauer’s collection reveals the crucial work of a tireless advocate

(Top) Bentley Director Terrence J. McDonald poses

with John Rapaport’s sons, Alexander and Nicholas,

during their recent visit to the Bentley Historical

Library. Also pictured are Michigan Governor George

Romney and HUD houses, the central topic of Rapa-

port’s honors thesis, now archived at the Library.

(Bottom) Rapaport during his senior year at U-M.

(Left) Elizabeth Bauer with her daughter, Ginny Bauer, of whom Elizabeth says,

“[She] is the engine that keeps me driving forward toward justice for all.”

(Right) The disability rights movement of the 20th century has included protests

on behalf of equality, independence, and access—among other key issues. This

image from a political button is featured in an online exhibit by the Smithsonian

Institution, showcasing dissent and activism by people with disabilities. You can

view the entire exhibit at: americanhistory.si.edu/disabilityrights/

photo courtesy of Elizabeth Bauer

20 21

War comes to campus

20

cAtHoLePisteMiAD

c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

photos (clockwise, top to bottom) BL018432, HS5011, BL018433, HS13571, BL003838, HS13568, HS13569, HS3865, HS13570, BL018430, HS7978

As 2015 marks the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, the Bentley takes note of how the campus changed during this tumultuous time. From cannons in the Law Quad to women in the Union, the University of Michigan—like the United States itself—was irrevocably altered.

By Brian A. Williams

December 7, 1941 The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, pushed the nation into war. Navy ensign Francis C. Flaherty, a native of Charlotte, Michi-gan, and a 1940 U-M graduate, was serving aboard the U.S.S. Oklahoma when it was bombed. He lost his life helping other shipmates escape the ship, for which he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

April 19,1940 (Pre-War)An all-campus peace rally on April 19, 1940, drew more than 3,000 people to hear a speech by North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye advocating complete non- intervention. A 1940 campus survey found that 80 percent of students opposed U.S. entrance into the war.

January 9, 1942U-M President Ruthven established the University War Board, which recommended an accelerated three-term, year-round academic program, making it possible for students to earn a degree in two years, eight months.

January 1942Town-wide blackout procedures were developed and tested. Only the factories on Ann Arbor’s west side making essential war material were allowed to stay illuminated.

May 1942 Police were flooded with calls about lights blinking in Burton Tower, which had been dark since the beginning of the war. The suspected enemy agents signaling planes turned out to be members of the physics department testing infra-red communication for the Navy. That was just one of dozens of war-related research projects underway on campus.

October 1942The Manpower Mobilization Corps organized scrap drives on campus to salvage metal for the war effort. Fraternities competed to col-lect the most scrap metal. Even the campus chimes, at U-M since 1883, were scrapped. The five bells weighed 2.5 tons.

Fall 1942Forty female U-M students took jobs sponsored by the Women’s War Council at the King-Seeley plant, working a swing shift from 4:30pm to 8:30pm.

February 1943In February 1943, women set foot in the Michigan Union for the first time ever as volunteer waitresses. Women also became editors of both The Michigan Daily and the Michiganensian for the first time in the University’s history.

Summer 1943Nearly 4,000 uniformed men were on campus as part of military units training at the University.

1943 Joseph K. Sano came to Ann Arbor from a Japanese internment camp on the West Coast, one of many Japanese Americans brought to Ann Arbor directly from relocation camps. Like Sano, many came to teach for the Army Japanese language school. Some 70 additional workers came to help staff kitchen and maintenance positions in the housing units and the hospital. Sano was forcibly interned at the start of the war, despite having served in the U.S. Army in WWI.

June 6, 1944 (D-Day)As word of the successful D-Day invasion of Normandy reached Ann Arbor, air raid sirens, factory whistles, church bells, and the Baird Carillon all rang for 90 seconds followed by 60 seconds of silent prayer. Special church services were held throughout the city.

October 1944The Technicolor film Michigan on the March, portraying the University during wartime, was released by the University in Octo-ber 1944. The movie (archived at the Bentley and available online) richly illustrates the University’s response to the war and the many contributions to the war effort.

May 7, 1945 Victory in Europe (VE Day)Germany surrendered uncondi-tionally on May 7, 1945. Classes continued as usual. The victory was celebrated, but attention turned to the remaining enemy, Japan.

August 14, 1945 Victory over Japan (VJ Day)Flocks of people—students, parents, servicemen, faculty members, and every-one in between—poured into Main Street to celebrate the Japanese surrender. The celebration lasted all night, into the next morning when, at 7:30am, the power-house siren sounded for five minutes, announcing the University would be closed for the day. The cannon in the Law Quadrangle fired a 21-gun salute.

Stores closed and churches held services of thanksgiving. The war was over.

June 1946 A “Victory Reunion” was held in conjunc-tion with the 102nd commencement in June 1946. A memorial service in the Rackham Lecture Hall paid tribute to the 474 University men and women known at the time to have lost their lives in the war (the number is now 585). In all, some 32,000 University alumni

served in the armed forces during WWII.

August 1942A simulated bomb shelter of sandbags and wood was constructed at the corner of North University and State Street. It was used to sell war stamps and bonds.

I946I942 I943 I944 I945

September 1942Judge Advocate General’s School moved into the Law Quad, whose French 75mm cannon fired at 6:30am. It woke up the JAG contingent, as well as the Ruthven house-hold across the street, and the women in Martha Cook.

I941

22 23c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

cAtHoLePisteMiAD

22 23

the Mystery Above the Pillars

W hen I was Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, I had a dream. In it at some point in their busy lives here, every University student, staff,

and faculty member would walk down State Street to view the great quotation on the pediment of Angell Hall. Reflecting on its origins, and inspired by its sentiments, they would then proceed up the steps of Angell Hall and into the astonishing intellectual world of the University of Michigan.

But then I woke up. In my travels through the College and the University, I learned that almost no one knew there was an inscription on the pediment, and those who had noticed one often had no idea what it said or what its source was.

The inscription is a passage from the Ordinance of 1787, commonly known as the Northwest Ordinance, drafted originally by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Continental Congress in that year. The Ordinance organized the Northwest Territory—that great stretch of land “northwest” of the origi-nal 13 American colonies—that would become the states of Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

The inscription says: Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. Along with the sentiment came grants of land to be sold to fund the “means of education,” thus making real the first promise of free, universal public education in the history of the world. And in 1804, the United States Congress declared, based on this previ-ous ordinance, that one township of land (23,040 acres) in each of the Northwest States would be sold to support higher educa-tion. To this, the Native American tribes of Michigan added three more sections (1,920 acres) in the Treaty of Fort Meigs in 1817.

This passage from the Northwest Ordinance was, there-fore, the birth certificate of the University of Michigan. In

What does the quote on the front of Angell Hall mean, and why is it there?

1887, the famous inscription was installed in the auditorium of University Hall, the headquarters of what was then called the Literary College, later the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. The auditorium was the celebratory heart of the University, the place where all large gatherings and meetings were held as well as lectures, dramatic and musical presentations (some of the most famous orators of the 19th century spoke there). For years, the ordinance was what all students and all visitors saw every time they entered the auditorium.

In 1925, the Hall was condemned and scheduled for demolition, and Hill Auditorium eventually would replace it as the ceremonial heart of the campus. In 1921, the Regents authorized a new “Literary Building” to replace University Hall itself. This would become James B. Angell Hall.

When the first designs for Angell Hall were prepared in 1923, they showed the building much as it is now, with the famous phrase beautifully inscribed where it is today. However, to save money, the Regents asked the building’s famed architect, Albert Kahn, to build Angell Hall directly to the west of University Hall, leaving the latter open for use (which continued, amazingly, through World War II). This compromised the site lines for the inscription from State Street. Both that decision and the inevitable effect of time on the letters make for hard reading today. It is only in the right light and with a craned neck that one can make it out.

But it is worth the effort to read the inscription to feel the inspiration it provided to the leadership of the Michigan territory who believed so firmly and at a time so long ago that a public university was necessary for the kind of society they hoped to build. It still is.

C hances are, you’ve seen it. The garishly painted boulder at the corner of Washtenaw Avenue and Hill Street in Ann Arbor, resting on a tiny triangular piece

of city-owned land, is hard to miss. But you may not know the rock’s origins—nor its com-

memorative role to honor a U.S. president. Mention of the iconic rock first appears in an Ann Arbor

News story from December 1932 with the headline: “Bowlder [sic] Placed in City Park.” Eli Gallup was the driving force be-hind the mammoth stone’s new locale. An Ann Arbor’s parks superintendent for nearly half a century (1919-1964), Gallup was also “quite a rock collector,” according to an Ann Arbor News story dated November 5, 1972. The News says that he spotted the chunk of glacial limestone “in the county gravel pit on Pontiac Trail” and wanted to use it to memorialize George Washington, whose 200th birthday was February 22, 1932.

The boulder was rolled into place in the winter of 1932 with help from a heavy-duty Detroit Edison truck, according to an Ann Arbor Observer article from March 5, 2009. In the foundation under the memorial, Gallup buried a time capsule that included its written history. Because copper was scarce at the time, Gallup had to secure enough of it—including scouring Dumpsters for scraps—before he could commission a memorial plaque. Seven years after the rock’s installation, a shield-shaped insignia was mounted onto the stone, facing Washtenaw Avenue. It read: “To George Washington this memorial erected in cele-bration of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, 1932.”

It’s not precisely clear when people began to paint the memorial, but it was likely sometime in the mid-1950s. The first alleged incident, according to the 2009 Observer article, was after a Michigan versus Michigan State football game, when someone reportedly painted the letters M.S.U. on the memorial.

A sign erected next to the rock in the early 1970s begged people not to paint the memorial, but it went unheeded. Once started, the tradition of painting the rock couldn’t be undone, and it continues today.

The hard truth about an Ann Arbor landmark

rock and role

By Louis Miller and Lara Zielin

photo Don Hammond

(Top and middle) Images

from the Bentley archive

show the George Washington

Memorial circa 1932, when it

was installed near Washtenaw

Avenue on Ann Arbor city

land. The memorial plaque,

salvaged from scrap metal

during the Great Depression,

is visible in the middle photo.

(Bottom) Students painting

the memorial, a tradition

which some suspect began in

the 1950s after a Michigan vs.

Michigan State football game.

photos (top to bottom) HS13077, HS5591, Scott Soderberg, Michigan Photography

By Terrence J. McDonald

24

1150 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2113 |  734-647-3534 | bentley.umich.edu/giving

hands-on historyU-M Professor Angela Dillard is among countless

faculty members who have used the Bentley to turn bold questions into revolutionary research.

VICTORS FOR MICHIGAN

The Bentley needs you — because our world needs Victors.

IMPACT

Support the work of Dillard and countless other researchers who need access to the primary sources of history to investigate, to teach, and to inspire. Use the enclosed envelope to make a gift to the Bentley and be a part of the Victors for Michigan fundraising campaign.

INSPIRATION

When she was a graduate student at U-M, Professor Angela Dillard used primary sources at the Bentley to inform her dissertation. Years later, that work would help generate her second book, Faith in the City, which looks at more than three decades of civil rights activism in Detroit, and the men and women of faith who inspired it.

“The Bentley provides the raw materials of research, without which the writing and understanding of history simply wouldn’t be possible,” she says.

24

BeNtLeY UNBoUND

c o l l e c t i o n s • t h e B e n t l e y h i s t o r i c a l l i B r a r y

Passports are one of the oldest and most interesting records available. Dating back to bibli-

cal times, they still convey a sense of adventure and exploration. Among the Bentley’s holdings are a number of passports, including two belonging to University of Michigan President James B. Angell.

Issued in 1851 and 1911, Angell’s passports consist of a single oversize

sheet of paper that was folded down to be carried in a pocket or wallet. The 1851 passport has been pasted into a small leather-bound book that provides additional pages for stamps, as the back of his passport had reached its capacity.

Such early passports lack a photograph, instead featuring a handwritten physi-cal description of the bearer. In 1851, the 22-year-old Angell had a square forehead, Roman nose, small mouth, light hair, and full chin. Sixty years later, his forehead was listed as high, his nose straight, mouth medium, hair grey, and chin small.

The 1851 passport was used by Angell when he toured Europe. His early lectures as a professor and published reminiscences draw from adventures on this trip that include arriving in France just after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat, seeing Pope Pius IX, falling in love with art in Rome, and being suspected of terrorism in Germany, when radicals in 1853 were using Ameri-can passports. (He was detained briefly, then released.) His 1911 passport was used during one of his final trips: A tour to Russia that culminated in a stroke with paralysis from which sources say he never fully recovered.

These two documents no longer allow access to countries, but they are passports to a multi-layered story full of history, adventure, and discovery.

Primitive PassportsA U-M president’s papers reveal the evolution and impact of border-crossings

photos Angell images (left to right) BL003652, HS3634

Collections, the magazine of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, is published twice each year.

terrence J. McdonaldArthur F. Thurnau ProfessorProfessor of History and Director

nancy BartlettAssociate Director

lara ZielinEditorial Director

hammond designArt Direction/Design

Copyright ©2015 Regents of the University of MichiganArticles may be reprinted by obtaining permission from:Editor, Bentley Historical Library1150 Beal AvenueAnn Arbor, MI 48109-2113

Please direct email correspondence to: laram@umich.edu

Regents of theUniversity of MichiganMark J. Bernstein, Ann ArborJulia Donovan Darlow, Ann ArborLaurence B. Deitch, Bloomfield HillsShauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse PointeDenise Ilitch, Bingham FarmsAndrea Fischer, Newman, Ann ArborAndrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe ParkKatherine E. White, Ann ArborMark S. Schlissel, ex officio

The University of Michigan, as an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight, or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Senior Director for Institutional Equity, and Title IX/Sec-tion 504/ADA Coordinator, Office for Institutional Equity, 2072 Administrative Services Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, 734-763-0235, TTY 734-647-1388, institutional.equity@umich.edu. For other University of Michigan information call 734-764-1817.

By Elise Reynolds

Scans of Angell’s passports showcase his travels abroad spanning

more than 60 years, and a changing physical description that went

from light hair and full chin to gray hair and a small chin.

1150 Beal avenue • ann arbor, Mi 48109-2113

NON-PROFIT ORG

U S POSTAGE

PA I DANN ARBOR, MI

PERMIT NO. 144

Soldiers enter the Michigan Union for

“chow time” in 1943. To honor the 70th

anniversary of the end of WWII, we’ve

loaded this issue with stories on every-

thing from brilliant scientists on the run

from Nazis, to trailblazers in Detroit who

aided war efforts at home, to a timeline

of how war impacted U-M’s campus.

Don’t miss the history inside!

Photo Bl003838