Pat's Blog: The Stereopticon Perspective

Let yourself go back in time to when land line telephones were uncommon and expensive, winter clothing was made of wool and cars were a luxury for many people. Airline travel was exclusively the domain of the very wealthy and most Americans had never traveled out of the state of their birth. Many households had only recently been electrified and connectivity meant fountain pen, paper and the U.S. Mail and the news of the world arrived by newspaper and/or vacuum tube radio in the living room. What most Americans knew of other nations of the world was what someone else told them through the media of the day.

One technology that peaked in this era was the Stereopticon. These devices first appeared in the 1860s and lasted until radio became common in most homes and people could go to movie theaters and watch newsreels of current events. The stereopticon was the way people saw images of the world around them and I have my Grandmother's stereopticon and five volumes of hundreds of image cards that show what the world was like from before WWI to the late 1930s. Each image card contains two photos, the horizontal axis of which is slightly offset so that, when viewed through two lenses, a stereo (or depth) effect is produced. The image is rendered as 3-dimensional, much like a modern 3-D movie. Photos are shown below.

For the U.S.A. there are images of African Americans picking cotton in Mississippi, early mechanized farm equipment, the new Empire State Building in New York and the most modern factories, trains and airplanes; modernization and progress seem to be the theme. The cards from Germany show the classic Oktoberfest scenes and famous churches, but also a rising Nazi Germany; Swastika-clad Zeppelins and monoplanes. The rest of Europe is represented as mostly the places American tourists would visit if they ever got to Europe. The world outside of the U.S. and Europe is mostly depicted as peasants working the fields or factories, and these are interspaced with classic buildings from the country in question. (See photo 3 below.) Japan is represented by cards that show women picking tea leaves, a group of farmers planting rice, and the most technology shown in any photo is of a stall full of Japanese sandal-style shoes. The subtle message was that the U.S.A. and Europe were better; more advanced and more civilized. But of course we were, and it was nice to see it affirmed.

This was the way it was, or at least the way the American consumer at the time was led to think it was. The thing that strikes me about the photos for the stereopticon is how easy it would be to believe that the "other" people in the world were as shown; I don't believe they were, but I believe the company that sold the photo cards gave U.S. citizens the view of other nations that their customers expected to see.

I can understand how when WWII broke out it was easy for us to be convinced to think of our adversaries as "Huns and Japs"; we had really only been exposed to media that presented things as the audience wished them to be ("we are better") or as the media source wished to present them ("all of them are our enemies"). What harm could that do?

One example of harm is one of our great national disgraces; the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry in WWII. We allowed our fellow citizens to be denied their rights as citizens, taken from their homes, stripped of all property and moved across the country to be put in detention camps. How could this happen, and with so little objection? Were these people, to most Americans, neighbors and fellow citizens or the people depicted on stereopticon cards and labeled as dangerous by the newspapers and radio? The answer would seem to be obvious. I am not in any way attempting to excuse the treatment of our fellow citizens by the U.S. Government (us), for it will always be a source of great national shame, but I think I see how it could happen; one-way filtered perspectives make it easy to believe only what we are shown. (Take a few minutes to read about the 442nd Infantry Regiment in WWII. It was composed of U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, many of whom had family in the internment camps. The law that started the internments was signed 72 years ago tomorrow, Feb. 19, 1942 - not that long ago.)

But we are beyond that now, right? Be careful if you only listen to media outlets that tell you what you want to hear, or that only tell you what they want you to know. To some extent we are just looking at modern versions of the stereopticon cards.