Part 3: The Making of The Atomic Revolution

Finally, for the the half dozen people who are as intrigued by The Atomic Revolution, the Cold War propaganda comic Ethan Persoff put online, here is at least part of the story of its origins.

Mushroom cloud, The Atomic Revolution, image: www.ep.tc
Mushroom cloud, from The Atomic Revolution, image: www.ep.tc

The comic itself is copyrighted 1957, by Mr. M Philip Copp, an artist nearly subsumed in an Eisenhower-era Establishment. At a time when comic books were being attacked in Congress and the popular media for contributing to juvenile delinquency, in an denigrated-yet-promising medium populated largely by second generation Lower East Side Jews, the Connecticut WASP Copp sold leased his artistic soul to custom-publish public relations comics for the government and major corporations, quaintly remembered as the Military Industrial Complex.
According to a Sept. 1956 profile of “industrial comics,” which annointed Mr Copp as the go-to guy for American Business Interests’ comic needs, TAR, which was “largely devoted to the peacetime uses of the atom,” was designed as a resource for those “interested in learning something about the fundamentals of atomic life.” [emphasis mine.]
M Philip Copp-R and artist Samuel Citron - L, reviewing The Atomic Revolution, image: nytimes 1956
M Philip Copp, right, reviews artwork for
The Atomic Revolution with artist Samuel Citron. image: NYTimes, 1956

More than a year in the making, Copp farmed out the creation of the book to “no fewer than eleven free-lance artists and four writers. (The artists and writers are frequently replaced until the combination jells.)” Oliver Townsend, a one-time aide to Gordon Dean (ex-Chairman of The Atomic Energy Commission) is credited with the “basic text,” and Life‘s science editor Warren Young turned in the final script. The only artist mentioned is Samuel Citron, shown reviewing the artwork for page 30, the “spotless” domed Antarctic mining city and “complete control over our environment” that the atom would soon make possible.
But where did the grand vision for TAR come from? Not from Copp, a self-proclaimed “catalyst,” whose real talent seems to be his eye, and whose own “creations” were limited to fawning profiles in the Times of the more accomplished members of his Connecticut shore yacht club. But ships do factor into the story.
TAR was the brainchild of John Hay Hopkins, the chairman of Groton-based Electric Boat, a WWII submarine manufacturer, which, under Hopkins’ leadership, became General Dynamics. According to the corporate history, Hopkins “saw that the need for defense was a permanent need, and not one that could be satisfied by improvisation in a time of crisis. ‘Grow or Die’ were words by which Hopkins lived…”
Hopkins turned General Dynamics from a shipbuilder to a diversified one-stop-shop for the Cold Warrior, and the atom was a major part of GD’s offering. It built the Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, and launched its General Atomic Division in 1955. Do the math. A year in the making, profile in late ’56, TAR could’ve been conceived on the deck of a vermouth-soaked General Atomic after-party.
Or perhaps it was part of a much more comprehensive media strategy. Hopkins turned to his slipmate M. Philip Copp for a $50,000, 500,000-copy run of an atomic comic, but to make “Grow or Die” the operating principle for military expenditures would require a multimedia lobbying public education campaign. You know, get that Disney fellow on the phone.
Check out Prof. Marc Langer’s amazing AWN article, “Disney’s Atomic Fleet.” After keeping his studio afloat during WWII by making animated training and propaganda films for the US armed forces, Walt Disney was asked to participate in Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” program in 1955. The result: a multi-year, multi-channel atomic edutainment extravaganza that reminds us that skilful collaboration between the media’s and military’s big guns didn’t start with embedding Jessica Lynch on MTV.
Disney began producing a live-action/animation program, Disneyland, for the emerging ABC TV network. In turn, ABC was asked to invest, alongside Western Publishing, in the new theme park the show would promote. In 1957, Disney aired My Friend The Atom as a Tomorrowland segment on the show. The program, along with millions of copies of the accompanying book, went into schools. When Tomorrowland actually opened at Disneyland, it featured a fleet of “nuclear powered” submarines. Vice President Richard Nixon accompanied Disney on the sub’s maiden voyage on June 14, 1959; the event was broadcast live on ABC.
My Friend The Atom promised a future where “‘clean’ nuclear reactors will replace grimy coal and oil power plants. Radiation will be used to produce better crops and livestock. People will zoom from place to place in atomic cars, trains, boats and planes. ‘Then, the atom will become truly our friend.'” If that future sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s almost an exact frame-for-frame description of the contents of The Atomic Revolution.
Like TAR, My Friend, The Atom was produced in collaboration with General Dynamics Corporation. John Hay Hopkins passed away in 1957, and while he never got to visit Disneyland, and it’s unlikely that he saw the completion of MFTA, he surely got to see a final proof of The Atomic Revolution, thanks to the tireless work of Mr M. Philip Copp.
Related links:
from the Eisenhower Library, a 1953 report by the [William Hay] Jackson Committee on international information warfare
Part 2: M. Philip Copp, State Dept. Info-warrior

Archaeology at WTC Site

In the MIT speech I posted last week, Rafael Vinoly made a comment that there was “no archaeology left” at the WTC site. It had been stripped to bedrock. The Bathtub/slurry wall had to be rebuilt/refaced/replaced already. The Twin Towers’ footprints themselves now only exist as coordinates in an XYZ grid. I went to the site yesterday morning to map out my idea for the Memorial Competion, and to take reference pictures, and I found there IS “archaeology” on the site.
For all the destruction, demoltion, clearing, and (now-begun) reconstruction, a part of the original WTC has been left standing. I’ve never heard anyone mention it, and I can’t find any reference to it online, but there it is, plain as day. It ain’t much, but it’s all there is.
5wtc_stairs.jpg
About 50m west of Church St, the pedestrian entry point to the original plaza, a crumbling staircase runs from street level on Vesey St, to what used to be the plaza level (which is marked in green above). It connected to 5WTC, one of the low-rise buildings that framed the plaza. On this map, it’s the green stairway next to the Children’s Discovery Center.
Read entries on the WTC Memorial Competition or more far-ranging memorial topics
[6/23 updates: in the Times, Glenn Collins writes about rebuilding/stabilization efforts for the wall. And a WSJ story about the successful evacuation odyssey of the Children’s Discovery Center.]

On Music for Souvenir November 2001

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about working on Souvenir November 2001, my first short. I decided a while ago that it really needed a proper sound edit, but my new Final Cut Pro install has had problems opening the project, and writing has distracted me from debugging.
Still, this week, I met with a cool young composer, Avery J. Brooks, about redoing the soundtrack for the film. We had a productive, fascinating discussion. Avery’s a friend of a friend (Fred Benenson, who, it turns out, is interning for Peter at Gizmodo. Is there anyone not working for Nick Denton these days?), and is alarmingly talented. Watching the current cut of SN01, he spotted emotional and narrative cues in the music that I never noticed.
Intuited, maybe, but never articulated. Jonah and I put tracks down by feel, more or less. Avery labelled one track “success,” another “disappointment,” another “random,” and so on, which mapped pretty closely to the main character’s emotional state as he half-blindly searches for a memorial he doesn’t know much about.
It’ll make a good summer project, we decided, and I’ll post updates of our discussion and clips as we go along. Meanwhile, check out Avery’s own site, where he posts performance info and some examples of his work.

Bollywood Thursdays on TCM

Turner Classic Movies is showing a dozen Bollywood classics on Thursdays in June, introduced by Ismail Merchant. As might be expected whenever Merchant’s involved, the movie menu reads somewhere between vegetarian and vegan: noble, needs some spice, and definitely not enough cheese.
But that’s just how it looks to a guy who discovered Bollywood through Diesel Jeans commercials and Namaste America, an Indian music video show on NYC’s public access channel Saturday mornings. Merchant/Ivory’s own meta-Bollywood film, Bombay Talkie is good, too, but unfortunately, it’s not in the series.

First, Industrial Comics, Now Industrial Musicals

[via Scrubbles] The Golden Age of corporate comic books coincides nicely with the Golden Age of industrial musicals. Jonathan Ward tells their history.
These lavishly produced sales-and-morale-boosting programs were usually performed only once or twice, at a company’s sales or management conference. Souvenir records were pressed in extremely small numbers and distributed only to the conference participants, making them very rare.

On The Atomic Revolution: Part 2, American Business Concerns

The non-comic comic book is often cited as a phenomenon of these troubled times…These garish publications are marked by horror, violence and practically everything but humor. They have evoked nation-wide condemnation.
In recent years a far different kind of “unfunny comic” has made an appearance. It is a publication, drawn in newspaper strip form, prepared for and distributed by American business concerns…These little books are becoming an important tool in industrial public relations. They go to stockholders, employes, schools, civic organizations, and the general public. As a medium of goodwill, they have proved extremely effective.
– New York Times, Sept. 1956

The driving force behind these “industrial comics”? Mr M. Philip Copp, a commercial artist-turned-agent-turned-publisher, a Connecticut sailing man from the Ivy League (well, he attended both Princeton and Yale), who set out, quixotically, to win over the leaders of the American Establishment for the “juvenile delinquency”-inducing medium they were, at that very moment, condemning— comic books.
During the Forties, Copp repped Noel Sickles, whose cinematic chiaroscuro style influenced generations of comic artists. Copp apparently sought to leverage this powerful style for Larger Purposes than just entertainment. He comped up a “Life of Jesus” comic book, but neither the Lord nor his churches provided, and the project was shelved.
Detail, The Korea Story, M Philip CoppStiffed by God, Copp turned to Caesar, then Mammon: in early 1950, the State Department bought over one million copies of “Eight Great Americans,” in eleven languages, for its worldwide propaganda war against the Soviet Union. Then in September, Copp flipped another million copies of “The Korea Story,” a comic booklet denouncing the communist North Korean June 25th invasion of South Korea. It was distributed in the Mid-East and Asia as part of the State Dept’s “Campaign of Truth.”
1952 was at least as busy for the M. Philip Copp Publishing Company. He made commemorative comics for utility companies, followed by a 50th anniversary book, “Flight,” which was purchased in large runs by the Aircraft Industries Association, Douglas Aircraft, Lockheed, IBM, and GM. Oddly, his probable classic, “Crime, Corruption & Communism,” went unmentioned in the Times puff piece which is the source for many of these details.
Copp took a Company Man view of his comic books, calling himself “a ‘catalyst: [I] furnish the basic idea, bring together artists, writers and researchers, and out comes the finished product.” It may have been an attempt to reconcile the comic art he had an eye for with the highly circumscribed, WASP-y world he lived in. Copp didn’t quite finish school; he ran a job shop, selling the Latest Thing to his classmates, neighbors, and yacht club slipmates; his boat was only a 14’ knockabout, but he was funny and, later on, wrote glowing profiles of his sailing friends for the Times.
Maybe I’m imagining (or projecting), but Copp’s eager desire to please his native tribe has kind of a sadness to it. The Atomic Revolution is remarkable in part because of the incongruity of powerful artwork and the patently hollow Military Industrial message it delivers. But it hints at what might have been, if Copp’d had been less concerned with his standing at the yacht club and more concerned about his place among artists.
Related posts:
Part 1: On M. Philip Copp, The Military Industrial Complex’s Goto Guy For “Unfunny Comics”
Finding The Atomic Revolution: Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner

“A magazine without a cruise is like a Muscovite without a stockbroker”

Q. You’re posting about magazine cruises?? If TMN told you to jump off the Empire State Building, would you?
A. Could I basejump?

Mr George Loper and Molly Ivins on The Nation's 2000 cruise, image:loper.org
Mr George Loper and Ms Molly Ivins, aboard the MS Ryndam
for The Nation‘s 1998 reader cruise. image: loper.org

Eric Wemple’s report of the failure of The New Republic‘s reader cruise is good, but doesn’t reach the hilarity of Eric Alterman’s New Yorker account of The Nation‘s near-mutinous first cruise.

A cruise consultant who had helped set up the trip was taken aback by the ambience. ‘I’ve never seen a cruise audience be so ornery to its guest speakers,’ he confided to me by the Stairmasters, adding, ‘and it’s not only the New Yorkers, either.’ He was grateful, though, that no one tried to unionize the crew’s largely Indonesian wait staff.

It’s part of Mr George Loper’s [pictured above] The Nation Cruise Anthology. Nick’s experience with one Nation editor begs the [gender biased. So sue me.] question, “Would YOU go on a cruise with this woman?”
Able efforts all, but for my money, David Foster Wallace is still king of the Reportage From Cruises You Don’t Want To Go On hill.

Ebay Find: Smart Car in the US


There’s a 2000 Smart Car for sale on Ebay, which appears to be legal in the US. Colorado registration, 12.5K miles. No mention of the EPA/DOT paperwork, but you can email the seller for details.
We’ve rented a Smart in France, and we beat our heads against the Smart dealership wall in Nice for several days, trying to get them to tell us how/why they helped Sally Jesse Raphael get one into the US, but they wouldn’t help/tell us. [But isn’t it because she was a star, you ask? Non. Any one of us is arguably more famous in France than Sally Freakin’ Jesse Raphael.]

101 Cameras: Lars von Trier and Me

For almost three years, I’ve carried a little red movie ticket in my wallet, the old-fashioned pulpy kind, from a big roll. It says “Emergency Re-admit” on it. It enables me to return and see Dancer in the Dark, which I went to see one weekday afternoon in 2000. After 15 confusing minutes, I snapped and decided I’d better get back to work, and I hastily, if temporarily, abandoned the controversial film.

Dancer in the Dark, image: finelinefeatures.com

Last night, I watched it on DVD, and it blew me away. It’s not just a movie starring a singer, it’s a musical. All this time, I’d assumed that meant it had some aggressively amateurish Sound of Music renditions, with Catherine Deneuve and Bjork as added gimmicks. So I was half-watching while writing when the first actual musical number came on, almost halfway into the film. After that, I was transfixed.
Von Trier was intent on “covering” the musical numbers in one take, as live events–come what may audio-, image-, and mistake-wise– using 100 cameras. It didn’t quite happen that way. They did use 100 fixed, synch-coded DV cameras (140 for one song), covering the entire performance area, and they shot several takes, all the way through. Additional crews shot close-ups of Bjork. The result: a staggering amount of footage (68 hours for one three minute song) and, presumably, a big job in post.
Rapid cuts between fixed shots stands in sharp contrast to the never-resting hand-held camerawork in the rest of the film. From the commentary tracks, the choreographer Vince Paterson, who did the Vogue video, meted out whip-cracking tough love, Madonna-style, on his Dogme-soaked, improv-happy collaborators. Vince made sure the 100 cameras positions and framing was actually based on the staging. His impressive combination of imperiousness and restraint comes through in his commentary, (“We found out it would serve our purpose much better to involve me.”) and it’s not hard to accept von Trier’s comment that Paterson saved the movie.
The limitations of this ultimately low-tech, handcrafted sophistication are apparent, though. Von Trier rightly laments the short cuts it produces: “Maybe if you had 2,000 cameras, you could get some longer cuts and closeups.” At the same time, he argues strongly against editing between multiple takes and for multi-camera coverage of a single performance. It all reminds me of The Matrix Reloaded, of all things. Specifically, the god-like CG camera technique the Wachowksis and Maeda used to film The Burly Man fight, the one with 100 Agent Smiths and thousands of cameras.

Venice: Vidi, Bitchy

The Venice Biennale is finally over open, and not a day too soon. For a bunch of whiny Americans, anyway. In the Times, Carol Vogel complains about having to see art “amid relentless heat intensified by the power needed for lighting and video installations.” Meanwhile, artnet’s Walter Robinson, an apparent Venice virgin, complains about having to see art in “some historic buildings,” the heat and the dearth of video. [After the massive sucking sound that was 2001’s video choices, less is definitely more, Walter.]
Lisa Dennison, chief curator of the Guggenheim (“Where the sponsor’s always right!”), complained to the Times about the curators having too much say. [Or the Guggenheim not having enough: they apparently lobbied hard for Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle to be chosen for the Guggenheim-owned American Pavilion. Fred Wilson got it instead.]
Wilson has an African street vendor selling fake purses at the entrance to his installation of Venetian Moor-related art. Via Vogel: “Richard Dorment, an American who is an art critic for The Daily Telegraph of London, said he was speechless when he saw the pavilion. ‘To put a seller of handbags in front of a pavilion is condescending to both Americans and Venetians,’ Mr. Dorment said. ‘This is a person, not a work of art. Where are the days when major American artists represented our country?'”
[Rowrr. Dorment apparently lived up to his name; his sniping ignores 1) the inside of the pavilion, which many people praised, 2) the major majorness of the 2001 show’s Robert Gober, and 3) Maurizio Cattelan showing a buried person–an Indian fakir, whose praying hands stuck out of the sand–in 1999. And besides, in 2001, Venice was plastered by billboards for some museum exhibition which pulled the same street vendor stunt as Wilson.]

Elmgreen and Dragset, Spelling UTOPIA, image: e-flux.com
Elmgreen & Dragset’s e-flux poster, starring Lala, image: e-flux.com

People, if you’re looking for Pitti, it’s in Florence. Venetian art parties rank below even Cannes film premieres on the Burdens Likely To Evoke Sympathy scale. It’s a lesson well learned by the Guardian’s Cannes crank, Fiachra Gibbons, who clearly looked on the bright side in Venice. His reports are giddy fun, from his Black Power shoutout for Wilson’s work, and Chris Ofili’s British pavilion to his star-struck love letter to Lala, the diva chimpanzee star of “Spelling U-T-O-P-I-A”, by my pals Elmgreen & Dragset. [There’s something for the blogosphere to figure out: at what point does “in the interest of full disclosure” become “shameless touting of my connection to famous friends”? Ask me tomorrow when I post about my friend, Olafur Eliasson.]
As I sit here in New York, recovering from my A/C-induced cold, I’m working on an “I Survived the Venice Biennale” T-shirt, for those who truly suffer for art. Stay tuned (or feel free to send a design suggestion or two).

On M. Philip Copp, The Military Industrial Complex’s Goto Guy For “Unfunny Comics”

The Korea Story, 1950, excerpt, published by M Philip Copp

Discovering The Atomic Revolution–a stunningly drawn, cheerleading 1957 comic book for Our Friend, The Atom–and being in an apocalyptic Animated Musical state of mind, I set out to discover its origins, and its elusive creator, Mr. M. Philip Copp, whose only other known (to Google) publication was a 1952 comic book, Crime, Corruption & Communism.

Continue reading “On M. Philip Copp, The Military Industrial Complex’s Goto Guy For “Unfunny Comics””

On the people in my neighborhood, v6

  • There’s a new Struth museum photo on my street; it moved in next door to an old Frank Stella painting. People who have good art rarely bother with curtains.
  • Researching The Atomic Revolution, that rad Establishment comic book I want to rip off for my Animated Musical, I ventured into the library of The Society of Illustrators, which turns out to be just around the corner. Who knew? It’s sort of an inker’s Friar’s Club; there’s a gallery on the ground floor, a bar/dining room (which I’d imagine fills up with crusty cartoonists around, oh, 11:00AM), and an eclectic library on the third floor. Alas, no trace of Mr M. Philip Copp or The Atomic Revolution. [At least not there.]
  • On my corner, then, an entrepreneurial neighborhood scamp from the co-op had set up two Hammacher & Schlemmer-y folding tables, and was doing brisk business in home-baked goods. A couple of years ago, the kid–he’s probably 12 now, with new braces–set up one table in front of my building to sell gum. (Parents buy a case at Cost-co, kid sells the packs individually. It’s like printing money, for a 10-year old. Still, as our now-closed neighborhood fountain pen store proved, you need more than one product; I gave him a couple of books to sell.)
    He’s since learned the importance of location–and foot traffic–to a retail operation. And he’s got his schtick down pat; as the neighborhood ladies marvelled at the marble cake (“And is that red velvet? I make that!”), he let it slip that he’d baked it himself last night. That’s right, those kids over on Fifth may be foisting their nanny-cake on the doormen, but on Lex, the law of the retail jungle prevails: it’s every man for himself. By the time his parents brought the Range Rover around for the drive to Southampton, he’d sold out his entire inventory of brownies and (bundt and red velvet) cakes.
    Lizzie Grubman, if you ever actually open a bakery here, you’ll have some stiff competition.

    • On, Apparently, Not Getting the Memo

    I broke down and subscribed to Harper’s after they jacked up their newsstand price. I can’t go without my Harper’s [You shouldn’t either.] But apparently, much like David Remnick before him, the illustrious Roger Hodge somehow neglected to notify me of Harper’s Weekly Review, which resides online. I had to learn about it from The Morning News. Not bad, but still. When is Big Media going to realize it’s real problem is not paying me enough attention?
    But nevermind that for now. Here’s an excerpt from this/last week [Urgent note to Mr Hodge: What, no archive??]

    President George W. Bush staged a handshake between the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers at a summit meeting in Jordan. President Bush, Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, and King Abdullah II of Jordan stood outdoors together in the hot sun wearing suits and ties but were kept free of unsightly perspiration by tubes installed by White House operatives that blasted cold air from an ultra-quiet air conditioner that was hidden nearby. Sharon and Abbas read statements about the “road map” to peace that were largely written by American officials. “I think when you analyze the statements, you’ll find them to be historic,” Bush told reporters later. “Amazing things were said.” Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade responded to the summit with a joint attack on an Israeli military outpost in Gaza, killing four soldiers. Elsewhere, in the West Bank, Israeli forces shot a seven-year-old Palestinian girl in the abdomen.