Historical Photos (Part 1)

Posted on 11. Nov, 2009 in Featured, People

There were many historical moments during 20th century. Here you will find photos (well-known or unknown) of such moments.

Rockfeller gives middle finger.

During 70’s and 80’s Nelson Rockfeller, four times governor and one of US wealthiest politicians, was the leader of “Liberal Republicans”. Today it’s an oxymoron, but druing 70’s and 80’s that was real. Rockefeller resigned in 1973 to devote all of his time to a potential presidential run in 1976. But when Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned in disgrace after pleading guilty to not paying taxes, Rockefeller called Nixon and asked for the vice presidency. Nixon decided instead to appoint House Minority Leader and Michigan congressman Gerald Ford. After Nixon’s resignation Gerald Ford was sworn in as President. Ford offered the Vice Presidency to Rockefeller. Knowing that he would not be the nominee for president in 1976, Rockefeller relaxed and enjoyed his duties as vice president.
This attitude was caught on camera, above in Binghamton, NY.; A heckler was shouting insults and Rockefeller leaned over the podium and gave him the finger.
The picture appeared in newspaper across the nation, the public opinion was divided: some criticizing it as a crude gesture, but others admitting that it was nice to see politician who wasn’t afraid to show just what he really meant.
Shortly after taking office both Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Rockefeller had been diagnosed with cancer and had to have mastectomies. It was major headline news and focused the nations attention on the dangers of breast cancer.
Then when California’s former two-term governor Ronald Reagan announced that he would be a candidate for the Republican nomination, Ford had to appease the conservatives, and replace Rockefeller was replaced on the ticket with Senator Robert Dole of Kansas.
It was a rally for Dole in Binghamton that Rockefeller hold up his middle finger with ’sneering, Satanic expression’. For him, not running for reelection again, the defiant middle finger was a kind of declaration of independence freeing him from the unspoken rule that politicians must always flatter the audience and ignore the hecklers.
He retired soon after; Rockefeller could have died with the respect, but it was reported that his fatal heart attack was induced by a more than the usual late night ‘office work’ with a young female associate.

The Marlboro Man

He was the Most Influential Man Who Never Lived.
Though there were many Marlboro Man models over time until 1999 (factoid: but only three of them succumbed to lungs cancer), the original inspiration for the Philip Morris cigarette advertising campaign came through Life magazine photographs by Leonard McCombe from 1949.
Clarence Hailey Long (above) was a 39-year-old, 150-pound foreman at the JA ranch in the Texas panhandle, a place described as “320,000 acres of nothing much.”
Once a week, Long would ride into town for a store-bought shave and a milk shake. Maybe he’d take in a movie if a western was playing.
He was described as “as silent man, unassuming and shy, to the point of bashfulness [with a] face sunburned to the color of saddle leather [with cowpuncher's] wrinkles radiating from pale blue eyes.
” He wore “a ten-gallon Stetson hat, a bandanna around his neck, a bag of Bull Durhamtobacco with its yellow string dangling from his pocket, and blue denim, the fabric of the profession”. He said things like, “If it weren’t for a good horse, a woman would be the sweetest thing in the world.” He rolled his own smokes.
When the cowboy’s face and story appeared in LIFE in 1949, advertising exec Leo Burnett had an inspiration.
Philip Morris, which had introduced Marlboro as a woman’s cigarette in 1924, was seeking a new image for the brand.
The image managed to transform a feminine campaign, with the slogan “Mild as May”, into one that was masculine in a matter of months.
The “Marlboro Cowboy” and “Marlboro Country” campaigns based on Long boosted Marlboro to the top of the worldwide cigarette market and Long to the top of the marriage market: Long’s Marlboro photographs led to marriage proposals from across the nation, all of which he rejected.
By the time the Marlboro Man went national in 1955, sales were at $5 billion, a 3,241% jump over the previous year.
Over the next decade, Burnett and Philip Morris experimented with other manly types — ball players, race car drivers and rugged guys with tattoos (often friends of the creative team, sporting fake tattoos); all worked, but the Marlboro Man worked the best. By the time the first article linking lung cancer to smoking appeared in Reader’s Digest in 1957, the Marlboro sales were at $20 billion.
Before the Marlboro Man, the brand’s U.S. share stood at less than 1%, but in 1972 (a year after the cigarette ads were banned from American televisions) it became the No. 1 tobacco brand in the world.

Kremlin under German bombardment.

Margaret Bourke-white was a very famous LIFE magazine photographer. She made many memorable photos in many countries and places.
In July 26th, 1941 she was the only(!) foreign photographer in Moscow. Wilson Hicks, one of the LIFE editors, sent her to Moscow because he believed that Germany would invade and capture Soviet Union soon.
Although the Soviet officials had announced that their soldiers would shoot anyone spotted with a camera, Bourke-White was granted an exception. She made these photos on the roof of American embassy in Moscow.
The above most picture showed the spires of Kremlin silhouetted by German Luftwaffe flare, with the antiaircraft gunners dotting sky over Red Square.
The second showed the Kremlin lit up by flares from anti-aircraft shells and seven Nazi parachute flares which provided light for German bombardiers.

Edward and Wallis with Hitler
In 1936, Edward VIII abdicated to marry the woman he loved, a divorcee Mrs Wallis Simpson.However, the Guardian claimed that the king’s decision was due to Mrs. Simpson being a Nazi sympathizer and this was totally unacceptable to the prime minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin.
The former Austrian ambassador, Count Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein, who was also a second cousin once removed and friend of George V, believed that Edward himself favoured German fascism as a bulwark against communism.
In 1941, while they were holidaying in Florida, the exiled former king and his consort, now the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, were spied upon by the FBI on the orders of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
These FBI files, written in the 1940s and now released under America’s Freedom of Information Act, detailed that the Duchess might have been passing secrets to a leading Nazi with whom she was thought to have had an affair and that His Majesty’s Government had known for the fact for some time.
Following Edward’s accession, the German embassy in London sent a cable for the personal attention of Hitler himself. It read: “An alliance between Germany and Britain is for him (the King) an urgent necessity.”
In October 1937, the Windsors visited Nazi Germany, met Hitler at his Obersalzberg retreat (above), dined with his deputy, Rudolf Hess, and even visited a concentration camp.
The camp’s guard towers were explained away as meat stores for the inmates. The visit was against the advice of the British government and during the visit the Duke gave full Nazi salutes.
At the outbreak of war, the duke served as a military liaison officer in Paris. Hitler made an abortive attempt to bring Edward and his wife to Nazi-sympathetic Spain, and greatly alarmed, the British establishment finally packing the duke off to the Bahamas from 1940-45.
Deeply disenchanted by the society that had spun him, the Duke made his Nazi sympathies explicit, once telling a journalist that “it would be a tragic thing for the world if Hitler was overthrown”.
In another break from his usual unassuming boyish behavior, he remarked, “After the war is over and Hitler will crush the Americans. We’ll take over. They (the British) don’t want me as their King, but I’ll be back as their leader.”
After the war, the duke and duchess returned to France. He died there in 1972, while the Duchess lived on until 1986.

Brezhnev kisses Carter

In ‘76, Democratic nominee for president, Jimmy Carter criticized detente and claimed he would drive harder bargains with Leonid Brezhnev than Gerald Ford had done.
Ronald Reagan, who was contesting the Republican nomination, said the same thing, only more vociferously. Going into a defensive crouch, Ford passed up a chance for a strategic-arms pact that year and may have cost himself the election.
Jimmy Carter won the election, but continued the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks started by the previous Republican administrations.
SALT II was a nuclear arms treaty which attempted to reduce all categories of delivery vehicles on both sides to 2,250. SALT II helped the U.S. to discourage the Soviets from arming their third generation ICBMs.
An agreement was reached in Vienna on June 18, 1979, and was signed by Leonid Brezhnev and Carter. This opened a “window of vulnerability”, opposed by many hawks from the both sides of the aisle in Congress.
Carter had to appease the conservatives with 200 MX missiles in 4600 silos costing the government $33 billion.
Six months after the signing, the Soviet Union deployed troops to Afghanistan, and in September of the same year, senators including Henry M. Jackson and Frank Churchdiscovered the so-called ”Soviet brigade” on Cuba.
In light of these developments, the treaty was never formally ratified by the United States Senate. When the 1980 Presidential Election came, the Reagan campaign made devastating use of the above photograph of Carter embracing Brezhnev at the summit meeting where the arms pact was finally signed, adding a caption, YOU, TOO, CAN KISS OFF CARTER.
The voters obliged.

A Nazi Funeral in London
This extraordinary photo captured in April 1936, showed the funeral of the German Ambassador Leopold Von Hoesch, with the people clearly giving the Nazi salute on the balcony of the Germany Embassy on Carlton House Terrace, overlooking The Mall.
The above image and footage were unearthed for the Discovery Channel programme: ‘Wartime London with Harry Harris’, a London cab driver and historian who has driven a taxi for two decades.

King Edward VII

It is King Edward’s only known photo. It was found in April 2009 in a cupboard in Exbury, the informal portrait, which shows the monarch dressed in a kilt and full highland costume.
It was taken in September 1909 by a close friend Lionel de Rothschild, a banker and Conservative MP, who invited the king to one of his regular trips to Scotland for the autumn grouse season, at Tulchan in Strathspey, 15 miles from Balmoral.
The portrait is thought to be one of the last pictures of Edward, who died eight months later.

Bourke-White’s Buchenwald photo

Margaret Bourke-White was with General Patton’s third army when they reached Buchenwald on the outskirts of Weimar.
Patton was so incensed by what he saw that he ordered his police to get a thousand civilians to make them see with their own eyes what their leaders had done.
The MPs were so enraged they brought back 2,000. Bourke-White said, “I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day… and tattoed skin for lampshades. Using the camera was almost a relief.
It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me.”
LIFE magazine decided to publish these photos in their May 7, 1945 issue many photographs of these atrocities, saying, “Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them.”

The Execution of Leonard Siffleet

Australian Sergeant Leonard Siffleet was part of a special forces reconnaissance unit in New Guinea, then occupied by Japanese Imperial forces. He and two Ambonese companions were captured by partisan tribesmen and handed over to the Japanese.
All three men were interrogated, tortured and confined for approximately two weeks before being taken down to Aitape Beach on the afternoon of 24 October 1943. Bound and blindfolded, surrounded by Japanese and native onlookers, they were forced to the ground and executed by beheading, on the orders of Vice-Admiral Michiaki Kamada.
The officer who executed Siffleet detailed a private to photograph him in the act. The photograph of Siffleet’s execution was discovered on the body of a dead Japanese soldier by American troops in April 1944.
As a part of a propaganda effort, it was published in many newspapers and in Life magazine but was thought to depict Flight Lieutenant Bill Newton, VC, who had been captured in Salamaua, Papua New Guinea, and beheaded on 29 March 1943.
The photo became an enduring image of the war.

Jackie Kennedy at JFK’s Funeral

Think of Elliott Erwitt, and the iconographic image that probably comes to mind is his photograph of a small, anxious chihuahua dwarfed by the boots of his owner and the colossal front feet and legs of a Great Dane.
While the observant and eclectic eye of Erwitt (one of the last surviving photojournalists of that Golden Age of photojournalism) has often explored life at its most humorous, leading critics to label him as photography’s greatest comic, one has only to turn to another famous image to see a completely different side of Erwitt.
At her husband’s funeral, Jacqueline Kennedy clutches the flag that draped his coffin to her chest as Bobby Kennedy looks on. Despite the black veil behind which she retreated to preserve a fragment of her privacy, Erwitt collides head on with the poignancy of a woman so lost in grief and confusion that the intimacy of the pain he captures pierces the viewer to the core.
It was one of the most memorable records of America’s national ordeal, not only Erwitt’s only memorable funeral image: earlier he had portrayed Robert Capa’s mother weeping over his grave.

The 40th anniversary of the Russian revolution

Born in Paris to Russian parents, and educated in America, Elliott Erwitt took up photography before being drafted into the US Army in 1950.
He made his name with photo-essays on barracks life in France then joined Magnum and travelled the world, capturing famous faces and places and producing quirky studies of dogs.
In 1957, Erwitt was covering the 40th anniversary of the Russian revolution for the American magazine Holiday.
It was when the first Sputnik was launched; his photographs of a lecture at Moscow’s planetarium appeared on the cover of the New York Times magazine.
Up to that point, no western journalist had managed to get pictures of the October anniversary parade (no foreigners were allowed to take part in the parade) but Erwitt tagged along with a Soviet TV crew and managed to pass five security lines, setting up his camera right by Lenin’s mausoleum: “Although I was questioned by a guard, I was able to convince them that I belonged to the parade.
I shot three or four quick rolls and then raced to my hotel room a few blocks away, where I processed them in the bath.”
Above was his picture of the Red Army’s new intercontinental ballistic missiles.
He went to Moscow with the intention to cover the 7th November parade and prepared an instant developing kit for it. He raced back to the Metropol Hotel where he was staying, sent a telex to New York saying he had something special, developed the film in his room, and caught a plane to Helsinki.
There, Time magazine arranged a special lab for him, from where the pictures were developed and distributed all over the world. Several magazines displayed those pictures on their cover.

Sacco Vanzetti Case

Nearly 90 years on, people still seem to take this one personally. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants accused of murdering two people during an armed robbery in Massachusetts in 1920.
The trial, which took place in the wake of the wave of national hysteria known as the “Red Scare,” was a joke; the public was paranoid about immigrants and the presiding judge made it clear that he knew what to expect from people who talked funny.
To make matters worse, Sacco and Vanzetti were avowed anarchists who both owned guns. Although there was no hard evidence against them, they were convicted and sentenced to death.
The case became an international cause célèbre, and people like Felix Frankfurter, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Mil- lay spent years pressing for a retrial.
From their desks overseas, Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw condemned the trial. Violent demonstrations, many of them in front of U.S. embassies and consulates, took place in London, Paris, Tokyo, Warsaw, and Buenos Aires.
However, Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes turned down an appeal.
When Sacco and Vanzetti were finally electrocuted in 1927, everyone was convinced that the whole liberal cause had collapsed.
Their funeral took place on August 27 and was attended by a march of 50,000 people, who were stopped at the cemetery-gates and scattered into the streets by the police before trouble could begin.
Sacco and Vanzetti became martyrs, with poems and plays written about them.
Unfortunately, modern ballistics tests conducted in 1961 seemed to prove conclusively that the fatal bullet used in the robbery did indeed come from Sacco’s gun.
Never mind, it still looks like Vanzetti might have been innocent.

Lord Combermere

Lord Combermere, while governor of Barbados, had ordered a professional investigation of ”Moving Chase Coffins” of Barbados.
The coffins inside the sealed vault are said to have been moved about by unnatural forces. The above photo of Lord Combermere’s library was taken in 1891 by Sybell Corbet while Lord Combermere’s funeral was going on a few miles away.
If you look at the left chair you can allegedly see Lord Combermere setting there.
Lord Combermere was a British cavalry commander in the early 1800s, who distinguished himself in several military campaigns.
Combermere Abbey, located in Cheshire, England, was founded by Benedictine monks in 1133. In 1540, King Henry VII kicked out the Benedictines, and the Abbey later became the Seat of Sir George Cotton KT, Vice Chamberlain to the household of Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII. In 1814, Sir Stapleton Cotton, a descendent of Sir George, took the title “Lord Combermere” and in 1817 became became the Governor of Barbados.
He died after being struck by a horse drawn carriage.
The photographic exposure, Corbet recorded, took about an hour.
It is thought by some that during that time a servant might have come into the room and sat briefly in the chair, creating the transparent image.
All members of the household claimed that they were attending Lord Combermere’s funeral.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

In 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop compiled a report to Himmler on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, which he personally saw to earlier. Originally titled “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more!”, and commonly referred to as “The Stroop Report”, the report also included many photographs with captions in Gothic script.
Among them was the above photo, titled, “Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs”, one of the best-known pictures of World War II.
The photo of a young unknown boy with his hands up being driven from the Warsaw ghetto has served as a touchstone for everyone from the Nuremberg prosecutors to Elie Wiesel, and from Susan Sontag to revisionist ranters on the web. In reality, the children played an important role inside the Ghetto; they begged everywhere, in the Ghetto as well as on the ‘Aryan’ side.
Six-year-old boys crawled through the barbed wire under the very eyes of the gendarmes in order to obtain food. Often a lone shot in the vicinity told that another little smuggler had died in his fight with omnipotent hunger.
The Stoop Report was later used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, and to convict and hang Stoop of war crimes.
Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the five-person command group that led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, died earlier this week, aged 90. Nearly 400,000 Jewish men, women and children had been sealed into the Ghetto in 1940 – the prelude to the Final Solution, which murdered almost all of Poland’s three million Jews, half of the total victims.
The uprising surprised the Nazis; Dr. Goebbels paid them a remarkable tribute: “The Jews have actually succeeded in making a defensive position of the Ghetto… It shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms. Unfortunately some of their weapons were good German ones…”

To be continued…