On July 15

May Craig, left, interviews unnamed servicemember (credit)

On this day in ...
... 1975, noted American journalist May Craig died in Silver Spring, Maryland. About 85 years earlier, in Coosaw, South Carolina, she'd been born Elisabeth May Adams. As a girl she moved to Washington, D.C.; she studied nursing at George Washington University. In 1924, Craig -- by then a married woman in her mid-30s -- began writing for Gannett newspapers in Maine. A women's suffrage activist before passage of the 19th Amendment, as a journalist she "took on leadership roles within both the Women's National Press Club and Eleanor Roosevelt's Press Conference Association, both organisations supporting women in journalism." She was posted in the European theater during World War II, writing 1sthand about London bombings, the liberation of Paris, and other events. Craig was the 1st woman journalist on a battleship at sea, and the 1st woman to fly over the North Pole. (A 1966 oral history interview of Craig is here.) She was noted for her more than 200 appearances on "Meet the Press." A notable quote by her points to her frustration at being left out of some news stories on account of her sex:

'When I die, there will be the word "facilities," so often it has been used to prevent me from doing what men reporters could do.'

(Prior July 15 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On July 5

On this day in ...
... 1937 (75 years ago today), Spam made its début. (Campaign to name this National Spam Day here.) This preternaturally pink canned meat – its name is said to be shorthand for "shoulder of pork and ham," or perhaps, simply "spiced ham" – became a much-maligned staple of Depression-era diets and World War II GI rations. (photo credit) It remains popular in some corners of our world. Its iconic status is evident from the facts that its founder, the Minnesota-based Hormel Corp., has opened a Spam Museum, and that cybernauts borrowed the name to describe the annoyingly ubiquitous "e-mail offering porn, drugs and bogus investment schemes". That borrowing took company executives aback. But it also guaranteed that the name Spam would have a shelf-life as long as, well, the original product.

(Prior July 5 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On June 22

On this day in ...
... 1931, the effort of 30-year-old Ruth Nichols (right) to become the 1st woman to fly solo across the Atlantic ended when her plane crash-landed in Newfoundland, Canada. (photo credit) Nichols, a New York-born Wellesley alumna who set women's records for altitude, distance, and speed that same year, injured her back in the attempt.  She'd go on flying for years; indeed, she did aviation-related relief work in World War II and in 1948 "piloted a world tour for UNICEF." Yet as we've posted, it would be Amelia Earhart, an IntLawGrrls foremother, who'd make the 1st solo trans-Atlantic flight by a woman, in May 1932.

(Prior June 22 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Look On! Sullivan's Travels

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy productions.)

Times are tough.
Lots of folks are out of work.
Lives are led in endless shades of grey.
Hollywood keeps spewing out escapist fluff.
What's a socially conscious artist to do?
It's a setup familiar in our world today, and why Sullivan's Travels, in which it occurs, is a film as timely today as when it was made 71 years ago. Perhaps even more so – by the time the film appeared in late 1941/early 1942, Pearl Harbor had been attacked, and the country was moving away from the Depression on which the film focused.
I had the opportunity to see an archival print, rich in decidedly non-HD texture, at a recent 5th birthday party for Ciné, a jewel of a nonprofit arthouse cinema here in Athens.
The story, in which actor Joel McCrea plays the film director Sullivan, who hits the tramps trail to try to answer his own question above, is fun – particularly since the tall man's short sidekick is Veronica Lake, famed for her waterfall of platinum hair. (photo credit) The overt skewering of the rich and famous will amuse 99 percent. And the film's ostensible moral – a laugh will get you a long way in a rough world – is worth mulling.
But what's most interesting is more subtle. Without comment, Sullivan's writer-director, Preston Sturges, depicted race in ways unexpected for a midcentury Hollywood release.
Color lines are clear in the homes of the wealthy, but not so in other social classes.  Hobos waiting to jump a freight train, homeless crouched in squalid camps or crowded on shelter floors are black and white, side by side. Most striking: It is the white establishment that railroads an amnesiac Sullivan to a swampy prison labor camp (depicted with all the meanness and none of the humor later seen in Cool Hand Luke), and it is the black church that restores human dignity by welcoming the chain-ganged prisoners to laugh with them as as they watch Pluto and other Disney cartoons projected on a sheet hung at the altar.
These social commentaries just below the surface, no less than the above-surface moral of the story, make the film still worth a watch.

Commemoration

Pleased to share on this Memorial Day the photo above, found in American Memory, a digital archive of the Library of Congress. Made by Royden Dixon and dated May 1942 -- when World War II raged -- it's captioned "Black troops at the Memorial Day parade, Washington, D.C., probably Constitution Avenue." (credit)

On May 26

On this day in ...
... 1916, Henriette Roosenburg was born into an upper-class family in the Netherlands. When World War II started she was in graduate school at Leiden University. She joined the Dutch resistance, using the nom de guerre "Zip," and also wrote for a Dutch newspaper. Arrested in 1944 and given the death penalty, she was incarcerated at Waldheim prison in Germany. Released days before V-E Day, she and 4 other former prisoners embarked on a weeks-long journey back to the Netherlands. That sojourn among U.S., Soviet, and other encampments became the basis of Roosenburg's memoir, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1957), at least one edition of which issued with the cover at left. (image credit) A Europe-based writer for Time magazine after the war, Roosenburg died in 1972.

(Prior May 26 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On May 19

On this day in ...
... 1952 (60 years ago today), the Acting Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State, Jack B. Tate (left), issued a statement on U.S. policy respecting foreign states' claims to sovereign immunity from lawsuits in courts of the United States. The Tate Letter announced a shift away from an absolute theory of immunity, by which foreign states were free from all exposure, and toward a restrictive theory, by which some but not all foreign state activities would be immunized. Congress adopted the latter theory in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976. IntLawGrrl Jennifer Kreder has posted on the significance of this letter in litigation over by Nazi Germany.

(Prior May 19 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On May 15

On this day in ...

... 1942 (70 years ago today), after 5 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a U.S. law setting up the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps took effect. (image credit) President Franklin D. Roosevelt's implementing order is here. The thousands who joined what soon was renamed the Women's Army Corps -- known as WACs -- served around the world in a range of jobs, "from clerk to radio operator, electrician to air-traffic controller." The legislation had been proposed a year earlier by New England's 1st Congresswoman, U.S. Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, who'd previously worked in military hospitals and later would serve as Chair of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs. The Corps stayed in effect until 1978, when "women were fully assimilated into all but the combat branches of the Army."

(Prior May 15 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'You know, in life there are only three or four fundamental decisions to make. The rest is just luck.'

-- French Résistant and publisher Raymond Aubrac, in a 2011 interview with Le Monde. The quote was reprinted in The New York Times' obituary on Aubrac, who died this past April 10 at age 97. The "fundamental decision" to which he referred? Marrying Lucie Bernard in late 1939, when he was still known by his birth name of Raymond Samuel. Within months the Nazis would occupy Paris, and the couple (left) -- 1st Lucie, then Raymond, would join the underground Résistance. (photo credit) Eventually they adopted one of their noms de guerre, Aubrac, as their legal surname. With Lucie Aubrac's help, as described in the obituary, he would escape torture and a death sentence imposed at the behest of Klaus Barbie -- decades later, the couple attended the trial in which Barbie was condemned for crimes against humanity. She died at age 94, in 2007.

Making aggression punishable before the ICC: Liechtenstein leads way & Germany's on road

"Liechtenstein geht international voran," boasted a headline in today's edition of the largest daily newspaper in Vaduz.
Occasioning this claim that "Liechtenstein leads the way internationally" was the announcement that yesterday, on the 67th anniversary of the end of World War II, Liechtenstein became the 1st state to ratify the Kampala amendments that would make the crime of aggression fully punishable by the International Criminal Court.
Martin Meyer, Deputy Prime Minister of the centuries-old principality, where today a little over 36,000 people occupy a space about the size of Washington, D.C., said:

'Der rechtliche Schutz vor Angriffskriegen ist gerade für Kleinstaaten von enormer Bedeutung. Ich bin stolz, dass wir heute unsere Vorreiterrolle zu diesem Thema fortsetzen können'.

That is:

'Especially for small states, legal protection against wars of aggression is of enormous importance. I am proud that today we can continue our leadership on this issue.'

Liechtenstein indeed has been a leader in moving toward definition and, perhaps, eventual activation, of the crime of aggression – an offense placed within ICC jurisdiction via the 1998 Rome Statute, by dint of Article 5(1), yet, by dint of Article 5(2), not then activated. (Here is IntLawGrrls' series of posts on the crime of aggression.)
Christian Wenaweser, the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary who's been Liechtenstein's Permanent Representative to the United Nations since 2002,served as chair of negotiations respecting the crime of aggression from 2003 to 2009 and, in his capacity as President of the Assembly of States Parties from 2008-2011, as leader of the ICC Review Conference. That 2010 Uganda meeting, on which many IntLawGrrls then posted, produced a package of amendments not only on the crime of aggression, but also on extension of certain bans on poisonous gases to non-international as well as international armed conflicts.
Thus in New York yesterday, Wenaweser's successor as Assembly President, Estonian Ambassador Tiina Intelmann, said as she accepted Liechtenstein's ratification documents from him:

'It is particularly fitting that Liechtenstein, which played such a crucial role in the negotiation of these amendments, should be the first to ratify them. I encourage other States Parties to do the same and hope for the earliest possible entry into force of the amendments.'

(credit for above (c) UN photo by Benoit Marcotte) To date, San Marino is the only other country to have ratified any part of the Kampala package – not the crime-of-aggression part.
But there is movement toward the goal that Intelmann articulated.
In Berlin in March 14, the German Ministry of Justice hosted a "VStGB konferenz" – that is, a conference aimed at exploring how the crime-of-aggression package might be incorporated into the statute known by its German acronym VStGB, which implements the Rome Statute domestically.
In opening the conference, the Ministry's State Secretary, Dr. Birgit Grundmann (left), referred to the negotiated agreement embodied in the Kampala package, and said:

On April 21

On this day in ...
... 1945, the Red Army of the Soviet Union approached Berlin from 3 directions, beginning a battle that would cost well over 50,000 lives, drive Nazi leader Adolf Hitler to suicide, and end, in early May (left), with Germany's surrender of the capital. (photo credit) An eyewitness account of this Battle of Berlin is here.

(Prior April 21 IntLawGrrls posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On April 15

On this day in ...
... 1892 (120 years ago today), a daughter, Cornelia, was born into a Christian family in Amsterdam. After the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, she and her family joined Dutch Resistance efforts. In 1942, they took in the 1st of what would be many Jewish persons whom they hid in their home in Haarlem, and helped escape, throughout the period of the Holocaust. Known by her nickname, Corrie ten Boom (upper right) was arrested along with her family on February 28, 1944, after an informant turned them in. (credit for undated photo) Her father, Casper ten Boom, died within days at a prison in Scheveningen, near The Hague. She and her sister, Betsie ten Boom (lower right), were sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp about which we've posted here. There Betsie perished. (credit for undated photo) Corrie eventually was released, and went on to write numerous books about her experiences, including an autobiography entitled The Hiding Place (1971). Corrie died on her 91st birthday, April 15, 1983, in Orange, California, to which she'd moved a few years earlier.

(Prior April 15 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On April 14

On this day in ...
... 1935, Emmy Noether (left) died in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, following complications from surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. Her passing occurred 53 years after her birth in Erlangen, Germany, site of the university where her father lectured in mathematics and where she, in 1907, earned her Ph.D. in the same field. (credit for photo believed to have been made in this period) Jobs for women were scarce; she worked for several years without pay and then for additional years lecturing under a man's name. Finally, in 1919, she was appointed a Privatdozent at the University of Göttingen. Noether taught there, earning a reputation as a groundbreaking theorist, until Nazi exclusions of Jews forced her to leave Germany; she joined the faculty at Bryn Mawr in 1933. A recent New York Times profile, entitled "The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of," wrote that Noether's theorem, which "united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation" is considered by some to be "as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity." Nevertheless, "Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well."

(Prior April 14 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On April 2

On this day in ...
...1947 (65 years ago today), U.N. Security Council Resolution 21, titled "Trusteeship of strategic areas," changed the status of islands in the Pacific that once had been controlled by Germany but then, following Germany's defeat in World War I, were assigned to Japan via League of Nations mandate. Japan having lost World War II, the islands were, by this resolution, made a Trust Territory of the United States. It did so on authorization of Chapter XII of the U.N. Charter, which set forth a framework for trusteeship. The Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands continued until 1986, after which re-formations occurred. (image credit) These islands include the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the Republic of Palau.

(Prior April 2 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On March 20

On this day in ...
... 1952 (60 years ago today), by a vote of 66 to 10, the U.S. Senate gave its advice and consent to the U.S.-Japan peace treaty. It had been nearly 7 years since Japan's surrender ended World War II combat between the 2 countries. The Senate also approved 3 related security pacts, which established mutual defense obligations between the United States and, respectively, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and the Philippines.

(Prior March 20 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On March 19

On this day in ...
... 1976, Dr. Eleanor Bontecou (right) died at age 85 in Washington, D.C. (photo credit) A top member of the Bryn Mawr College Class of 1913, Bontecou had been a student of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law and in 1928 had earned her Ph.D. from what's now known as the Brookings Institute. A career as a law professor at the University of Chicago was cut short when she contracted sleeping sickness and was rendered bed-ridden in the 1930s. But by 1943 she was better, and embarked on a distinguished governmental career, including service in the Civil Rights Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice and in the War Department. In the latter, she inspected post-World War II proceedings at Nuremberg (thus making her the newest addition to our Women at Nuremberg series), and further helped to prepare war crimes cases to be tried in Tokyo by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. On retirement she aided persons harmed by the anti-Communist fever of the McCarthy era. Three years before her death, Bontecou gave an oral history interview to the Truman Library, which also houses Bontecou's papers.


(Prior March 19 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On March 15

On this day in ...
... 1921, Eileen Nearne (right) was born in London to a family with English, French, and Spanish ancestry. (photo credit) They lived in France, where she grew up, until shortly before the Germany occupied that country during World War II. The family fled, arrived in England, and she, a sister, and a brother eventually joined Britain's spy network, the Special Operations Executive. (On other women who served in the S.O.E., see here and here.) Nearne parachuted into France and worked for the Allies in the occupied land, sending messages back via secret radio. Eluding capture until mid-1944, she was then arrested, endured torture, and detained at Ravensbrück and other concentation camps. She escaped, only to have American troops suspect she was a Nazi spy, until Britain informed them otherwise. Nearne died at age 89 on September 2, 2010.

(Prior March 15 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

On February 15

On this day in ...
... 1910, Irena Sendler (right) was born in Otwock in what is now Poland; then, part of the Russian Empire. Her Roman Catholic family did not shun Jewish persons -- her father was among few Catholic physicians who would treat them. He died from typhus in 1917, and members of the Jewish community offered to pay for her schooling; she would be suspended from Warsaw University for opposing religion-based seating segregation there. Once Nazis occupied Warsaw, she served in the resistance, and helped to smuggle 2,500 Jewish children safely out of the Nazi-imposed Ghetto. Arrested, tortured, and sentenced to death in 1943, she escaped via bribes and hid until the war's end. She died in Warsaw in 2008, at age 98. (credit for 1942 photo)

(Prior February 15 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Uncommon heritage: Elisabeth Mann Borgese

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the passing of a woman known by some as the "mother of the oceans."
She was Elisabeth Mann Borgese (right). A talented and peripatetic woman who successfully forged her own path in North American academic and intellectual circles in the middle of the twentieth century. “EMB” died on February 8, 2002, in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
The Ocean Yearbook, which Elisabeth founded, has dedicated its current issue to her and to the thirtieth anniversary of the signing of the Law of the Sea Convention. "Celebrating 30 Years of Ocean Governance under UNCLOS: Elisabeth Mann Borgese and the Ocean Governance Mission of IOI." is the title of that issue, Volume 26.
My own contribution to that forthcoming volume – an article entitled "Uncommon Heritage: Elisabeth Mann Borgese, Pacem in Maribus, the International Ocean Institute and Preparations for UNCLOS III," provides the basis for this post.
Born in Munich on April 24, 1918, in her 83 years Elisabeth claimed four different national affiliations – German, Czechoslovakian, U.S., and Canadian – and five different countries as her home – Germany, Switzerland, the United States, Italy, and Canada.
Elisabeth landed in the United States in 1938, at the age of 20, a young German woman with almost no English and no formal secondary education. Yet she ended up as a Canadian university professor.
She had studied piano performance in Zürich. She and her family had fled to that Swiss city from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 when she was fifteen. Such schooling offered little preparation either for her life in North America, which began with her parents in Princeton, New Jersey, or for the work she would initially find in her new home: first as a Research Assistant to the University of Chicago’s “Committee to Frame a World Constitution” in the 1950s, and later as the only female fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, where she moved in 1964.
In these first two positions, surrounded by male intellectuals who were shaping the U.S. academic and political landscape, Elisabeth pieced together an informal education and laid the foundation for her life’s work as an oceans activist, environmentalist, and teacher of the law of the sea.

Missed about War Time

University of Chicago Law Professor Eric Posner has spent much of the last decade criticizing the liberal legal response to post-9/11 government policies. In his review of my new book War Time – about which IntLawGrrls posted yesterday – Posner sticks to the script. But this leads him to miss a critical point: the book does not reinforce post-9/11 liberal thought but instead criticizes it.
What’s at stake here is the way the very concept of “wartime” works in contemporary American law and politics. Just in the past week, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the United States hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan in 2013. Meanwhile, at Guantánamo and elsewhere, the United States holds enemy combatants “for the duration of hostilities.” The “endings” of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq (prior IntLawGrrls posts) appear to have no consequences for the ending of detention. This illustrates a difficulty: there is a disconnect between the wars the United States is ending (Iraq and Afghanistan), and the war that has justified detention (the war on terror). President Obama generally has not employed the Bush Administration’s idea of a “war on terror,” but the war on terror continues to serve as the basis for detention.
This particular disconnect helps to uncover a more enduring problem of the misfit between the way war is conceptualized and the military conflicts the nation engages in. In War Time, I argue that this is not a new phenomenon. It has been of great importance at least since the Cold War. Uncovering the disconnect could enable more transparent decision-making – whether it be liberal-leaning or conservative.
Posner gets distracted by the usual right/left argument about war and civil liberties, and he reads the book as taking a position on the left side of that debate. I will address why this is a misreading in a later post (my argument is more about the scholarship on civil liberties, identifying a conceptual problem on both the left and the right), but right now let me take up what the book is actually doing.
A reader looking for conventional liberal complaints about post-9/11 government policy might be puzzled, as Posner is, about the reason the book spends so much time talking about time itself. The book is not a traditional historical narrative, but a work of critical historiography and intellectual history. It is short because it focuses on just one thing: the way ideas about time are part of the way we think about war, as captured in the very term “wartime.”
That temporal thinking is built into the way war is conceptualized goes back at least to the British political theorist Thomas Hobbes, who wrote in The Leviathan (1660):