Timeless sentiments
Posted in Discourse on Thu Aug 31, 06 by Kyle under 19th Century.
In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy on November 13, 1789 Benjamin Franklin wrote that:
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
With certainty I can can say that he was right. Despite the ever-changing nature of how the world looks and sounds, some things never manage to change. In that vein I offer for your consideration a glimpse at this turn of the century cartoon from The Wasp, a satirical (and quite often blatantly racist) magazine published in San Francisco through the last half of the 19th century.
I think it incontestable that we could add “unaffordable rents in San Francisco” to Ben’s little list. One notable point of interest in this cartoon is the Chinese servant. In the late 1800s there was very strong anti-Chinese immigrant sentiment in California, so much so that they replaced African Americans and Irish immigrants as the most derided minority of that era’s political season. Wait long enough and anything can come back into style, sadly even racism. The parallels between the rhetoric and imagery of the Chinese immigration debate and our contemporary debacle with this issue a century later are simultaneously astounding and hauntingly familiar.