On this day on 3rd December
On the day in 1838 Octavia Hill, the eighth daughter (and ninth child) of James Hill, corn merchant and his third wife, Caroline Southwood Hill, was born on . Octavia's father was an early supporter of Robert Owen and his socialist utopianism. However, in 1840 he went bankrupt and after a nervous breakdown virtually disappeared from her life. Octavia's mother had to turn to her father, Dr Thomas Southwood Smith, for financial support and he became in many respects a surrogate father to her children. Southwood Smith, who was a dedicated utilitarian, and a follower of Jeremy Bentham, had spent his life campaigning on issues such as child labour to housing conditions of the working classes.
Octavia Hill and her sisters were educated entirely at home by their mother. In 1852 Caroline Southwood Hill moved to Russell Place, Holborn. She had been offered the job of manager and bookkeeper of the Ladies Guild, a co-operative crafts workshop nearby. Now aged fourteen, Octavia became her mother's assistant. This involved visiting the homes of the toymakers. During this period she heard the lectures of Frederick Denison Maurice and was deeply influenced by his Christian Socialism. Her biographer, Gillian Darley, commented: "Brought up a Unitarian, her mother left Octavia's religious allegiances deliberately untouched. In 1857, as a result of her friendship with F. D. Maurice and his circle, she was baptized and then confirmed into the Church of England; but she remained notably undogmatic. She regarded faith as a personal matter and never intruded upon the religious observance of the tenants she was to acquire - many of whom were Irish Catholics."
In 1853 Octavia Hill met John Ruskin who, along with Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, was part of Maurice's Christian Socialist circle. Ruskin also taught at the Working Men's College that had been founded by Maurice. Ruskin employed Octavia as a copyist. In 1856 Maurice offered her a job as secretary to the women's classes for a salary of £26 per year. The college aimed to educate women "for occupations wherein they could be helpful to the less fortunate members of their own sex". Octavia also joined the campaign of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon for a married women's property act.
Octavia Hill also read the work of Henry Mayhew, a journalist working for the Morning Chronicle. Another journalist, Douglas Jerrold wrote to a friend in February, 1850: "Do you read the Morning Chronicle? Do you devour those marvellous revelations of the inferno of misery, of wretchedness, that is smouldering under our feet? We live in a mockery of Christianity that, with the thought of its hypocrisy, makes me sick. We know nothing of this terrible life that is about us - us, in our smug respectability. To read of the sufferings of one class, and the avarice, the tyranny, the pocket cannibalism of the other, makes one almost wonder that the world should go on. And when we see the spires of pleasant churches pointing to Heaven, and are told - paying thousands to Bishops for the glad intelligence - that we are Christians!. The cant of this country is enough to poison the atmosphere."
Mayhew's articles concerned the life of the working class living in London started her thinking about what she could do to relieve their suffering. However, conservative-minded people condemned this call for charity. The Economist attacked the publication of Mayhew's work because it believed was "unthinkingly increasing the enormous funds already profusely destined to charitable purposes, adding to the number of virtual paupers, and encouraging a reliance on public sympathy for help instead on self-exertion."
According to Gillian Darley: "By 1859 Hill's daily routine of copying in Dulwich Art Gallery or the National Gallery, followed by many more hours spent teaching, had become punishing. Even F. D. Maurice told her that trying to do without rest was very self-willed but she took no notice. A tiny woman (all the family were diminutive) with a heavy-browed head and great dark eyes, her indomitable personality was already fixed. Eventually her family forced her to go to Normandy on holiday, but a dangerous pattern of working until she collapsed was established which would periodically interrupt her work over the coming years."
in 1864 Ruskin's father died, leaving a substantial sum to his only son. He agreed to invest some of his inheritance in Octavia Hill's long-held dream, to establish improved housing for "my friends among the poor". She purchased a terrace of artisans' cottages just off Marylebone High Street, London, and a short walk from Regent's Park. The premises were transformed by cleaning, ventilation, clearance of the drains, repairs, and redecoration. Octavia also recruited a team of women that included Henrietta Barnett, Catherine Potter and Emma Cons to help her with this venture. She later argued that the most important aspect of her system was the weekly visit to collect rent. This allowed her and her colleagues to check upon every detail of the premises and to broaden their contact with the tenants, especially the children. They also tried to find local and regular employment for the tenants. Norman Mackenzie has described the women as "welfare workers and moral guardians of their tenants".
Octavia Hill had been influenced by the ideas expressed by Samuel Smiles in his book, Self-Help (1859). This resulted in her developing strong opinions about helping the poor. She argued: "We have made many mistakes with our alms, eaten out the heart of the independent, bolstered up the drunkard in his indulgence, subsidised wages, discouraged thrift, assumed that many of the most ordinary wants of a working man’s family must be met by our wretched and intermittent doles."
Tristram Hunt has pointed out: "Octavia always had an admirably broad conception of the lives of the inner-city poor and closely connected cultural philanthropy to social reform. It wasn’t enough to collect the rent and fix the gutters. Her growing acreage of housing estates in Lambeth, Walworth, Deptford and Notting Hill (some 3,000 tenants by the mid-1870s) were hubs of creativity, with panels by the artist Walter Crane, music lessons, cultural outings and Gilbert & Sullivan performances."
Octavia Hill became romantically attached to Edward Bond, a wealthy young man who was interested in her new housing project. Beatrice Webb later recalled: "I remember her well in the zenith of her fame... At that time she was constantly attended by Edward Bond. Alas! for we poor women! Even our strong minds do not save us from tender feelings. Companionship, which meant to him intellectual and moral enlightenment, meant to her 'Love'. This, one fatal day, she told him. Let us draw the curtain tenderly before that scene and inquire no further." His rejection of her led to Octavia suffering a nervous breakdown. Webb added: "She left England for two years' ill health. She came back a changed woman.... She is still a great force in the world of philanthropic action, and as a great leader of woman's work she assuredly takes the first place. But she might have been more, if she had lived with her peers and accepted her sorrow as a great discipline." On her return to England she went to live in a cottage at Crockham Hill, outside Edenbridge, with her recently recruited companion, Harriot Yorke.
In 1883 Octavia Hill published Homes of the London Poor: She argued that the building of good new homes was not the answer: "The people’s homes are bad, partly because they are badly built and arranged; they are tenfold worse because the tenants’ habits and lives are what they are. Transplant them tomorrow to healthy and commodious homes, and they would pollute and destroy them. There needs, and will need for some time, a reformatory work which will demand that loving zeal of individuals which cannot be had for money, and cannot be legislated for by Parliament. The heart of the English nation will supply it - individual, reverent, firm, and wise. It may and should be organised, but cannot be created."
In 1884 Octavia Hill was asked by the ecclesiastical commissioners, to take on the management of certain properties, initially in Deptford and Southwark. Gradually they handed over more and more housing to her management and, in particular, a large area of housing in Walworth in London. She was consulted on the rebuilding of the estate and argued successfully for the involvement of the tenants in the process.
Octavia Hill was considered to be an expert problems. In 1884 Sir Charles Dilke invited her to be a member of the royal commission on housing which he was to chair but the home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, vetoed her. There was a cabinet discussion in which William Gladstone supported her candidacy. Hill would have been the first woman member of a royal commission. However, it was eventually decided to withdraw the offer and instead she became a witness before the royal commission.
Beatrice Webb met Octavia Hill at the home of Henrietta Barnett in 1886: "The form of her head and features, and the expression of the eyes and mouth, show the attractiveness of mental power. A peculiar charm in her smile. We talked on Artisans' Dwellings. I asked her whether she thought it necessary to keep accurate descriptions of the tenants. No, she did not see the use of it... She objected that there was already too much windy talk. What you wanted was action... I felt penitent for my presumption, but not convinced."
In 1889 Octavia Hill became actively involved with the Women's University Settlement, in Southwark. At first she had been prejudiced against the whole scheme. E. Moberly Bell, the author of Octavia Hill (1942), has argued that "she believed so passionately in family life, that a collection of women, living together without family ties or domestic duties, seemed to her unnatural, if not positively undesirable." However, after spending time with the women she remarked: "They are all very refined, highly cultivated... and very young. They are so sweet and humble and keen to learn about things out of the ordinary line of experience."
In 1905 Octavia she joined the royal commission for the Poor Law, with Charles Booth, Beatrice Webb and George Lansbury. The historian, Tristram Hunt, has pointed out: "She was adamant that a distant, Whitehall-run welfare state could never provide such intimacy and personal care. Octavia was dead against free school meals, council housing and a universal old-age pension, with its nefarious attempt to equalise income, and to get rid of charity, and to substitute a rate distributed as of right".
Her biographer, Gillian Darley has argued that Octavia Hill was very much a figure of the 19th century: "Despite the transformation of nineteenth-century philanthropy into twentieth-century social service which was taking place around her, Octavia Hill remained opposed to state or municipal action for welfare. She argued against old-age pensions; as she also opposed parliamentary votes for women, largely on the grounds that women were unfit to determine matters of international policy, defence, and national budgets. She was an enthusiastic supporter of women's involvement in politics at a local, suitably domestic, level. She was visionary in her attempt to bring self-respect to those who had long since lost it, and inspired in the choices and manner of campaigning to improve the lives of the impoverished." Octavia Hill died of cancer on at her home, 190 Marylebone Road, London.
On the day in 1897 William Gropper, the son of Harry and Jenny Gropper, was born in New York City. His father was a Jewish immigrant, and despite the fact that he had a university degree and spoke eight languages, was forced to accept manual work and the family lived in poverty in New York's Lower East Side.
According to Joseph Anthony Gahn, the author of The America of William Gropper, Radical Cartoonist (1966), his father's situation had a major influence on the development of Gropper's political views. He was further radicalized by the death of his aunt in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster which resulted from locked doors in a New York sweatshop.
In 1912 Gropper began studying under Robert Henri and George Bellows at the Ferrer School in Harlem. The school had been founded by a group of anarchists that included Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Guest lecturers included writers and political activists such as Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.
In 1917 joined the staff of the New York Tribune and over the next few years produced drawings for its Sunday edition. However, as a socialist, he mixed with radical cartoonists such as Alice Beach Winter, Cornelia Barns, Rockwell Kent, Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, Lydia Gibson, K. R. Chamberlain, George Bellows and Maurice Becker, who worked for the left-wing magazine, The Masses.
William Gropper believed that the First World War had been caused by the imperialist competitive system. After the USA declared war on the Central Powers in 1917, the The Masses magazine came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges. Gropper now joined forces with its former workers, including Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Crystal Eastman, Art Young, Robert Minor, Stuart Davis, Hugo Gellert, Maurice Becker, Lydia Gibson, Cornelia Barns and Louis Untermeyer to form the Liberator.
In 1922 the journal was taken over by Robert Minor and the American Communist Party and in 1924 was renamed as The Workers' Monthly. Many of the people who contributed to the original Liberator, including Gropper, were unhappy with this development and in 1926, they started their own journal, the New Masses.
Gropper also provided cartoons for The Revolutionary Age, a revolutionary socialist weekly edited by Louis C. Fraina and John Reed. Other drawings appeared in The Rebel Worker, a magazine of the Industrial Workers of the World. In 1921 he left the New York Tribune and became a freelance artist. It has been argued by one critic the "quiet, stocky William Gropper, a punch-packing cartoonist, is a still better painter. He paints as he draws, quickly and simply, without benefit of model, in reds, blues, yellows, whites."
After the failure of his relationship with Gladys Oaks he married Sophie Frankle in 1924. According to Time Magazine: "The two of them built their own nine-room stone house ("bourgeois as hell")" at Croton-on-Hudson. In 1925 he joined the New York World. Two years later he toured the Soviet Union with Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser.
Gropper was a great friend of John Reed, who died of typhus while in Moscow. In 1929 he joined with Hugo Gellert, Jacob Burck, Anton Refregier and Louis Lozowick, to establish the first John Reed Club. The group held classes and exhibitions in New York City. Later, these clubs were formed all over the country.
William Gropper also painted and he had his first one-man show at the ACA Gallery in 1936. Gropper's work reflected a keen sense of social injustice and both his paintings and graphics were extremely influential during the Great Depression. He also attacked the growth of fascism in Germany, Italy and Japan and a cartoon of Emperor Hirohito that appeared in Vanity Fair in August 1935 caused a diplomatic incident with the Japanese government demanding an official apology.
After the Second World War Gropper became increasingly concerned with the growth of the extreme right in the United States. His attacks on Joseph McCarthy led to him being called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee in May 1953. Gropper, who was never a member of the American Communist Party, refused to answer any questions and claimed that the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution gave him the right to do this.
Although blacklisted, Gropper, unlike the Hollywood Ten, who pleaded the 5th, was not imprisoned for taking this action. The experience resulted in him producing a series of fifty lithographs entitled the Caprichos. Cécile Whiting has argued: "One of the most important illustrators for the American radical press, William Gropper sharpened his pen against potbellied politicians and bloodthirsty fascist leaders, while honoring the heroism of the worker and the rituals of Jewish life... Gropper experimented with a variety of techniques including pen and ink, lithography, etching, and painting. Despite his numerous works on canvas, however, Gropper was most gifted as a political illustrator."
In 1956 there was a major exhibition of his work at the Piccadilly Gallery in London. This was followed by the 1957 La Galerie del Frente Nacional des Artes exhibition in Mexico City. His last major work was the production of stained glass windows for Temple Har Zion, River Forest, Illinois. William Gropper died from a myocardial infarction at Manhasset on 6th January 1977.
On the day in 1895 Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays Freud, was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary on 3rd December 1895. It seems that Sigmund Freud was disappointed in having another daughter and in a letter to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, he wrote: “If it had been a son I should have sent you the news by telegram. But it is a little girl… you get the news later.”
Martha had a difficut pregnancy and unlike the other children, Mathilde, Martin, Oliver, Ernst and Sophie, Anna was not breast-fed. Matha's sister, Minna Bernays, moved in to help. Freud referred to them as the "two mothers". According to Janet Sayers, she "was less attached to them than to other maternal figures" such as her nursemaid, Josefine Cihlarz.
Anna did had a good relationship with her father who was always kind to her. She later told the story of an incident that took place in her early childhood: "All the family went off in a boat and left me at home, either because the boat was full or I was ‘too little'. This time I did not complain and my father, who was watching the scene, praised me and comforted me. That made me so happy that nothing else mattered."
Anna was educated at a private elementary school. This was followed by going to the Salka Goldman Cottage Lyceum. Anna was an excellent student but "was precocious in her ability to learn and understand, and had excellent results in all her subjects". However, Freud was unwilling to send her to the Gymnasium where she would be prepared for university. "Much of her learning was stimulated at home, where she seems to have thrived in the intellectual atmosphere surrounding her father with his highly gifted friends... Anna, whose interest in psychoanalysis was evident at the age of fourteen when her father introduced her to its complexities, and who subsequently was allowed to listen to the clinical papers and discussions held every Wednesday evening."
Anna had difficulties getting along with her siblings, specifically with her sister Sophie Freud who represented a threat in the struggle for the affection of their father. She was described as "a somewhat troubled youngster who complained to her father in candid letters how all sorts of unreasonable thoughts and feelings plagued her". She was sent to a health farm in an attempt to get her to gain weight. It has been suggested by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl may have been suffering from depression which caused eating disorders.
After working in a daycare centre for working-class children and visited England in the summer of 1914. Before she left, Freud warned her against the attentions of Ernest Jones who was looking after her in London. "I know from the best sources that Dr. Jones has serious intentions of seeking your hand." He added that she should "discourage any courting yet avoid all personal offence."
Freud also wrote to the 35 year-old Jones, explaining that he should not make any sexual advances towards his daughter. "She is the most gifted and accomplished of my children, and a valuable character besides, full of interest for learning, seeing sights and getting to understand the world... She does not claim to be treated as a woman, being still far away from sexual longings and rather refusing man. There is an outspoken understanding between me and her that she should not consider marriage or the preliminaries before she gets 2 or 3 years older. I don't think she will break this treaty."
Peter Gay has argued that "this treaty" was an agreement to "postpone thinking seriously about men". Freud had told others that Anna was emotionally younger than her age. "Yet to claim that Anna, a fully grown young woman, lacked any sexual feelings was to sound like a conventional bourgeois who had never read Freud. One might take this to be part of Freud's hint that for Jones to put his hands on Anna would be equivalent to child abuse... Freud's denial of his daughter's sexuality is transparently out of character; it reads like the surfacing of a wish that his little girl remain a little girl - his little girl."
Anna Freud obediently followed her father's instructions, but she did become close to Loe Kann, Jones's attractive mistress, who was a morphine addict who had been analyzed by Sigmund Freud, two years earlier. It has been claimed that Anna found Kann more attractive than Jones. On the outbreak of war, she returned to Vienna accompanied by the Austrian ambassador.
During the First World War Anna Freud began attending her father's lectures. She now decided she wanted to work in this field and had read all of her father's books on the subject. Years later she admitted she would sit outside her father's library and "listen to his discussions with visitors... that was very useful".
In the 1918 the International Psychoanalytical Congress in Budapest it was ruled that personal analysis a condition of becoming an psychoanalyst. That autumn she agreed to be psychoanalyzed by her father. it has been argued by people such as Melanie Klein that it was wrong to do this. "She felt that children needed privacy from their parents, and that the power of the parent in the child's mind should not be increased even further by intrusive attempts to interpret the child's deepest and guiltiest secrets."
Anna reported details of her dreams to her father: "Most of the time now something bad happens in my dreams, about killing, shooting or dying." She dreampt, over and over, that she was going blind, which terrified her. It has been argued that "all these dreams invite interpretations involving her passionate feelings for her father". On another occasion she reported that she had "recently I dreamt that you are a king and I a princess, that people want to separate us by means of political intrigues. It was not pleasant and very agitating."
Anna Freud's first "patients" were her nephews, her sister Sophie's orphaned little boys, Ernstl and Heinele. She concentrated on six-year-old, Ernstl. She got him to tell her stories, and in return informed Ernstl about sex and death. "These informative confidential conversations enabled her to analyze the little boy's fear of the dark." In 1922 she wrote a paper on her first venture into "these tentative child analyses".
Anna later admitted that her work was part of her rivalry with his mother and Minna for her father. It was a profession that her mother had dismissed as "a form of pornography". She attempted to obstruct her daughter's career by objecting to her working as a psychotherapist in the family home. Anna complained that "so far as psychoanalysis was concerned, my mother never co-operated."
In February 1923, Freud discovered "a leukoplastic growth on my jaw and palate." A leukoplastic is a growth associated with heavy smoking, and Freud, fearing that his doctor might order him to give up his addiction, initially kept his discovery a secret from everyone. Eventually he went to see a specialist and he had the growth removed. He told his friend, Ernest Jones, "smoking is accused as the etiology of this tissue-rebellion".
On 7th April, Dr. Felix Deutsch, advised Freud to stop smoking and to have the growth removed. Something went wrong on the operating table and Freud bled heavily both during and after the procedure. Anna Freud was with her father and reported that "he was weak from loss of blood, half-drugged with medicines and in great pain." He eventually recovered and told Lou Andreas-Salomé "that I can speak, chew, and work again; indeed, even smoking is permitted - in a certain moderate, cautious, so-to-speak petty-bourgeois way."
Freud had to have thirty further operations to fight off the encroaching cancer. This included having the whole of his upper jaw and palate on the right side were removed and a kind of gigantic denture fitted to isolate his mouth from his nasal cavity. "Freud endured all this with the stoic acceptance of life's vicissitudes which was one of his most admirable qualities."
Freud suffered from several health problems. According to his friend Ernest Jones, Freud complained about having "a tired heart, with palpitation and other cardiac symptoms". He wrote to Jones that soon after sixty-fifth birthday, "I quite suddenly took a step into real old age. Since then the thought of death has not left me, and sometimes I have the impression that seven of my internal organs are fighting to have the honour of bringing my life to an end."
Freud's poor health persuaded Anna she could never leave the family home. It was her, rather than her mother, who accompanying her father on his many visits to Berlin for medical treatment over the next decade. She also re-entered analysis with him. This was the source of Freud's important essays on female sexuality, beginning with his highly controversial Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes, which she read to that year's International Psychoanalytic Congress in Berlin in October, 1922.
Freud argued: "She acknowledges the fact of her castration, and with it, too, the superiority of the male and her own inferiority; but she rebels against this unwelcome state of affairs. From this divided attitude three lines of development open up. The first leads to a general revulsion from sexuality. The little girl, frightened by the comparison with boys, grows dissatisfied with her clitoris, and gives up her phallic activity and with it her sexuality in general as well as a good part of her masculinity in other fields. The second line leads her to cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity. To an incredibly late age she clings to the hope of getting a penis some time. That hope becomes her life's aim; and the phantasy of being a man in spite of everything often persists as a formative factor over long periods."
He went on to state that the "girl's penis envy" is converted into a "wish for a child; and with that purpose in view she takes her father as a love object". In a sense Freud colluded with this desire in Anna. Although he complained, "I cannot free her from me, and nobody is helping me with it" he made sure she was dependent on him. Freud also encouraged Anna to break-off her relationship with Hans Lampl and gave her a dog whom the two pampered like a child, much to Anna's mother's annoyance.
Freud admitted that women would be hostile to his concept of penis envy. "It is to be anticipated that men analysts with feminist views, as well as our women analysts, will disagree with what I have said here. They will hardly fail to object that such notions spring from the 'masculinity complex' of the male and are designed to justify on theoretical grounds his innate inclination to disparage and suppress women... The opponents of those who argue in this way will on their side think it quite natural that the female sex should refuse to accept a view which appears to contradict their eagerly coveted equality with men. The use of analysis as a weapon of controversy can clearly lead to no decision."
Anna Freud also treated Adelaide Sweetzer, the six-year-old daughter of Arthur Sweetzer, the unofficial US ambassador to the League of Nations, because of her "parents' worries about her apparent intellectual backwardness and emotional withdrawal". Adelaide told Anna that she had "a devil in me" and asked if it could "be taken out?" Anna used her father's method of dream interpretation to treat her patients. Anna also supplemented her father's technique by analysing children's daydreams.
In 1928 she published Introduction to the Technique of Child Analysis, where she ridiculed the theories of Melanie Klein concerning her theories of child's play as symbolic of sexual fantasies: "If the child overturns a lamppost or a toy figure, she (Melanie Klein) interprets this action, e.g. as an aggressive impulse against the father; a deliberate collision between two cars as evidence of the child having observed sexual intercourse between the parents… But the child who upsets a toy lamppost may have witnessed some such incident in the street the day before; the car collision may be reproducing a similar happening."
On 30th January, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Germany's chancellor and over the next few months he banned opposition political parties, free speech, independent cultural organisations and universities and the rule of law. Anti-Semitism became government policy and German Jews, including the psychologists, Erich Fromm, Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel, left the country. Two of Freud's sons, Oliver and Ernst, who had settled in Germany, also decided they had to move. Freud wrote to his nephew in Manchester that "life in Germany has become impossible."
However, Anna and Sigmund remained in Vienna. In February, 1933, socialists and communists in Austria attempted to bring down the Dollfuss dictatorship by calling a general strike. Freud had little sympathy for the strikers as "their success would have been very short-lived and brought about military invasion of the country. Besides they were Bolshevists and I expect no salvation from Communism. So we could not give our sympathy to either side of the combatants." He told his son, "With the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was the goal of the so-called leaders, one cannot live either."
As a Jew, Freud thought he was safe in Austria. In April, 1933 he wrote: "We are passing over to a dictatorship of the Right, which means the suppression of social democracy. That will not be a pretty state of affairs and will not be pleasant for us Jews, but we all think that special laws against Jews are out of the question in Austria because of the clauses in our peace treaty which expressly guarantee the rights of minorities... Legal persecution of the Jews here would lead to immediate action on the part of the League of Nations... In such ways we buoy ourselves up in relative security. I am in any event determined not to move."
Anna Freud's most important book was The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. Published in May 1936 as an eightieth birthday present for her father. According to Janet Sayers, the author of Mothers of Psychoanalysis (1991): "It enormously expanded Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex division of id, ego, and superego, and his account of the defences caused by anxiety. It also culminated in one of the first and most influential psychoanalytic accounts of adolescence, the groundwork of which lay in the book's early chapters on the ego's defences against the id and superego."
Anna Freud's work caused her to come into conflict with Melanie Klein, who developed a loyal group of followers. Sigmund Freud defended his daughter ferociously. "Anna Freud drew on her own clinical experience, but relied on her father's writings as the principal and authoritive source of her theoretical insights. She was posscessive of her father, sensitive to any views that might even hint at criticism of his work, jealous of others - siblings, patients, friends - who might cut into her prerogatives... The two had become, and they were to remain, intellectually and emotionally inseparable."
This book and other of Anna's publications, has been criticised for being too sympathetic to Freud's original theories: "Anna Freud… devoted her life to protecting her father's legacy... In her theoretical work there would be little criticism of him, and she would make what is still the finest contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of passivity." According to Louis Breger, the author of Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (2000): "Anna Freud's publications contain few original ideas and are, for the most part, a slavish application of her father's theories."
In February 1937, Anna Freud with the help of a small group of women, opened the Jackson day nursery for toddlers whose mothers, faced with their husband's unemployment, had to go to work. "As well as having a charitable aim, the nursery also provided an opportunity for direct infant observation, thereby enabling Anna and her colleagues to go beyond her father's account of infant development solely through its reconstruction via adult analysis... Given free choice of food, she pointed out, the Jackson children were clearly able to schedule and balance what they ate for themselves without their pleasure in eating being deadened by an externally imposed regime."
During the spring of 1938, it was reported that some 500 Austrian Jews chose to kill themselves to avoid humiliation, unbearable anxiety, or deportation to concentration camps. In March the authorities felt compelled to issue a denial of the "rumours of thousands of suicides since the Nazi accession to power." The press release added that "from March 12 to March 22 ninety-six persons committed suicide in Vienna of whom only fifty were directly connected with the change in the political situation in Austria."
Ernest Jones flew to Vienna in an effort to persuade Sigmund Freud and his family to move to England. At first he said he was too old to travel. He also commented that "he could not leave his native land; it would be like a soldier deserting his post". Eventually he agreed and Jones returned to London on 20th March, to have talks with friends in the government, including Sir Samuel Hoare, the home secretary, and Herbrand Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr, lord privy seal.
On 22nd March, 1938, Anna Freud was told that she had to appear at Gestapo headquarters in Vienna. Max Schur, Freud's personal doctor, was supplied with a sufficient amount of the poison veronal. Schur later recalled: "I stayed with Freud (while she was with the Gestapo)... The hours were endless. It was the only time I ever saw Freud deeply worried. He paced the floor, smoking incessantly. I tried to reassure him as well as I could." During the interrogation, she managed to persuade them the International Psychoanalytic Association was an unpolitical organisation and she was released.
This incident convinced Freud that his family should move to London. One of the conditions for being granted an exit visa was that he sign a document that ran as follows, "I Prof. Freud, hereby confirm that after the Anschluss of Austria to the German Reich I have been treated by the German authorities and particularly the Gestapo with all the respect and consideration due to my scientific reputation, that I could live and work in full freedom, that I could continue to pursue my activities in every way I desired, that I found full support from all concerned in this respect, and that I have not the slightest reason for any complaint." It was later claimed Freud agreed to sign the document but asked if he might be allowed to add a sentence, which was: "I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone".
The Gestapo agreed that he could go to England as long as all his debts were paid. Marie Bonaparte agreed to do this and on 4th June the Freud party left on the Orient Express. On 6th June the Freuds crossed over to England by the night boat. On their arrival, Anna Freud told the Manchester Guardian that "in Vienna we were among the very few Jews who were treated decently. It is not true that we were confined to our home. My father never went out for weeks, but that was on account of his health. The general treatment of the Jews has been abominable, but not so in case of my father. He has been an exception."
Sigmund Freud's health remained poor. A biopsy performed on 28th February, 1939, showed that the cancer had returned but it was so far back in the mouth an operation was considered to be impossible. In a letter to Arnold Zweig he complained that since his last operation "I have been suffering from pains in the jaw which are growing stronger slowly but steadily, so that I cannot get through my daily chores and my nights without a hot-water bottle and sizable doses of aspirin."
Max Schur, Freud's personal doctor, had been treating him since March 1929. The main source of conflict between the two men was Freud's refusual to give up his beloved, necessary cigars. At their first meeting Freud asked him to "promise... when the time comes, you won't let them torment me unnecessarily." Schur agreed and the two men shook hands on it."
On 21st September, as Schur was sitting by his bedside, Freud took his hand and said to him: "Schur, you remember our contract not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense." When he replied that he had not forgotten, he said "I thank you" and added "Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it's right, then make an end of it." Anna Freud wanted "to postpone the fatal moment, but Schur insisted that to keep Freud going was pointless". He pointed out that Freud wanted to keep control of his life to the end.
Schur injected Freud with three centigrams of morphine - the normal dose for sedation was two centigrams - and Freud sank into a peaceful sleep. Schur repeated the injection later that day and administered a final one the next day. Freud lapsed into a como from which he did not wake. Sigmund Freud died at three in the morning on 23rd September, 1939.
In 1941 Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham established two nurseries in Hampstead and Dunmow for children from London's badly bombed and impoverished East End. She recorded the way the children responded to the Blitz. This included the comment that the older children became more aggressive and this undermined "their only recently internalized controls against it". Anna Freud argued that more than anything it was the mother's presence or absence that shaped the children's response to war. "If the mother was calm, so was the child. The reverse happened if she were distraught."
Edward Glover was outraged by a January 1944 suggestion that the teaching of the organization should cover Klein's controversial ideas. He now resigned, complaining that the Society was hopelessly "women ridden". (63) In a letter to Sylvia Payne he explained his decision: "I have now simply exercised the privilege of withdrawing from the Society (a) because its general tendency and training has become unscientific and (b) because it is becoming less and less Freudian and has therefore lapsed from its original aims."
Glover attempted to persuade Anna Freud to leave the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Phyllis Grosskurth argued that "Glover lacked psychological insight and an understanding of the strength of Anna Freud's inflexibility. She would not allow herself, Freud's daughter, to be pushed out of the Society and branded as a schismatic. She sometimes said that she stayed in because she was grateful to Jones for bringing her family to England, but it is possible that she also felt that she could work things to her own advantage if she played her cards right."
Negotiations continued for two years before an agreement was reached. On 5th November, 1946, a scheme of training was arranged which incorporated both the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. (66) "It is disturbing to accept that highly intelligent, well-educated people could succumb to the hysteria that swept through the British Society for some years. But one must realize that all human beings, even psychoanalysts, are subject to the same pressures; when engulfed in groups, they exhibit envy, anger, and competitiveness, whether the group be a trade union or a synod of bishops. The fact that the British Society did not split is, in the view of many members, evidence both of British hypocrisy and of British determination to compromise." Anna Freud died on 9th October 1982.
On the day in 1886 Scarface Charley died of tuberculosis at the Quapaw Reservation. Scarface Charley, a member of the Modoc tribe, was born in 1851. It is unknown how he got the scar on his face that gave him his name. He developed a reputation as a fearless warrior and took part in the Modoc War of 1872-73 in California. He played a leading role in the Battle of Lost River and the numerous raids on white settlers in the region.
During peace negotiations on 11th April, 1873, a group of warriors killed Brigadier General Edward Canby. He refused to become involved in this incident and after the execution of Kintpuash and Boston Charley, Scarface Charley was appointed by Colonel Wheaton as chief of the remaining Modocs.
Scarface Charley took his people to Quapaw Reservation in Oklahoma. The authorities were disappointed by Scarface Charley's ability to control the behaviour of the Modocs and in 1874 he was replaced by Bogus Charley. In the 1880s Scarface Charley was converted to Christianity by a Quaker missionary.
On the day in 1914 Clara Zetkin, writes to Helen Ankersmit about the Social Democratic Party and the First World War. "The most disastrous phenomenon of the current situation is the factor that imperialism is employing for its own ends all the powers of the proletariat, all of its institutions and weapons, which its fighting vanguard has created for its war of liberation. Social Democracy bears the main guilt and responsibility for this phenomenon before the International and history. The granting of the war credits was the harbinger for the equally comprehensive and revolting process of capitulation of German Social Democracy. The majority nowadays no longer constitutes a proletarian Socialist party of class battles, but a nationalist social reforming party which waxes enthusiastic over annexations and conquests of colonies. Social Democratic and trade union organs have approved of the illegal invasion of Belgium, of the massacre of suspected guerrillas, as well as their wives and children, as well as the destruction of their homes in various towns and districts."
Zetkin was one of the leaders of the anti-war movement in Germany. Zetkin became involved in the Women's Peace Party that attempted to bring an end to the war. Other members included Mary Sheepshanks, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Chrystal Macmillan. Sylvia Pankhurst, Charlotte Despard, Helena Swanwick, Olive Schreiner, Helen Crawfurd, Alice Wheeldon, Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, Lida Gustava Heymann, Rosika Schwimmer; Aletta Jacobs and Emilia Fogelklou.
At a International Women's Peace Conference in March, 1915, at the Hague, Clara Zetkin argued: "Who profits from this war? Only a tiny minority in each nation: The manufacturers of rifles and cannons, of armor-plate and torpedo boats, the shipyard owners and the suppliers of the armed forces' needs. In the interests of their profits, they have fanned the hatred among the people, this contributing to the outbreak of the war. The workers have nothing to gain from this war, but they stand to lose everything that is dear to them."
Franz Mehring established a new journal, Die Internationale. Zetkin and her fellow comrades, Rosa Luxemburg , August Thalheimer, Bertha Thalheimer, Käte Duncker and Heinrich Ströbel. The journal included articles by Mehring on the attitude of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to the problem of war and Zetkin dealt with the position of women in wartime. The main objective of the journal was to criticise the official policy of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) towards the First World War.
Over the next few months members of this group were arrested for their anti-war activities and spent several short spells in prison. This included Ernest Meyer, Wilhelm Pieck and Hugo Eberlein. Other activists included Leo Jogiches, Paul Levi, Julian Marchlewski and Hermann Duncker. On the release of Rosa Luxemburg from prison in February 1916, it was decided to establish an underground political organization called Spartakusbund (Spartacus League). The Spartacus League publicized its views in its illegal newspaper, Spartakusbriefe. Like the Bolsheviks in Russia, they argued that socialists should turn this nationalist conflict into a revolutionary war.
The group published an attack on all European socialist parties (except the Independent Labour Party): "By their vote for war credits and by their proclamation of national unity, the official leaderships of the socialist parties in Germany, France and England (with the exception of the Independent Labour Party) have reinforced imperialism, induced the masses of the people to suffer patiently the misery and horrors of the war, contributed to the unleashing, without restraint, of imperialist frenzy, to the prolongation of the massacre and the increase in the number of its victims, and assumed their share in the responsibility for the war itself and for its consequences."
In April 1917 Clara Zetkin left the Spartacus League and along with other left-wing members of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). Members included Kurt Eisner, Karl Kautsky, Emil Barth, Julius Leber, Ernst Toller, Ernst Thälmann, Rudolf Breitscheild, Emil Eichhorn, Kurt Rosenfeld, Ernst Torgler and Rudolf Hilferding.
Clara Zetkin was one of twenty-two members of the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) elected to the Constituent Assembly. The German Social Democrat Party won 163 of a total of 421, and dominated the new national government. On 29th January 1919, she was the first woman to speak in a German parliament. In the speech she delivered an attack on Friedrich Ebert and his government for the way he had dealt with the Spartacus League.
Leo Jogiches was executed on 10th March, 1919. Clara Zetkin wrote to Lenin on 8th April: "The murder of Karl (Liebknecht) and especially Rosa (Luxemburg) was a terrible blow. Leo's death has taken from me the last of the small group in which we have been fighting together... Of the four who first protested against the world war and fought for the revolution I am now the only one alive and in Germany I feel completely orphaned."
In May, 1919, Clara Zetkin, wrote an article, about her long-term colleague, Rosa Luxemburg, who had been murdered by the Freikorps. "Rosa Luxemburg the socialist idea was a dominating and powerful passion of both mind and heart, a consuming and creative passion. To prepare for the revolution, to pave the way for socialism - this was the task and the one great ambition of this exceptional woman. To experience the revolution, to fight in its battles - this was her highest happiness. With will-power, selflessness and devotion, for which words are too weak, she engaged her whole being and everything she had to offer for socialism. She sacrificed herself to the cause, not only in her death, but daily and hourly in the work and the struggle of many years. She was the sword, the flame of revolution."
In January, 1919 the Spartacus League changed its name to the German Communist Party (KPD). Later that year she switched from the USPD to the KPD. Other members included Paul Levi, Willie Munzenberg, Ernst Toller, Walther Ulbricht, Julian Marchlewski, Ernst Thälmann, Hermann Duncker, Hugo Eberlein, Paul Frölich, Wilhelm Pieck, Franz Mehring, and Ernest Meyer. Levi's moderate approach to communism increased the size of the party and in the 1924 elections they won 62 seats in the Reichstag.
Clara Zetkin served on the Central Committee of the KPD. She was also appointed to the executive committee of Comintern which meant she spent long period in the Soviet Union. A life-long anti-racist, Zetkin took part in the international protests against Jim Crow laws in the United States. She also campaigned against the conviction of the Scotsboro Boys.
In March, 1929, Clara Zetkin wrote to Nikolai Bukharin complaining about the way the KPD was being run. "I feel completely alone and alien in this body, which has changed from being a living political organism into a dead mechanism, which on one side swallows orders in the Russian language and on the other spits them out in various languages, a mechanism which turns the mighty world historical meaning and content of the Russian revolution into the rules of the game for Pickwick Clubs."
In 1932, Zetkin, although seventy-five years old, was once again elected to the Reichstag. As the oldest member she was entitled to open the parliament's first session. Zetkin took the opportunity to make a long speech where she denounced the policies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. "Motivated by imperialist cravings, they bring Germany into aimless, amateurish vacillations between clumsily currying favour with and sabre-rattling against the Great Powers of the Versailles Treaty, which will bring this country into greater dependence upon them. They also damage relations with the Soviet Union - the state that, through its honest policies of peace and its economic ascendance, stands behind the German working population."
Zetkin condemned the terror tactics employed during the election campaign. "The presidential cabinet bears a great burden of guilt. It is fully responsible for the murders of the last few weeks, murders for which it is fully responsible through its abolishing the ban on uniforms for the National Socialist Storm Troopers and by its open patronage of Fascist civil-war troops. In vain, it seeks to hide its political and moral guilt through quarrels with its allies about the division of power in the state; the blood that has been spilled will forever link it to the Fascist murders." Clara Zetkin died on 20th June, 1933.
On the day in 1918 David Lloyd George asks the newspaper barons to help him win the 1918 General Election. Before announcing the election to take place on 14th December, Lloyd George did a deal with Arthur Bonar Law that the Conservative Party would not stand against Liberal Party members who had supported the coalition government and had voted for him in the Maurice Debate. It was agreed that the Conservatives could then concentrate their efforts on taking on the Labour Party and the official Liberal Party that supported their former leader, H. H. Asquith. The secretary to the Cabinet, Maurice Hankey, commented: "My opinion is that the P.M. is assuming too much the role of a dictator and that he is heading for very serious trouble."
Lloyd George ran a campaign that questioned the patriotism of Labour candidates. This included Arthur Henderson, the leader of the Labour Party who had served in the government as Minister without Portfolio. Henderson's crime was that he did not call for the Kaiser to be hanged and for Germany to pay the full cost of the war. One of his opponents, James Andrew Seddon, the former President of the Trade Union Congress, and now a National Democratic Labour Coalition candidate, commented: "Mr Henderson was very sore because he was being labelled a pacifist. He might not be a pacifist but he had his foot on the slippery slope."
According to Duff Cooper, Lloyd George feared his tactics were not working and he asked the the main newspaper barons, Lord Northcliffe, Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook, for help in his propaganda campaign. They arranged for candidates to be sent telegrams that demanded: "For the guidance of your constituency will you kindly state whether, if elected, you will support the following: (i) Punishment of the Kaiser (ii); Full payment for the war by Germany (iii); The expulsion from the British isles of all Enemy Aliens."
In every issue of The Daily Mail, Northcliffe he insisted on the hanging of Kaiser Wilhelm II and indemnities from Germany. However, he wrote to George Riddell that he would not use his newspapers and personal influence to "support a new Government elected at the most critical period of the history of the British nations" unless he knew "definitely and in writing" and could approve "the personal constitution of the Government". When Riddell passed along this demand for the names of his prospective ministers to Lloyd George, he replied that he would "give no undertaking as to the constitution of the Government and would not dream of doing such a thing."
Lloyd George told Northcliffe he could "go to hell". One friend remarked: "Each described the other as impossible and intolerable. They were both very tired men and had been getting on one another's nerves for some time." Without the full support of Northcliffe, Lloyd George, arranged for Sir Henry Dalziel and a group of businessmen, who he bribed with the offer of honours and titles, to purchase The Daily Chronicle for £1.6 million. Previously, the newspaper had supported H. H. Asquith and had been highly critical of Lloyd George during the Maurice Debate. The newspaper gave its full support to Lloyd George during the 1918 General Election.
David Lloyd George argued during the campaign that he was the "man who won the war" and he was "going to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in." Although he told Winston Churchill in private that he was going to urge the execution of the Kaiser he left his fellow candidates to call for him to be hanged. The government minister, Eric Geddes, promised to squeeze Germany "until the pips squeak". In reply to those Labour politicians who called for a fair peace agreement that would prevent further wars, Lloyd George responded by calling them "extreme pacifist Bolsheviks".
The General Election results was a landslide victory for David Lloyd George and the Coalition government: Conservative Party (382); Coalition Liberal (127), National Labour Coalition (4) and Coalition National Democrats (9) . The Labour Party won only 57 seats and lost most of its leaders including Arthur Henderson, Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, George Lansbury and Fred Jowett. The Liberal Party returned 36 seats and its leader H. H. Asquith was defeated at East Fife.
On the day in 1918 anti-war activist, John Maclean, was released from prison after being found guilty of sedition. Maclean, the second youngest of seven children, was born in Pollockshaws, Glasgow in 1879. John did well at school and although his widowed mother was extremely poor, she was determined that he would have a good education. In 1896 he became a pupil-teacher and later entered the Free Church Teacher Training College.
After graduating in 1900, Maclean became a teacher in Glasgow. He also studied part time for an MA at Glasgow University where he met James Maxton. The two men were both committed socialists and over the next few years worked together on numerous campaigns.
Maclean joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Glasgow Teacher's Socialist Society and was active in the trade union and co-operative movements. He eventually fell out with H. M. Hyndman, the leader of SDF, who he felt was growing increasingly dictatorial. Later he became one of the leaders of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), an organization that had been inspired by the writings of Daniel De Leon, the man who helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Other leaders of the SLP included John S. Clarke, Arthur McManus, Willie Paul, James Connally and Tom Bell.
John Maclean was totally against Britain's involvement in the First World War. He wrote an article in Justice where he argued: "It is our business as Socialists to develop a 'class patriotism,' refusing to murder one another for a sordid world capitalism. The absurdity of the present situation is surely apparent when we see British Socialists going out to murder German Socialists with the object of crushing Kaiserism and Prussian militarism. The only real enemy to Kaiserism and Prussian militarism, I assert against the world, was and is German Social-Democracy. Let the propertied class go out, old and young alike, and defend their blessed property. When they have been disposed of, we of the working class will have something to defend, and we shall do it."
In 1915 a group of Scottish socialists, including Maclean, Willie Gallacher, John Muir, David Kirkwood, and John MacLean, formed the Clyde Workers' Committee, an independent organisation of the rank and file. The CWC attempted to confront Government demands over dilution and conscription.
Maclean produced a journal called The Vanguard where he campaigned against the First World War. Maclean and James Maxton were both arrested and charged with sedition under the terms of the Defence of the Realm Act. Found guilty, the men served over a year in prison. The Govan School Board sacked Maclean from his teaching post at Lorne Street School.
Maclean was released from prison in 1916 and returned to work with the Clyde Workers' Committee. Senior members of the CWC, including Willie Gallacher, David Kirkwood and Arthur McManus helped organize production in Beardmore's Mile End Shell Factory. Kirkwood later remarked: "What a team! We organized a bonus system in which everyone benefited by high production... The factory, built for a 12,000 output, produced 24,000. In six weeks, we held the record for output in Great Britain, and we never lost our premier position." Maclean was opposed to this strategy. He wrote: "Lloyd George's purpose is to coax you to relax your Trade Union rules about non-union workers. The dangers... are the weakening of your unions and the lowering of your wages."
McManus had been impressed with the achievements of the Bolshevik Government following the Russian Revolution and in January 1918 Maclean was elected to the chair of the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets. The following month he was appointed Bolshevik consul in Scotland.
On 15th April 1918, Maclean was arrested for sedition. He was refused bail and his trial fixed for 9th May in Edinburgh. He conducted his own defence. He argued that in his lectures he had "pointed out that as a consequence of the robbery that goes on in all civilised countries today, our respective countries have had to keep armies, and that inevitably our armies must clash together. On that and on other grounds, I consider capitalism the most infamous, bloody and evil system that mankind has ever witnessed.... I wish no harm to any human being, but I, as one man, am going to exercise my freedom of speech. No human being on the face of the earth, no government is going to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind. I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot."
Maclean was found guilty and sentenced to five years. While in Peterhead Prison Maclean started a hunger strike. His wife wrote to a fellow member of the Socialist Labour Party: "John has been on hunger strike since July. He resisted the forcible feeding for a good while, but submitted to the inevitable. Now he is being fed by a stomach tube twice daily. He has aged very much and has the look of a man who is going through torture... Seemingly anything is law in regard to John. I hope you will make the atrocity public. We must get him out of their clutches. It is nothing but slow murder..."
Following the armistice he was released from prison on 3rd December 1918. Maclean formed the Tramp Trust Unlimited in 1919, an organisation that campaigned for a minimum wage, a six-hour day and full wages for the unemployed.
Former comrades in the Socialist Labour Party such as Arthur McManus, Willie Gallacher, Tom Bell and Willie Paul, formed the Communist Party of Great Britain. Maclean refused to join as he believed that workers in Scotland could develop into a revolutionary force before those in England and Wales. Maclean instead formed the Scottish Workers Republican Party (SWRP) which combined communism with a belief in Scottish independence.
In the municipal elections held in November 1923, none of the twelve SWRP candidates came anywhere near victory. Even Maclean only polled 623 votes out of a total of 8,190. Weakened by poor health and his spells in prison, John Maclean died on 30th November 1923.
