Consumers of 1800’s America were as disparate a group of peoples as one could imagine. They were an ad-man’s demographic nightmare. A focus group without a focus. They did not yet truly share a common language and certainly didn’t share a common culture. Simple commerce in this age before wholesale could be a challenging proposition.

Characterizing an “average” customer from a shop owner’s perspective in this melange would be an almost comical task, except for the single obvious trait which everyone shared: the inability to understand one another. Add to this the fact that most people were illiterate and you have the seeds of what would ultimately grow into a ubiquitous American sight: the cigar-store Indian.

“Visual trade signs” were essentially stand-ins for written signposts that might have been incomprehensible to potential customers, many of whom were immigrants or illiterate. Chiropodists (early-day podiatrists) displayed large white feet, teahouses had Chinamen to lure customers, pharmacies used an oversized mortar and pestle, Locksmiths featured large keys, pawnshops were known by three balls. The most popular, however, were the tobacconist’s cigar-store Indian. Tens of thousands of shop figures were carved in the United States and Canada in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.

The origin of the wooden Indian dates back to England in 1617, when small wooden figures called “Virginie Men” were placed on countertops to represent tobacco companies. The “Indian” likeness became synonymous with tobacco products for a century after.

After the Indian became recognized as the standard smoke-shop symbol, certain tobacconists sought to distinguish themselves by using other types of figures. Turks and sultans (for turkish tobacco), Punch figures (which survived into the modern age on rolling papers), Scottish Highlanders (for snuff), baseball players, and “racetrack touts or dandies” with jeering faces dressed in houndstooth coats and top hats.

In America the vast majority of the sculptures were created by shipcarvers trained in traditional Anglo-American woodcarving techniques. In the 1820’s steam ships brought about the decline of sailing ships and these shipcarvers had to find new avenues on which to ply their trade.

The carvers themselves coined the phrase “the image business” to characterize the wide range of shop figures that they were eventually called upon to create. And they were very successful. By mid-century, the phenomenon had reached the dimensions of a fad, with the figures becoming an essential part of any shopkeepers’ operations.

Most of these artisans worked out of the east coast and may never have actually even seen an American Indian. As such they are often characterized as “looking like white men in native garb.” Shaped by nineteenth-century Anglo-American values, they also reflected the tenor of the times, including racial and gender stereotyping and an embryonic popular culture. The cigar-store Indian typified what is now commonly considered the birth of modern advertising techniques in America.

Although some figures were made of cast metal, the great majority were carved from wood. The preferred material for the statues was white pine, usually three to seven-foot sections of masts purchased at spar yards in the maritime district. The carvers’ tools were axes, mallets, and chisels. Industrialization, which was well under way by this time, never made much headway into the craft of “trade figure” carving, and so surviving statues represent an interesting blend of folk, fine, and popular art of the time.

For a variety of reasons, including over supply, changing tastes, and new modes of advertising, the production of new figures virtually ceased by 1900. They were increasingly seen as old-fashioned symbols of an era that was rapidly passing away.

As a result of the 1910 urban-sidewalk-obstruction laws countless Indian statues were sold from the commercial streets and slowly disappeared. During the depression most wooden cigar-store Indians were broken down and burned as firewood.

Of the tens of thousands once carved it is thought that now only a tiny fraction of original trade figures survive. A fact which the people whose likenesses these statues stereotyped are none too broken up about I’m sure.

I find it interesting that this visual mode of salesmanship, which is one of the earliest tropes of advertising, was created to draw in illiterates by employing obvious stereotypes and the most simplistic symbolic language… Looking at the lion’s share of advertising today I can’t help but wonder whether it has really changed that much, in form or ultimate function. Just a thought.

This post incorporated information from the following sources which you should look to for more in-depth information on the subject:

The Image Business, Shop and Cigar Store Figures in America. By Ralph Sessions.

Cigar Store Indian History and the Origin of Tobacco Shops.

The Museum of American Folk Art page on the subject.

Cigar Store Figures.

Also see:

Peace Party for an American Indian viewpoint.

Sidewalk Sculptures. Cigar-Store Indians Served as High-Profile Advertising Tools for Tobacconists. By Nancy Wolfson. Which points us toward Mark Goldman’s collection.

And this page which focuses on one of the most famous and well documented of all surviving 19th century American cigar-store Indians.

Most of the images in this post were scanned from The Book of Pipes and Tobacco by Carl Ehwa Jr. Published in 1974 by random house.

Hope you enjoyed.

To me they look, more than anything else, like overhead shots of failed civilizations, or possibly the images now returned on a daily basis from the surfaces of distant moons and planets. Me Likey.

One final note: Discovering Droste today had extra punch for me, though not because of the sculpture pictured above. While looking for more info on him I came across his photography, which he evidently began dabbling in latter in his career. Take a look at these images and then take a look at these (especially those toward the bottom of the page) and it shouldn’t be hard to tell why.

Every so often I come across an artist who I’ve never heard of and am humbled to see (what I feel to be) my own aesthetic in evidence elsewhere, created long before I ever touched a camera or brush. In the case of Droste’s photographs I can see immediately what he was after. How many times have I stood by the edge of the lake in Central Park trying to capture the same kind of thing? Fascinating; for me anyway.

Hope you enjoyed. If anyone out there has further info on Droste please let me know.

“Who? Neva hoid ov’em.”

The Seven Sages of ancient Greece. They are considered by many to be the fathers of western philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy… at least in the general sense. Stories about them may be a touch apocryphal (for instance attribution for specific nuggets of wisdom is occasionally shifted from source to source among the seven) but they were none-the-less considered the great minds of the archaic western tradition.

“Oh.”

Oh indeed. And yet their names are not exactly common knowledge are they? No cars or candy bars named after them. Such is the injustice of daddy time.

So who specifically were these seven dudes so filled with sagacity that they deserve their own ancient-world version of mensa? Well the early philosophy fan-boys debated about their exact make-up just exactly as a group of Trekkies might debate the make-up of the magnificent seven of Starfleet. I am going to go with Plato’s version here (because as far as historical accounting goes, he was not only the philosophy club president but he was also a member.)

Solon of Athens
Occupation: “Beloved tyrant.”
Catch phrase: “Nothing in excess.”
Athenians addressed him as: “Sir”
Turn-ons: Lawgiving, statesmanship, arbitration, lyric poetry, long walks on the beach.
Claim to fame: Creating a supreme court. Repealing the laws of Dracon, which punished even small offenses with death, making only murder and manslaughter punishable by death. Allowed the poor to participate in government. And lastly basically the founding of the Western tradition of constitutional government in the laying of the foundation for classical Greek culture. 

Chilon of Sparta
Known as: “The laconic spartan.”
His enemies called him: “The Fartin’ Spartan.”
Catch phrase: “Know thyself.” (It has never been satisfactorily settled as to whether he meant in the metaphysical sense or what we’d now call the “Biblical” sense.)
Alternate catch phrase: “I’m Chilon like Gillagon.”
It is said that: He died of joy in the arms of his son, who had just gained a prize at the Olympic games.

Bias of Priene
Catch phrases: “Too many workers spoil the work.” “All men are wicked.” “Speak of the Gods as they are.”
Example of his sagacity: He wisely said that as a judge, he would rather decide a dispute between two of his enemies than between two of his friends. No matter what he ruled in the first case, one of the two enemies would become his friend, but in the second case, one of his two friends would become an enemy.
Final Irony: He was a preeminent lawyer and judge of his time and yet his name would, through coincidence, come to mean “a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment, prejudiced.”

Cleobulus of Lindos
Catch Phrase: “Moderation is the chief good.”
His Father once told him: “Don’t be such a sagenheimer!”
Turn-ons: hexameter verse, egyptian philosophy, Minerva, tyrany.
Example of his sagacity: he wisely said when a man goes out of his house, he should consider what he is going to do: and when he comes home again he should consider what he has done.
Greatest lapse in judgement: naming his daughter “Cleobulina.”

Pittacus of Mitylene
Catch phrase: “Know thine opportunity.”
Turn-ons: Killing athenians, being a general, elegiac metre, floppy hats.
Terms the archaic poet Alcaeus used to describe him:
Sarapous (because he was splay-footed and dragged his feet.)
Cheiropodês (because he had scars on his feet.)
Phuskôn or Gastrôn (because he was fat.)
Agasurtos (because he was lazy and dirty.)
Person who Pitticus exiled: Alcaeus the archaic poet.

Periander of Corinth
Catch phrase: “Forethought in all things.”
Corinthians called him: “Master.”
Good deed: He restricted the number of slaves in Corinth.
Real reason for doing so: To keep the citizens too busy to conspire against him.
Accomplishment: he constructed the famed Diolcos, which carried ships over the isthmos of corinth for a thousand years, in order to kick much naval ass.
Turn-ons: Killing his wife, sending his enemies children off to become eunuchs, puppies.
Admission: Plato actually left Periander off his list because he was a huge dick.

Thales of Miletus
Catch phrase: “To bring surety brings ruin.”
Turn-ons: Astronomy, engineering, mathematics, romantic dinners.
Turn-offs: His mother asking him over and over again to marry her.
When asked why he had no children he answred: “Becuase I love children.”
Claims to fame: Being the first man in history to correctly predict a solar-eclipse. Being the first man in history to have specific mathematical discoveries attributed to him. Determining the height of an Egyptian pyramid by measuring the length of its shadow. Dividing the year into 365 days. Being a world class smart-ass.

Truth be told it is Thales (pronounced Thay-lees) who led me to this post in the first place. There are so many anecdotal stories about him that I would feel it remiss not to offer him special treatment and relate at least one.

When Solon went to visit Thales, Solon asked why he did not get married and have children. Thales gave no reply, but he hired an actor, who a few days later pretended to have just arrived from Athens. Solon asked this actor for the latest news, and the actor said that nothing important had happened, except there was a funeral of some young man who had died while his famous father happened to be away. “Poor man,” said Solon, “but what is his name?” With every question and answer, Solon got more and more worried, until finally he mentioned his own name. “That’s the man!” said the actor, and Solon went into all of the usual expressions of grief while Thales watched impassively. After a while, Thales said to Solon: “You asked why I did not marry and have children. You now see the reason.”

So there you have it friends a refresher course, complete with a few eensy-weensy lies, on The Seven Sages. Hope you enjoyed.

For more see:

The lives and opinions of eminent philosophers.

The Seven Sages, Between Legend and History.

The Seven Sages of Ancient Greece.

The Seven Wise Men of Antiquity.

For further sagacity see:

The Sages Directory.

Lastly I must mention that the images in this post were adapted from The Morse Library of Benoit College’s excellent online version of the The Nuremberg Chronicle , a sprawling medieval history of the world, which, owing to it’s amazing illustrations (some by a young Albrecht Dürer) alone, deserves its own post. Perhaps another time.

Even for the disinterested, Godless, and “Wrong-Godded” there have been signposts in the road too well covered by the media to be completely ignored.

There was David Linbaugh’s 2003 book, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity.

Last year whilst sugarplums were ostensibly dancing in our heads conservative radio hosts gnashed their teeth about the “War on Christmas.”

In 2004 this thread was continued with John Gibson’s book, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

In the meantime there have been countless Bill O’reilly sound bytes⊕ and and endless stream of repetitive Fox News talking points.

This past March it all reached a crescendo when radio commentator Rick Scarborough convened a two-day conference in Washington to address the “War on Christians.” It opened with “reports from the front-lines” on the “persecution” of Christians in the United States. Among its key speakers were the House majority leader, two U.S. senators, and two former republican presidential candidates. Sounds serious huh? It’s enough to make you think trembling little Christians are being rounded up en-mass, being tattooed, and having jumper-cables clamped to their private parts! Just a terrible, terrible thing this “war.”

I only bring this up because a couple of weeks ago I came across some county-level choropleth maps put out by the Glenmary Research Center which show the distribution of religious congregations across the United States. Looking at the 25 maps I couldn’t help but notice that a full 23 of the 25 represented the distribution of essentially Christ worshiping denominations. It struck me that perhaps a more truly representative map could be created by lumping all 23 of these denomination together.

So i did just that. Here is a map of the beleaguered and persecuted group which I’ll here call “Christies” as they are distributed across the United States.

Just to offer some perspective here are the other two Glenmary Research Center maps which plotting data on groups which actually qualify as discrete Religious bodies.

So what am I getting at? Let me sum it up in one sentence-

Overwhelming majorities do not get persecuted.

It’s as simple as that, really. Isn’t it high-time this line of rhetoric gets shit-canned? Christies who get worked into a lather by all the snarling of their own duplicitous leadership about the criminalization of Christianity need to understand that not being allowed 100% iron-fisted totalitarian control over every single aspect of society is not even close to the same thing as persecution.

If a group of people who have an 85% majority, with an allied two term president⊕ control of the senate, a supreme court stacked in their favor, and powerful lobbyists whose tendrils creep into every nook and cranny of society, have the gall to still feel persecuted… well then frankly about all I can do in response is invoke their God myself and say “Jesus Fucking Christ! You’ve got to be kidding?!”

Anyhow, enough of that.

An interesting tidbit revealed itself, when I combined the Cristies map with the others, which I wanted to draw your attention to. Have a look at the detail below, paying special attention to the area circled-

You see that little, lonesome, white county there? According to the Glenmary maps that happens to be the one and only county in the entirety of the United States, Alaska included, without a measurable number of religious adherents. It just so happens to be called Loving County. Is it possible that in all my grumbling about delusional Christians that I accidentally discovered… (gasp) Heaven?

Maybe it was just a census error, maybe the population was so miniscule that it just didn’t register on the map, or maybe it was the fact that Loving County itself boasts more ghost towns⊕ than living ones⊕. Then again who knows? Maybe the folks in that one Texas town are uniquely humanistic, secular, rational and without superstition… Spectacularly unlikely I know, but hey, “spectacularly unlikely” is practically the definition of Heaven.