Santa's Zeppelin

Christmas

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Irish Stereotype

Postcards such as these mobilized huge protests in 1907, 1908, and 1909. Obviously Irish-American objected to the stereotypes depicted, but the protests also revealed that Irish-Americans felt entitled to use and enjoy holiday postcards. In part this was because postcards signaled belonging to a particular constellation of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic Whites, who reinforced certain holiday practices and iconography. By asserting that stereotypes on postcards were inappropriate, Irish-Americans were also asserting that they had a rightful place in this group of Whites.

Dan Gifford

Dan Gifford

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Witch in Laboratory

The traditional or crone witch surrounded herself with bottles, pots, and potions that were used towards executing her powers. These items often reappear in Halloween bedroom interiors, especially on the dresser, as young women took on the trappings of a witch and her power.

Dan Gifford

Dan Gifford

All images uploaded to postcardwhisperer.net become the property of the site and its administrators, and can be used for all other purposes related to the Postcard Whisperer Project.

Christmas Rural Window

Christmas

Rich fabrics on the window seat and curtains, as well as the mother’s dress, all denote middle class respectability and material comfort. However, through the window we see that this is clearly a rural family, not a city one, living amid those markers of wealth and comfort.

White Woman Plucking

Thanksgiving

The arduous labor involved in plucking a turkey was invariably shown as a thing of the past for White women. Instead, their anachronistic, Puritan counterparts are charged with such work.

1912

Dan Gifford

Waiting for Post

Christmas

The notion that postcard recipients were expected to become postcard senders is reinforced here. The cycle of give and get was put into motion by sending this postcard; however, the recipient was then asked “Does my old friend remember me,” entreating the recipient to then become a sender herself.

1911

Dan Gifford

Uncle Sam Presenting Turkey

Thanksgiving

The image of Uncle Sam presenting a turkey at Thanksgiving was also the embodiment of nationhood presenting the embodiment of prosperity and bounty. It is also a very patriarchal image—the male deliverer of prosperity offers his gifts just like the idealized father offers prosperity to his family.

1910

Dan Gifford

Rural Halloween

Halloween

These children look out a window that could be part of any urban, middle class home. The furnishings, the books, the fabrics all indicate a bourgeois interior. However, through the window we see they are in the rural landscape, with a single steepled church and perhaps a solitary house in the distance. Such rural interiors were a far cry from the pictures painted by Country Life reformers.

Thanksgiving Table

Thanksgiving

Celebrating Thanksgiving and its consumerism become civic virtues in this image. Whether this was seen an inclusive invitation or an exclusive retrenchment depended on the viewer; however, the mechanisms of material nationalism are at work here, by suggesting good citizenship came in a very specific package of racial, class, and familial signifiers.

1908

Dan Gifford

Thanksgiving Peace Dinner

Thanksgiving

Perhaps destined to become the most notorious postcard in the collection, at the very least this builds on the notion that American Indians needed the charitable and missionary uplift of Whites in order to bring them into the Thanksgiving narrative. But the image also begs the question--just where, exactly, is his right hand? Clearly the brave is made an Other within the picture by his near-nakedness. His exposed body and exaggerated muscularity, placed in the center of the image, invited the gaze of the White viewer, extolling his“barbarian virtues.” Whether the Indian additionally has his hand beneath his loincloth in a sexual act remains an open question. But it would certainly build on the idea of the “dirty savage” already given a foundation in his sexualized, near-nude state.