A Jazz Life, Interrupted

A recently acquired National Museum of American History Archives Center collection, the Maceo Jefferson Papers, 1898-1974, relates to a little-known but extremely interesting jazz musician and composer named Maceo Jefferson (1898-1974). Though possessing an impressive resume that included associations with such notables as Duke Ellington, W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, The Blackbirds, and others, he never attained fame for himself. He was a prolific composer and arranger, and lived an extremely interesting and eventful life. The rich archival collection donated by his great-nephew to the Archives Center gives us glimpses into the very earliest years of jazz and life for jazz musicians in the years between the world wars, and it opens up opportunities for researchers and scholars of this era. Only a few of our jazz collections document this formative era. Jefferson’s correspondence (he saved carbon copies of letters he sent--a luxury for a researcher) documents his efforts to have his music recorded and heard by the public. Reading Jefferson’s letters, one gets the sense of a likable, generous man with an ebullient personality and a wry wit, one who made the best of things when his career and life were derailed by circumstances beyond his control.

Jefferson’s early jazz life was probably typical of many musicians in the 1920s and 1930s, as he went from band to band, nightclub to nightclub. Many of these bands and clubs are documented in photographs in the collection. Born in 1898 in Beaufort, South Carolina, Jefferson, who came from musical parents, showed early aptitude for both banjo and guitar. In a document, he described lying awake nights listening to music from a dance hall down the street. He attended the Avery Institute in Charleston for two years, but the deaths of his parents ended his chance for further education. He served with the Coast Guard on a cutter, and with the Navy in World War I, and in a letter he stated that he “saw death staring me in the face dozens of times.” After his military service, he went back to music. He played in a nightclub in Norfolk, Virginia, for two years. He then spent another two years in a nightclub in Washington, where he met Duke Ellington and was one of the original members of his band, the Washingtonians. According to Jefferson’s nephew, he was the original arranger for this act, but Jefferson and Ellington had a falling out. He moved on to New York and worked in a succession of clubs there. He described the transformative experience of seeing and hearing Fats Waller play the piano in the Gaiety Theater. He joined Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds orchestra in 1926 and went on a European tour with them throughout 1927, and another with Leon Abbey’s band in 1928, eventually relocating to Paris. He lived in France for several years, married a Parisian costume designer, Yvonne Runtz, in 1937, and worked with several jazz bands and musicians including Louis Armstrong’s Plantation Orchestra, and then returned to New York. He played in Willie “The Lion” Smith’s band and later toured with blues composer W.C. Handy.

 Photographer unidentified. Jefferson (front row, wearing arm band) with Louis Armstrong (top row, far left) and his orchestra. Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000005.

Photographer unidentified. Jefferson (at left, seated, having his shoes shined) with the Leon Abbey Band. Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000004.

Photographer unidentified. Jefferson (holding banjo) with the Four Harmony Kings.
Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000006.

The late 1930s found him back in Paris. Soon afterward, Jefferson’s life took a radical detour. The Germans invaded Paris in 1940. After the closing of the Moulin Rouge left Jefferson without work, he worked with the Red Cross delivering U.S.-donated food and medicine to civilians and prison camps. In a 1967 letter, he said that “the Germans considered most of us working with the American Red Cross a bunch of spies.”

Photographer unidentified. Photographs taken of Jefferson while he was working for the Red Cross. Maceo Jefferson Papers. Top, No. 1370-0000008. Bottom, No. 1370-0000010.

The Nazis arrested Jefferson three days after Germany’s declaration of war on the U.S. (December 11, 1941), and he spent the next 27 months in an internment camp in Compiegne, France. Compiegne held political prisoners, French Jews, employees of the French government, and resistance fighters to the Vichy government. While imprisoned, Jefferson led an orchestra in the camp. According to his nephew, this may have saved his life. A concert program, hand-made, survives in the collection. The musical pieces played at this concert are an eclectic mix of fox trots, waltzes, hymns, solos, and just one composition by Jefferson.

 Program from a February, 1942 concert held inside the Frontstalag 122, Compiegne, France, led by Maceo Jefferson. Maceo Jefferson Papers.  Top: Cover, No. 1370-0000001-01.
Bottom: Inside text, No. 1370-0000001-02.

Jefferson’s wife Yvonne came regularly to see him in the camp, and bring him food. In a letter he wrote late in life, at a time when he had to make many sacrifices to take care of his wife, he said “she came 72 times to see me…walking from home to the station and after arriving at Compiegne she had three miles to walk to the camp, and that back… she has shown me her courage now it’s my time.”

In a 1967 letter, Jefferson describes his wife Yvonne’s heroic efforts to sustain him during his imprisonment by the Nazis. Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000002.

He was released in 1944 in a prisoner exchange, and returned to the United States in diminished health. At this point he resumed club work and songwriting, and in fact, in his later years he concentrated on composing, on developing new arrangements for old songs, and on getting his music performed and recorded. Letters in the collection document Jefferson’s contacts with performers such as Liberace, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Peggy Lee, and others, offering his compositions for their use. Guitarist Ray Rivera and blues singer Alberta Hunter did accept his offers.

A letter from Tennessee Ernie Ford declining Jefferson’s offer of musical compositions, 1956.
Maceo Jefferson Papers, No. 1370-0000003.

Maceo Jefferson died in 1974, leaving behind a sizable but largely unknown musical legacy. The above-described archival materials comprise just 1/8 of the collection. The other 7/8 contains a couple of recordings, one of which is a very early wire recording, and hundreds of Jefferson’s compositions.


By Cathy Keen, Archivist
Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Hitler's Electron Microscope

Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
                                                                          --Forrest Gump, 1994

Archival material is like a box of chocolates because when you open an archival box you never know exactly what will be inside. Recently it was Adolf Hitler's electron microscope. Well, not the microscope itself, but the paperwork about the 1944 confiscation by Allied Forces of a Siemens electron microscope from the laboratory of Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morrell, and its transfer and reassembly at the Army Medical Museum at Walter Reed.

An academic researcher at the Technische Universität Wien (Austria), where they are celebrating the 75th anniversary of electron microscopy, wrote asking for a description of several folders from our Rubin Borasky Electron Microscopy Collection, including Series 5, Box 7, Folder 17: Siemens Electron Microscope (captured in WWII).

The transmittal document describes the Siemens electron microscope as purchased by Adolf Hitler for Dr. Morell. The back story here is that Hitler was a hypochondriac in thrall to Dr. Morell, who supplied him with vitamins, hormones, and steroids. The strength of his hold over Hitler is reflected in the fact that there were perhaps only two or three of these Siemens electron microscopes in existence being used for atomic research. According to a 2009 book by two German historians (The Hitler Book: The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin / 2009 Henrik Eberle, Matthias Uhl), Morell hoped to use it to develop an explosive powder. He set up a laboratory in Bad Reichenhall, just at the foot of Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, where Hitler had built his Eagle’s Nest bunker.

The Eagle's Nest, Bavaria

Picked up by Allied Forces, Dr. Morell was taken from prison in Bad Reichenhall, Bavaria; he took them to the laboratory location in a fortified house on the outskirts of the town, where the microscope was found. The Army packed it up but later found parts were missing. Because of the missing parts, a second Siemens electron microscope was located and the parts from the two combined the make a single model for display. The microscope thus created is now part of the Billings Microscope Collection at the National Museum of Health and Medicine.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine website has a complete inventory of the Billings Microscope collection and a Siemens electron microscope appears on p. 151 of the PDF.

Christine Windheuser, Volunteer
Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Journals and Diaries: A Window into the Past

As a member of the Archives Center staff, I have worked with numerous hand-written archival materials over the past four years. Most of my work with hand-written documents has been for the purpose of digitizing them to be uploaded into the Transcription Center for transcription by public volunteers. While the Archives Center staff has digitized a wide array of materials, many of these handwritten documents are diaries or journals.

The majority of these diaries and journals provide a first-hand detailed account of a specific time and place, like the journals in the Leo H. Baekeland Papers, 1863-1968.  Leo Baekeland was a chemist and inventor, credited with the development of an early form of plastic called Bakelite. His journals, which spanned 35 years, 1907-1942, preserve much of his ideas and work in the development and production of plastic and his research. While this may be fascinating to some researchers, what I find most valuable about these journals is not the specifics of his work. I am more interested in his details of day-to-day American life and historic events.

Pages 142-143, Volume 25 of Leo Baekeland’s journals from the Leo H. Baekeland Papers, Archives Center, NMAH

Baekeland’s journals, 65 in all, cover not only his work with plastic, but some of the most important events in American history.  As an example, he wrote on November 7th, 1918, “WAR IS OVER and GERMANY SURRENDERS” and describes the celebration on Broadway in New York City. Later in his diaries, October 29, 1929, Baekeland writes about the fall of Wall Street and how he did not lose his money, but many did due to speculation and inflation of the stock market. In December 1941, he wrote of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Journals like this are an invaluable resource for the day-to-day activities of their author, but also the insight they provide on the American experience from that period of time. When researched alongside other journals and diaries from other collections, on the same dates of important events or time periods, these manuscripts can assist the researcher in seeing a snapshot in time.  This can be an important aid to the understanding of a specific time period or experience.  For myself, this is why these types of manuscripts are so important to us and our researchers.

Joe Hursey
Archives Center, National Museum of American History

Be Your Own Navigator

"Present day navigators are apt to place so much reliance on mechanical and tabular aids that we sometimes forget that primitive peoples were able to voyage over a large part of the world without any such devices. A study of these primitive methods shows that there are many valuable aids we have neglected or forgotten, and that a continued reliance on mechanical aids places us in a very helpless position when deprived of them. In the lore of the sea and the sky one can still find those fundamental and simple means which gave early man confidence and enabled him to find his way on the trackless seas."

So wrote the 20^th-century’s master navigator of both sky and sea, Harold Gatty (1903-1957), in his beguiling The Raft Book. Last fall, the United States Naval Academy reintroduced the requirement of a formal course in celestial navigation after an absence of nearly two decades from the curriculum. At that time, this nifty publication, its title and author unknown to me, needed to be cataloged for the National Air & Space Museum Library’s special collections. 

The book’s covers are blue heavy paper stock, embossed in silver with a majestic, soaring albatross upon a field of stars. Within its original slipcase are also two large folding leaves containing tables for navigation computations, scales for measuring distance ("Greenwich date and hour scales”) and a unique world-wide chart. What librarian could resist a survival book that first acknowledges one of its own, C. R. Taylor of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand? Isn’t my profession all about navigating through an ocean of information? 

While an interesting, well-illustrated, carefully thought-out, and concise specimen of book production, The Raft Book is both a training manual (on shore) and a survival guide (at sea). An errata slip in the first edition of 1943 states: “For service use in rafts and lifeboats the book will be waterproofed and will have spiral plastic binding. The book and charts will be contained in a waterproofed envelope.”  It directs the reader to always carry a pocket watch set to Greenwich Time in order to determine longitude. How to protect that valuable piece?: “get a rubber sack (obtainable from pharmacist) for it and keep it dry.”  
 

"Harold Gatty instructs an Air Corps officer in the use of the drift indicator he invented" National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (link here)

Gatty wrote The Raft Book here in Washington, D. C., at the behest of the U. S. Army Air Forces for pilots flying over the Pacific, and perhaps always with an eye toward others such as fishermen and sailors. He is the sole author and, with his (second) wife, the copyright holder, not the U. S. Government. Gatty was ideally suited for the task. He had first learned navigation as a midshipman at the Royal Australian Naval College and then celestial wayfaring by his own observations stargazing on long voyages. Landing in California, Gatty taught marine navigation to yachtsmen at his own school in Los Angeles before taking on the challenges of charting routes in the skies with both celestial navigation and dead reckoning. Philip Van Horn Weems became his mentor at his navigational school in San Diego and the two had a long collaboration.

Gatty was navigator to pilot Wiley Post during their world record circumnavigation of the globe in 1931. Touching down in Roosevelt Field on Long Island, having bested the 21-day record set by the airship Graf Zeppelin, they were feted with an exuberant ticker-tape parade that only New York City can provide. The two wrote Around the world in eight days: the flight of the Winnie Mae, with an introduction by Will Rogers. They rivaled Charles Lindbergh in popularity. Post, the high-altitude aviator in the Golden Age of Aviation who discovered the jet stream, and Rogers, humorist, writer, social commentator, and actor, were killed together in 1935 when their plane crashed in the Territory of Alaska. 

Lockheed Vega "Winnie Mae" National Air and Space Museum

Not as well remembered today is the innovative, resourceful Gatty whom Lindbergh anointed the “Prince of Navigators.” Roscoe Turner, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Clyde Pangborne, Howard Hughes, Arthur Goebel, Harold Bromley, and Pan American Airways all turned to Gatty for his expertise and advice. In 1932 he was appointed Senior Aerial Navigation Engineer for the U. S. Army Air Corps. 

Of special value to the military at the start of World War II in the vast, still largely uncharted Pacific was Gatty’s long study of Polynesian seafaring skills over millennia. In The Raft Book, Gatty laid out simple and practical methods of determining location and charting a course to shore in a lifeboat or dinghy without a map and compass. The book describes how Polynesians viewed the stars as moving bands of light. “They knew the stars which passed over particular islands, and used these stars as heavenly beacons to lead them to their destination.” Along with the ability to measure distance from the Equator by either the North Star or the Southern Cross and other celestial bodies, the author explains how all the senses were to be employed for survival with the “lore of the sea and sky.”  

For example, Gatty describes how seafarers should pay attention to the light at dawn, the appearance of clouds, and the currents and wave patterns of the ocean. In addition, familiarity with the habits of sea and land birds, fishes and insects can be used as navigational aids, and will enable a hungry castaway to more easily catch these creatures for food when necessary. Less obvious senses can have an essential role in survival on the ocean, as well. Such as being alert to scent: “I have personally experienced the fragrance of new-mown hay 80 miles off the New Zealand coast in the springtime.” And sounds from land: “The roar of heavy surf may be heard long before the shore is seen. At night, the continued cries of sea-birds from one particular direction will signify their roosting place on land.” Looking at the directions of the wind, waves, and swells, can also be aids for a castaway. Understanding the color of the sea and even testing the temperature of the water with one's fingers are also part of the "lore" in the book.

Other editions of The Raft Book—in a smaller type, with fewer of the colored plates, less of a lyrical cover, and waterproofed—soon became part of the survival kits of all Allied airmen serving in the Pacific Ocean theater. The publication portrays the world’s oceans not as indifferent or hostile but teeming with life, with routes voyaged for centuries by many cultures, including the Phoenicians, the Arabians, and the Vikings. Gatty conveyed his deep knowledge of using the sea and sky and their movements to find one’s way to land, interspersed with quotes from Shakespeare, Dante, and William Cullen Bryant, not at all pretentiously but to underline a particular lesson. 

                                 
                                        Now do I lay the bows of my canoe
                                        To the rising of the Sun, nor deviate from there

                            Straight to the land, to the Fatherland

Ancient Maori Karakia

Post-war, Gatty continued to chart his own course in life. Despite various U. S. military appointments and honors, he kept his Tasmanian citizenship (Congress had to pass special bills to accommodate his request to remain an un-naturalized citizen despite his official positions). Gatty found his way to Fiji, where he owned the island of Katafanga, ran a plantation, served in the Legislature, created Fiji Airlines, and continued to study ancient wayfaring. Gatty’s last work, Nature is your guide, was published posthumously. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in August 1957. 

Gatty’s The Raft Book, as perhaps the U. S. Navy has discovered, is still relevant today as we have become ever-more reliant on high-tech instruments, on land in a car, out at sea in a boat, and in the skies in an aircraft. Increasingly dependent on sophisticated but vulnerable technology, know that one can still be one’s own navigator.  

Julia Blakely, Special Collections Cataloger

Smithsonian Libraries 

Johnston, Andrew K., Roger D. Connor, Carlene E. Stephens, and Paul E. Ceruzzi. Time and navigation: the untold story of getting from here to there. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2015.

Charting a new course: celestial navigaton returns to USNA

Winnie Mae Newsreels

US Army Air Corps Avigation Training