Comments on: American Idol, 1873

By: Tamary

Tamary — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:44:35 +0000

That picture would probably have given me nightmares if I’d seen it when I was a child. (Maybe that was the point.)

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:26:29 +0000

Gee, thanks Ardis. Hope you enjoyed the duet as much.

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:20:02 +0000

Oh good grief. Where’d that “their” come from??

Makes the failure to close the parenthetical completely anticlimactic.

[Fixed, Mark. Now everybody'll just think you're mumbling to yourself here. ]

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:18:49 +0000

Oh, gotta love that use of "malaria"--not the mosquito-borne disease that had been thought the result of breathing bad air, but truly "bad air" made so by the smoke of the evil weed tobacco! (And I can't help but think of the lovely duet from The Marriage of Figaro, "Sull aria" which is as sweet an air as there is in all opera. For you movie-going non-opera fans, this duet had its moment in the sun in The Shawshank Redemption. [Warning: video contains opera singers in typical costume--and they're not Dick Motta style sopranos.])

By: Researcher

Researcher — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:00:00 +0000

The smoking Turks — or as William Saroyan didn’t say, the poor and burning Turks.

That idol looks like an illustration from the Oz books. The patchwork girl, perhaps.

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:22:40 +0000

I don't know Cannon's source(s), but I came across an 1860s anti-tobacco book entitled Tobacco: What It Is, and What It Does featuring several of these same points: the leeches (pp. 34-35); the "malaria of tobacco," "slender form and sharp features," missing "flush of health" from the cheek (pp. 166-67); the degeneration of Spain (pp. 155-57); and the lazy and indolent Turks (p. 28).

By: kevinf

kevinf — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:36:33 +0000

I always wondered why doctors quit using leeches. GQC minced no words in this. I think it is obvious how he felt. As to "excessive smoking" leading to the degeneration of Spain, I think it all started from the smoke of the fire ships that Sir Francis Drake sent against the Spanish Armada in 1588.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:00:14 +0000

Paul, this early I don’t think there was any in-house production. The Mormon portraits and engravings of Salt Lake scenes had all been published elsewhere before it showed up in JI, and there’s a letters in the Brigham Young papers about GCQ having purchased a large collection of what must have amounted clip art, and the difficulty of writing JI articles to fit the art rather then the other way around.

By: Paul Reeve

Paul Reeve — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:52:06 +0000

And year by year they become more degraded physically and mentally. During the Crimean war the Turkish officers were found to be ignorant, lazy and indolent, constantly stupefied with Tobacco

Let it, like every other idol, be thrown down and cast aside, and the Latter-day Saints become a pure, clean, healthy race of people, in whom the Lord will take delight.

This sounds to me like other of Cannon's "body" rhetoric, but this time attempting to claim whiteness for Mormons vis a vis the W of W, while racializing the Spaniards and Turks using the same language often employed against Mormons. Good stuff, Ardis.

By: Paul Reeve

Paul Reeve — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:45:33 +0000

Cool picture. Any indication if it was produced for and/or by the JI staff or if they “borrowed” it from elsewhere? Sometimes we forget that cigarette prohibition was a progressive era reform that resulted in at least 14 states going smoke free. If memory serves, Washington was first in 1896. Utah came later, 1921, and only lasted two years. This 1873 manifestation seems early, but likely a part of the broader movement and a part of W of W reform aimed at the rising generation?