Monthly Archives: July 2007

by | 12 July 2007 · 9:33 am

Effects of the New Madrid Relief Act of 1815

On February 17, 1815 [three years after the strongest earthquakes in U.S. history], Congress passed the New Madrid Relief Act, the first federal disaster relief act in U.S. history. Unfortunately, the act itself turned out to be a disaster.

The legislation provided for residents whose land had been damaged in the earthquakes to trade their land titles for a certificate that would be good for any unclaimed government land for sale elsewhere in the Missouri Territory. The only restriction was that the new grants had to be between 160 and 640 acres, regardless of how much or little land a person had previously owned. Well-intentioned though the legislation was, it did little to help the residents of the New Madrid area.

Communications being what they were, word of the New Madrid Relief Act did not reach the New Madrid area for months. News did reach St. Louis and other places, however, and speculators were soon beating a hasty path to New Madrid and buying up land for a pittance from unsuspecting locals. Of the 516 certificates issued for redemption, only twenty were held by the original landowners. Three hundred and eighty-four certificates were held by residents of St. Louis, some of whom had as many as forty claims. Adding insult to injury, many banks in Missouri failed, making the Missouri banknotes used to pay for these claims worthless. Governor Clark himself was not above profiting from the situation, as he authorized two of his agents, Theodore Hunt and Charles Lucas, to purchase land in the New Madrid area. Meanwhile, opportunists in New Madrid caught on to what was happening and began selling their land titles many times over. Before too long, the term “New Madrid claim” came to be synonymous with fraud.

Litigation over the resulting land claims tied up the courts for over twenty years, with hundreds of fraudulent claims being pressed. Over the next three decades, Congress passed three more pieces of legislation to try and straighten out the mess. The last case stemming from the New Madrid Relief Act was finally settled in 1862, fifty years after the earthquakes of 1811–12—by which time the frontier had moved a thousand miles west.

SOURCE: When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquake, by Jay Feldman (Free Press, 2005), p. 236

Plus ça change …

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by | 11 July 2007 · 5:52 pm

Media Disastermongering in 1990

OVER THE COURSE of the next century and more [after 1811–1812], the New Madrid earthquakes gradually receded from public awareness, as the New Madrid fault system produced just two shocks greater than magnitude 6.0 in the 180 years following the 1811–12 sequence—a 6.5 in 1843 and a 6.8 in 1895. An occasional magazine article would appear and several epic poems and novels using the quakes as a setting were written, but in general, the largest series of earthquakes ever to hit the North American continent faded from memory—until 1990, when a prediction by Dr. Iben Browning suddenly brought the New Madrid fault system to the forefront once again.

Browning was a climatological and business consultant who claimed to have predicted the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta quake that struck northern California during the 1989 World Series, causing extensive damage in the San Francisco Bay area. Browning also claimed to have predicted other large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, including the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington.

Addressing a business seminar in Atlanta in February 1988, Browning told his audience that an earthquake could strike the Memphis area in early December 1990. More than a year and a half later, on November 27, 1989, a short Associated Press story made the prediction public, and the following day, a longer story appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Two weeks later, speaking to the Missouri Governor’s Conference on Agriculture, Browning repeated his prediction that there was a 50 percent probability that a magnitude 6.5–7.5 earthquake would hit the New Madrid area on December 3, 1990. Browning’s prognostication was based on tidal forces, which were going to be extraordinarily high on December 2 and 3.

Suddenly, people were interested in the New Madrid fault system again. The Lorna Prieta quake in October 1989 had received widespread television coverage, and the repeated viewings of the worst of the damage had created a climate in which Browning’s prediction was taken seriously by the media and the public. Despite the fact that the connection between tidal forces and earthquakes has never been proven, and despite the refutation of Browning’s prediction by several seismologists, including the Center for Earthquake Research and Information director Arch Johnston, media outlets all over the country began picking up the story and running with it.

The issue was given further apparent credence in June 1990 when David Stewart threw his support behind the Browning forecast. Stewart, a geophysicist, was then the director of the Center for Earthquake Studies at Southeast Missouri State University and one of Missouri’s leading earthquake preparedness experts. On July 21, in an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled, “Quake Prediction Taken Seriously,” Stewart was quoted as saying that Browning’s “methodology does seem to be promising and worthy of serious and thorough consideration.”

In fact, Browning’s methodology was highly questionable—he had no physical model for his prediction and showed no verifiable evidence to back up his prediction. Moreover, it turned out that his “predictions” of the Lorna Prieta quake and the Mount St. Helens eruption were also suspect. Browning’s doctorate was in zoology; he was a self-taught climatologist with no scientific expertise in seismology or earthquake prediction. After Stewart joined Browning, a number of seismologists made efforts to debunk the prediction, but the cow was already out of the barn.

The Associated Press picked up the Post-Dispatch piece, and it was reprinted in newspapers throughout the New Madrid Seismic Zone region. Stories then ran in major newspapers all across the country, including the New York Times, Wall StreetJournal, Chicago Tribune, and Miami Herald. Soon the national media jumped in. Time and Newsweek published articles and USA Today ran close to a dozen stories. Browning appeared on Good Morning America. Johnston was interviewed for the Today show. World News Tonight and NOVA planned segments on the New Madrid fault system.

Earthquake and natural disaster agencies, together with organizations like the Red Cross, unwittingly exacerbated the crisis by sending out literature on earthquake preparedness without also providing a disclaimer regarding Browning’s prediction. Throughout the New Madrid Seismic Zone, agencies were inundated with requests for information. National Guard units in Missouri and Arkansas conducted earthquake drills. Department stores passed out survival-tip literature and stocked up on blankets, bottled water, and first-aid kits. Many school districts announced that schools would close on December 3. A minor 4.6 tremor near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on September 26, made the situation that much worse, as many people interpreted the event to be a foreshock of the anticipated December quake.

Except for Stewart, the entire scientific community was aligned against the Browning prediction. “Earthquake experts across the country consider this ‘prediction’ ridiculous and unscientific,” wrote Douglas A. Wiens, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University of St. Louis, in an op-ed piece for the Post-Dispatch on September 30. “The public should disregard all predictions about the specific date that an earthquake will occur. No one can make such predictions. Though scientists have investigated many different factors that could signal an impending quake, none has proved reliable.” Nevertheless, the media continued to treat the Browning prediction as genuine news.

In mid-October, the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council (NEPEC) released a study that thoroughly refuted Browning’s prediction, but still the media hype went on. By the beginning of December, the New Madrid Seismic Zone region was in a state of near-hysteria.

On the weekend of December 1–2, a carnival-like atmosphere prevailed in New Madrid. More than thirty satellite trucks from television and radio networks worldwide were parked in downtown New Madrid, with its population of just over 3,300. Church marquees advertised sermons with earthquake-inspired themes like, “Preparing for the Big One? Are You Prepared for the Last One?” Cars prowled the town displaying homemade signs along the same lines: “New Madrid save your city fast and repent.” Rev. Frank McRae of the St. John’s United Methodist Church cheerfully admitted, “You don’t get breaks like this often.” Tourists roamed the streets, and the Chamber of Commerce sold “official” earthquake T-shirts and sweatshirts. Tom’s Grill offered quake burgers that were served divided down the middle by a jagged line, while McDonald’s advertised free coffee, “a price you can shake & rattle about.” Near the Mississippi River, the Faultline Express Band played earthquake songs. A California psychologist featured an Iben Browning doll that children were encouraged to pummel as a way of dealing with their fears about the earthquake prediction.

December 3 came and went with no earthquake, of course. The tourists and media crews quickly left, and after several months in the limelight, New Madrid went back to being an ordinary Mississippi River town.

The Browning prediction underscored the fact that there is only one thing certain about the New Madrid fault system, and that is that it will go off again. It could be in two hundred years. Or it could be tomorrow.

SOURCE: When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquake, by Jay Feldman (Free Press, 2005), pp. 238-241

Plus ça change …

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by | 4 July 2007 · 2:16 pm

Fingerspelling: From Alphabet to Syllabary

National standards for sign languages of the Deaf have evolved in different ways, but almost always with foreign influence. Much of the vocabulary of American Sign Language (ASL) was adapted from earlier standardized French Sign Language (FSL), and both remain very different from British Sign Language (BSL).

The standardizers of ASL also adapted the one-handed manual alphabet (fingerspelling) of FSL. Most letters in the BSL alphabet, by contrast, require the use of both hands. As relative latecomers, the standardizers of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) also adapted its fingerspelling standards from the FSL/ASL tradition, but with a twist: they turned the manual alphabet into a kana-based syllabary. According to Karen Nakamura’s Deaf Resource Library:

JSL appears to be a much “younger” language form than many other national sign languages. The first school for the deaf was established in Kyoto in 1878 and we have very little evidence for sign language communities before that time (although they no doubt existed in small pockets). The current form of fingerspelling was introduced in the early 20th century and is based on the fingerspellling used in Spain, France, and the United States. However, many older Deaf do not know the fingerspelling forms or numerals and most Deaf born before the end of World War II (1948) did not attend school since it was only after the war that compulsory education for the Deaf was instituted.

Fingerspelling is much less common in JSL than it is in ASL. Japanese signers appear to rely much more on “airwriting” kanji rather than spelling out pronunciations by means of signed kana. Nevertheless, let’s examine a few of the ways a 26-sign alphabet was adapted and expanded into a syllabary of almost twice that many signs. For more discussion, see Wikipedia; images of JSL finger spellings can be found on the Tokyo Green Systems website.

  • Borrowing directly – The five vowels of ASL serve as the five vowels of JSL: A, I, U, E, O. Eight ASL consonants (K, S, N, H, M, Y, R, W) serve as the top row of the syllabary: KA, SA, (TA), NA, HA, MA, YA, RA, WA. ASL T is an obscene gesture in Japan, so a thumb raised above a fist (rather than inserted between the first two fingers) was substituted for it. The same sign means otoko ‘man’ in JSL.
  • Using numbers for sounds – The signs for numbers are used to represent syllables that occur in those same numbers: 1 = HI(totu), 2 = NI, 3 = MI(tu), 4 = YO(tu), 6 = MU(tu), 7 = SI(ti), 9 = KU. (The number ‘1000’ can be signed either by katakana TI [チ] or by airwriting the kanji [千] from which the former derives.)
  • Signing katakana shapes – The following signs evoke the shapes of the katakana representation of the same syllables: KO, SU, TI, TU, NO, HU, HE, RI, RU, RE, RO, N.
  • Signing pictographs – Several signs are pictorial: KI ~ kitune ‘fox’ (with outside fingers raised like ears and middle two touching the thumb like a snout); SE ~ se ‘spine’ (a raised middle finger, but with the palm facing the viewer); SO ~ sore ‘that’ (pointing); TE ~ te ‘hand’ (an open hand); TO ~ to ‘and’ (first two fingers side-by-side); NE ~ ne ‘root’ (all fingers pointing down); HO = ho ‘sail’ (back of hand like billowing sail); ME ~ me ‘eye’ (between thumb and forefinger); MO ~ mo ‘too, also’ (JSL sign for onaji ‘same’); YU ~ yu ‘hot water’ (three fingers like symbol for public bath house).
  • Adding diacritics – As in the kana syllabaries, voicing is indicated by diacritics. For instance, GA, DA, and BA are derived from the shape of KA, TA, and HA, respectively, by adding a short sideways motion, and PA is derived from the shape of HA by adding a short upward motion. Vowel length is shown by adding a short downward motion after a syllable, like the length mark in katakana.

See also Wayne H. Smith’s (2005) article in Language and Linguistics 6:187–215 about Taiwan Sign Language (TSL), which appears to share nearly half its vocabulary with JSL. Taiwan signers don’t fingerspell Bopomofo syllables. Instead, they rely exclusively on “airwriting” hanzi.

UPDATE: Unlike the JSL kana syllabary, which was clearly adapted from earlier manual alphabets in ASL and FSL, the Japanese Morse Code syllabary is utterly distinct from alphabetic Morse Code. Compare:

  • K –·– vs. KA ·–··
  • S ··· vs. SA –·–·–
  • T – vs. TA –·
  • N –· vs. NA ·–·
  • H ···· vs. HA –···
  • M –– vs. MA –··–
  • Y –·–– vs. YA ·––
  • R ·–· vs. RA ···
  • W ·–– vs. WA –·–

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by | 1 July 2007 · 10:03 pm

Japan, Korea, Manchuria :: Torso, Arm, Fist

THE YEARS BETWEEN the collapse of the United Front in the fall of 1931 and the outbreak of the war with China in 1937 brought colonial Korea’s ironies and contradictions into sharp focus. While the fall of the United Front meant the collapse of overt nationalist resistance, what emerged in its place was a more violent anti-Japanese movement represented by the guerrilla movement in Manchuria and the Red Peasant Unions in the far northeast of the peninsula. Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931 altered Korea’s position in the empire, for Korea then became a middleman in the empire’s development of northeast China’s vast untapped resources. The subsequent, seemingly anomalous industrialization of North Korea provided new jobs for peasants, but at the price of dislocating them from the densely populated south and moving them to the north; furthermore, Korea’s industrial labor force expanded simultaneously with the deepening immiseration of the Korean countryside. Finally this period witnessed the flowering of a capitalist mass culture in Korea’s cities, a popular culture providing the façade of a modernity that had evolved unevenly in the colony. The alluring consumer culture and glittering nightlife in the cities contrasted with abject poverty in the countryside, symbolizing each end of the economic spectrum of a dual economy—dual in the sense that parts of Seoul were as modern as anything in Tokyo, yet in rural backwaters profound poverty and wretched material conditions remained unchanged from the nineteenth century.

The addition of Manchuria caused large-scale shifts within the Japanese Empire. Increasingly isolated in world affairs and threatened by economic isolation as trading nations erected tariff barriers to protect their own economies, Japan began to create an autarkic economy formed around its colonies. The main axis of this system ran from Japan proper through Korea and Manchuria, with Taiwan playing an important, but less crucial role. Because Korea was more firmly integrated politically, had a more developed infrastructure, and was labor rich—not to mention its being geographically central—Japan began to industrialize Korea in order to exploit the raw materials of Manchuria. The state-led industrialization of Korea in the 1930s was an anomaly in colonial history. No colony had ever before been industrialized to the level of Japan’s Korea colony, a process that shifted labor from the densely populated south to the sites of huge new factories in northern Korea and Manchuria and spurred urban growth as well.

The increasing economic importance of Korea within the empire motivated Japan to intensify its efforts to spread Japanese values, language, and institutions within the colony. By the mid-1930s Japanese authorities were demanding active Korean participation in Shinto ceremonies, stepping up the pressure within the education system to spread Japanese language use, and trying to eliminate the last differences in legal and administrative practices that distinguished the Japanese naichi (inner lands) from the colonial gaichi (outer lands). The goal in the minds of colonial officials was a seamless cultural, legal, and administrative assimilation of Korea, and where this could not be accomplished in reality, cosmetic fiction would do. This was especially true in the dark years of the Pacific War (1941–1945), when the Japanese assimilation policies became increasingly hysterical and unrealistic.

By the end of the colonial period in 1945, Korean society [like Japan—J.] was suffering under a cripplingly harsh mobilization for total war. It was no consolation that the Japanese Diet had recommended the complete elimination of the distinction between naichi and gaichi, or true Japanese from their imperial subjects on the periphery. [One might say the same for the distinction between soldiers and civilians—J.] Becoming assimilated meant that Koreans would be allowed the same privileges to sacrifice for the emperor granted the citizenry of the main islands—namely, to be conscripted for the military and labor forces, to render their rice and precious metals to the imperial treasury, and to be forcefully moved wherever manpower was needed. Of course while distinctions disappeared in theory, Koreans and other colonials still carried identity cards designating their ethnicity.

SOURCE: Korea’s Twentieth-Century Odyssey: A Short History, by Michael E. Robinson (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2007), pp. 76-77

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