The American Colonization Society

In 1808, the United States outlawed the importation of slaves, ending nearly two hundred years of forcefully shipping people across the Atlantic from Africa.  Okay, maybe it didn’t completely stop the trade, what with Brazil and several islands in the Caribbean continuing to import slaves for decades, but at least in the United States the practice stopped.  Well, at least it stopped being done legally.  You know what, we’re not going to get anywhere if we get stuck now, so let’s just keep going forward with what we got.  Anyways, though the international slave trade was made illegal, the trading of slaves already in the United States remained perfectly acceptable, at least up until the Civil War, but hopefully you already know how that whole shindig turned out.

The time following the Revolutionary War in the United States was a time of enlightenment, at least for some.  Thanks to the rise of hardcore religious groups, which took a rather negative view of the whole slavery thing, the practice of literally owning people was beginning to look less and less like a good thing.  By the time 1808 rolled around, all of the northern states had outlawed slavery, and it had become at least somewhat common for many slave owners to free their slaves upon their death, the slave owner’s death that is.  As a result, the U.S. was becoming home to an increasingly large number of free black people.  This of course caused problems, by which I mean a bunch of asshats created a problem out of nothing.  You see, though the abolitionists of the day were totally down with getting rid of slavery, they weren’t so down with former slaves living amongst them.  Proving that racist ideas just don’t change that much, it was claimed that Blacks were mentally inferior savages who had no business mixing and intermingling with the majority white population.  Of course, what was anybody supposed to do about it?  It wasn’t like they could just ship all the freed Black people back to Africa.  Oh…..wait……that’s exactly what they decided to do.

In 1815, a strange coalition of racist abolitionists, slave owners who really didn’t want their slaves noticing that people with the same skin color were walking around free, and free Black people who were just plain sick of getting treated like shit for no good reason, formed the American Colonization Society (ACS).  Together, they began working to establish a new country in west Africa, a country that would later become known as Liberia.  Though it sounds crazy today, the idea was widely seen at the time as being the best way to handle things.  Even good old Honest Abe Lincoln was a major proponent.

Things of course started out all sorts of fucked up.  The first thing the ACS needed to do was to buy some land.  Luckily, they got a great deal after using the tried and true negotiation tactic of putting a gun to the local chief’s head.  Colonists began to show up soon after, some 4,500 over the next two decades.  These colonists did not have the easiest of times.  For one thing, for some reason the local tribes weren’t really down with a bunch of total strangers just suddenly appearing and declaring that a big chunk of land belonged to them now.  For another, most of the immigrants were several generations removed from their ancestors, meaning that they lacked immunity to the tropical diseases of their ancestral homelands.  Between these two factors, around 60 percent or so died.  Despite this horrible loss of life, the ACS, which was completely aware of it, just kept shipping more people over, reaching some 15,000 by the start of the Civil War.

In 1847, the Black immigrants formed their own country, naming it Liberia because it kind of sounded like liberty, and forming a government based upon that of the United States.  Unfortunately, this involved treating anyone different like shit.  The Black immigrants generally viewed the local tribesman as a bunch of filthy savages, and thus refused to grant them citizenship.  This didn’t change until 1904, though in the mean time they did create a myriad of programs to promote assimilation, by which I mean they forced people to change under the threat of violence.  The immigrants also enslaved many of the local tribespeople, a practice that didn’t end until the 1930’s.

After the U.S. Civil War, the number of African-Americans willing to immigrate to Liberia dropped significantly.  As a result, the ACS folded soon after and the idea of avoiding racial assimilation by shipping all the Black people back to Africa died with it.  Actually, just kidding, the idea remained politically relevant throughout the early twentieth century, even gaining widespread traction again in the 1920’s thanks to Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican born Black nationalist and leader of the Pan-Africanism Movement. The ACS remained an active organization until 1964.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stork_Derby#/media/File:Charles_Vance_Millar.jpg

The Great Stork Derby

In 1926, a wealthy Canadian lawyer and financier named Charles Vance Millar died in his sleep at the age of 73.  With no close relatives and a significant fortune up for grabs, his law partners eagerly unsealed the envelope holding his will.  What they found was ridiculously horrifying.  It’s probably a good idea to pause here real quick to mention that Millar was known as a bit of a prankster.  One of his favorite hobbies was to leave money on the sidewalk, and then secretly watch as random people scooped it up and furtively pocketed it.  The guy was an odd-duck is what we’re trying to say.  Anyways, Millar’s entire will was full of shenanigans.  For instance, he gave his vacation home in Jamaica to three men who hated each other, he gave his stock in a brewery to a group of ministers and temperance activists, and he gave his stock in the local horse racing club to a group of anti-horse racing activists.  However, it was the last part of his will that gained the most attention.  The majority of his fortune, some seven million U.S. dollars in today’s money, was to go to whatever woman living in Toronto had the most babies in the next ten years.

Nobody really took Millar’s will all that seriously in the early days.  Mention of its weird clauses made it into a couple of newspapers, and after that it was largely forgotten.  A few of Millar’s most distant relatives tried to contest the will, but their efforts really went nowhere.  All of this changed in 1932, when the government of the province of Ontario, not liking the idea of seven million dollars just sitting around for a stupid baby making contest, tried to pass a bill that would allow them to seize the money.  While the attempt ultimately failed, it did bring the contest back into the public view, and this time a lot of people became very interested, what with it now being the middle of the Great Depression and all.

Now all of this might have been just a strange curiosity if it hadn’t been for the Toronto newspapers.  Hungry for any story that didn’t include standing around in long unemployment lines, the newspapers used public records to hunt down women who had already had six babies over the past six years, dashing to their houses to try and get exclusive interviews.  In some cases, the women hadn’t even heard of the contest until told by the newspaper reporters knocking on their doors.  Dubbed the Great Stork Derby, the press began regularly printing leader boards and interviews with the potential winners, all of which was gobbled up by a public wanting to be distracted by the overall shittiness of their lives.  After all, it wasn’t an easy time to be living in Toronto, again, because of the Great Depression.  Thousands were out of work, a quarter of the population was on welfare, and many families were living in shacks.

The press was unyielding in its coverage of the story, often paying women for the right to write about every little piece of their life.  They were of course not kind.  Most of the women were poor as shit, and didn’t meet the preferred mold of Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  Of the front-runners in the race, all were either immigrants, Catholics, and/or women who had children fathered by different men.  The newspapers pounced on these poor women, braying about the shitty conditions in which they lived, calling them irresponsible and at times even trollops.  The more lurid the descriptions, the more papers that got sold. The women were turned into caricatures.  Family tragedies such as stillbirths, miscarriages, and even a baby dying after getting bitten by a rat, were covered in terms only related to how it affected the leader board.  The women, desperate for money to help their families, and many planning on having large families anyways, went along with it.  Some of the more enterprising used their fame to make money by endorsing products such as soaps.  As the years ticked by, the toll on the mothers began to show.  Many of the women were constantly in and out of the hospital for operations and transfusions.  The infant mortality rate for women involved in the competition was six times the national average.  A third of the babies born to these mothers died.

The race finally came to an end in 1936, at which time the front runners all got themselves lawyers to fight for a piece of the pie.  A series of court cases ensued in which a judge eventually ruled that in order for a baby to count they couldn’t be bastards, they couldn’t be stillborn, and they had to be have been properly registered.  These stipulations of course mostly affected the poorest of the bunch.  Woman after woman was made to testify about every little detail of their personal lives and the deaths of their babies, with the whole traumatic affair punctuated by ribald comments by the rival lawyers.  In total, seven women who had nine or more babies were eventually disqualified, leaving just eight mothers, all married middle class Protestants of an Anglo-Saxon background.  Parts of the case were appealed and it eventually found its way clear to the Canadian Supreme Court, but in the end the decision was upheld.  The four socially acceptable women split the prize, and so ended the Great Stork Derby.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stork_Derby#/media/File:Charles_Vance_Millar.jpg

A Little Something About MSG

In 1908, a research scientist in Tokyo named Kikunae Ikeda got his panties in a twist over the taste of the seaweed broth he was eating.  Specifically, it drove him nuts that the broth had a flavor that didn’t really fit into the existing pantheon of sweet, sour, bitter, or salty.  Rather than just moving on his with life, Kikunae instead made up his own flavor, which he called umami, the Japanese word for delicious, and then spent the next year trying to isolate the source of his new flavor.  Eventually, Kikunae managed to distill the essence of his umami flavor into a white powder.  As you can probably already guess, this powder was monosodium glutamate, also known as MSG by those who don’t have the time to not use acronyms.

Within less than a year of being invented, MSG was being manufactured as a food additive.  At a time when scientific progress was seen as a good thing, what with humankind giving mother nature and her limitations the finger and all, MSG quickly became a widely used flavor enhancer throughout Japan.  It probably didn’t hurt anything that MSG was delicious as fuck.  Now MSG might have remained a simple curiosity of Japanese cuisine, if it wasn’t for the fact that the Japanese were pretty hog wild about invading other countries at the time.  Over the next several decades, the Japanese Imperial Army cut a swath through Asia, conquering Taiwan, Korea, and northern China.  The people who lived in these places were less than pleased by this turn of events, what with all the wanton crimes against humanity and the such, but they were rather happy with the new delicious flavoring the Japanese brought with them.  In fact, the flavoring proved so popular, that it spread beyond the Japanese controlled territories.  Of course, Japanese rule didn’t last forever, what with a little thing called World War II, but the popularity of MSG remained.  Following World War II, MSG found its way across the Pacific to the United States, first via Chinese restaurants, which had become popular amongst returning American GIs, and then via the big food companies who dumped it in pretty much any processed food they could.

This all changed in 1968, when a recent immigrant from China, Dr. Ho Man Kwok wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine.  In his letter, Dr. Kwok, who was from southern China, complained that every time he ate at restaurants serving cuisine from northern China, that he got a headache and felt a numbness in his arms and back and a general feeling of weakness.  Dr. Kwok blamed MSG, which at the time was much more common in northern Chinese cuisine.  This probably had nothing to do whatsoever with the chemical’s Japanese origin or the fact that Dr. Kwok had grown up in China during the Japanese invasion.  Now Dr. Kwok had no proof whatsoever, but of course this didn’t stop things from getting crazy as shit.  Soon after Dr. Kwok’s letter, many other doctors also began writing letters to the New England Journal of Medicine describing similar symptoms, which became known as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.  The New York Times eventually noticed all the random talk by prominent doctor types, and ran with the story, of course using a headline written in such a way as to be as racist as possible.  Other newspapers ran with it from there, also using super racist sounding headlines, and suddenly everyone and their fucking dog were reporting a growing list of symptoms every time they ate Chinese food, then eventually food from any Asian country.

Of course, all of this was a bunch of bullshit.  Even though MSG was heavily used in American processed food, nobody was claiming that they were getting headaches from their can of Campbell’s soup.  As well, though tens of millions of Japanese and Chinese people had been eating MSG every day for decades, none of them were reporting any problems either.  However, this didn’t stop Americans from freaking right the fuck out, a situation little helped by the publication of several dubious scientific research papers which linked MSG consumption to a rising list of maladies, including brain lesions and female sterility.  Many of these studies were published by a researcher named Dr. John Olney, who became a major advocate of a growing movement of idiots who were calling for the outright banning of the flavoring.  In this they were less than successful, probably because of the much more numerous number of studies showing that MSG was perfectly safe.  Of course, Olney and his allies in turn claimed that all of these studies were obviously flawed since any researcher who disagreed with them obviously had to be in bed with the big food industry.

Though unsuccessful in getting MSG banned, the whole mess did result in Chinese restaurants across the country changing their recipes to be MSG free in order to avoid the risk of losing business.  In comparison, the big food manufacturers continue to use MSG in all sorts of food products to this day, with little to no negative affect on the health of their customers or their bottom lines.  Despite close to half of Americans still being convinced MSG is poison as shit, the average American still consumes over half a gram every day.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monosodium_glutamate_crystals.jpg