Category Archives: migration

by | 24 November 2025 · 8:32 am

RLS & Fanny as Newlyweds

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 311-312:

The newlyweds entered this union with their eyes open. A fragmentary essay that Louis drafted in San Francisco shows deep understanding of the relationship they were now confirming.

In all our daring, magnanimous human way of life, I find nothing more bold than this. To go into battle is but a small thing by comparison. It is the last act of committal. After that, there is no way left, not even suicide, but to be a good man. She will help you, let us pray. And yet she is in the same case; she, too, has daily made shipwreck of her own happiness and worth; it is with a courage no less irrational than yours that she also ventures on this new experiment of life. Two who have failed severally now join their fortunes with a wavering hope.

Biographers have suggested that Fanny was lucky to get Louis, but the reverse was equally true. He commented a year later that she had married him “when I was a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.” Nellie said that “she married him when his fortunes, both in health and finances, were at their lowest ebb, and she took this step in the almost certain conviction that in a few months at least she would be a widow. The best that she hoped for was to make his last days as comfortable and happy as possible.”

…

Fanny certainly didn’t imagine that she was uniting herself with a future celebrity. “She married Louis,” Belle said, “not expecting that he would live, but hoping by her devotion to prolong this life now so dear to her. Though she admired his work, she had no idea he would ever become famous.” In fact his later achievements had much to do not just with Fanny’s belief in him, but with her intelligent criticism and advice. Nellie also said, “Her profound faith in his genius before the rest of the world had come to recognize it had a great deal to do with keeping up his faith in himself.”

Belle added a moving reminiscence: “I remember coming through the hall, and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch at my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.” As Nellie commented in quoting this, Belle never grasped until then “what a sad and bitter life Fanny Osbourne’s had been.”

More than any of Louis’s biographers, Richard Holmes does justice to this remarkable union. “When one considers other Victorian literary marriages—Hardy’s, say, or Dickens’s—Stevenson’s is something phenomenal, dynamic, explosive. It contained energies, tempests, fireworks, and sheer anarchic excitement that would have obliterated any conventional household. To find anything like his relationship with Fanny—and the comparison is significant in the largest way—one would have to look forward to Lawrence and Frieda.”

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Filed under family, literature, migration, travel, U.S.

by | 23 November 2025 · 8:41 pm

Ukrainian Rikishi Wins Emperor’s Cup

Aonishiki Arata, a 21-year-old rikishi from Vinnitsya, Ukraine (sister city of Kielce, Poland), won the Emperor’s Cup at the just-completed Kyushu Basho in Fukuoka, Japan.  The talented, fast-rising youth in former rikishi Aminishiki‘s new Ajigawa Stable is now being considered for Ozeki (Champion) rank in Sumo’s Top Makuuchi Division. Congratulations to him. おめでとう！

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by | 21 November 2025 · 10:41 pm

RLS in the “Long Depression”

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 276-277:

This was the time of a “Long Depression” that lasted for six years throughout Europe and the United States. Britain was hardest hit of all. Louis was now confronted with a reality he had been insulated from, and as Furnas says, “There rubbed against him the direct knowledge that to be penniless was more miserable than picturesque; that economic disaster was cruel to individuals as well as abstractly depressing to masses; that alcoholism was incapacitating, not jolly.”

In many ways The Amateur Emigrant anticipates Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London half a century later.

Those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. . . . Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar doors broken and removed for firewood; of homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never taken them home to me, or represented these distresses livingly to my imagination.

In a real sense Louis was escaping from defeats of his own. “We were a company of the rejected. The drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land were now fleeing pitifully to another, and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England.” Of Scotland too, of course. “Skilled mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters were fleeing as from the native country of starvation.” What skills was he himself bringing?

Yet a surprising optimism prevailed. “It must not be supposed that these people exhibited depression. The scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear was shed on board the vessel. All were full of hope for the future, and showed an inclination to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing, and all began to scrape acquaintance with small jests and ready laughter.” Louis always enjoyed children, and noted with amusement that they were attracted to each other “like dogs” and went around “all in a band, as thick as thieves at a fair,” while the adults were still “ceremoniously maneuvering on the outskirts of acquaintance.”

As the title of The Amateur Emigrant suggests, he belonged among these people only in a sense. It would be some years before he could support himself by writing, but his parents might resume their subsidies before then, as indeed did happen. His fellow travelers were not just emigrants but immigrants, whereas (despite what the passenger list said) he had no intention of making a home in America. In much the same way, by the time Orwell published his book he had ended his experiment of being down and out. Still, the voyage was a turning point. “Travel is of two kinds, and this voyage of mine across the ocean combined both. ‘Out of my country and myself I go,’ sings the old poet: and I was not only travelling out of my country in latitude and longitude, but out of myself in diet, associates, and consideration.”

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Filed under Britain, democracy, economics, labor, literature, migration, U.S.

by | 19 November 2025 · 11:45 pm

RLS as Amateur Emigrant

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 272-273:

As Louis relates in his book about the voyage, The Amateur Emigrant, he engaged a second-class cabin for ₤8, ₤2 more than passengers in steerage paid, which meant that he was furnished with bedding and had a private room with a table to write on. Still, it was only a little enclave in the midst of steerage. Located near the machinery that powered the ship, the steerage was crowded, malodorous, and poorly ventilated.

Alfred Stieglitz’s classic photograph (fig. 38), taken on the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907, makes it clear that steerage passengers got up on deck whenever they could. Still higher up, the wealthy ladies and gentlemen are literally looking down on them.

In Edinburgh Louis had been accustomed to mix with working-class people in a rather touristic way, but now he was one of them, although paying for second class did qualify him as technically a gentleman. “In the steerage there are males and females; in the second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time after I came aboard I thought I was only a male, but in the course of a voyage of discovery between decks I came on a brass plate, and learned that I was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course. I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.”

The description “steamship” may conjure up images of a mighty vessel like the Queen Mary, but the Devonia was low-slung and modest in size, a vessel of thirty-five hundred tons (the Queen Mary was eighty-one thousand). There were just 256 passengers. Nicholas Rankin had the inspiration of tracking down the original passenger list in the New York Public Library. Fifty-one people were in the first-class saloon and identified as clerks, divines, and nil—not unemployed, but too rich to need employment. Twenty-two were in the second-class cabin: 15 Scots including Louis, 6 Scandinavians, and an Irishman. The remaining 183 were in steerage. They were Scottish, Irish, German, Scandinavian, and a Russian. Thirty occupations were listed, including brewer, carpenter, lawyer, marble cutter, and silk weaver.

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by | 6 November 2025 · 10:03 pm

Escaping Russia to Riga, 1921

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2673ff.

The last prison that Cooper was in was Vladykino. Here with two Polish officers he decided to escape. This time he succeeded. In a way he was forced to escape by his Polish counterparts. In his report filed after reaching Warsaw, he wrote that the two Polish prisoners managed to brake into the prison office in order to forge a few documents for the escape. At this point there was no return. Cooper was very well aware that not only the two direct perpetrators might be shot dead on the spot. He, after all, was considered to be a dangerous anti-revolutionary and enemy of the people. The escape must have happened at the beginning of March, 1921.

Since Cooper himself did not know Russian, he pretended to be mute, and on the long march from Moscow to the Latvian border, Lt. Stanisław Sokołowski and Corporal Stanisław Zalewski facilitated everything for him. They marched in the direction of Wielkie Łuki with Latvia as their general destination, which was then, as through the entire inter-war period, the most efficient crossing point between the workers’ paradise and the outside world. It was through this very border that Boris Savinkov, the famous terrorist, returned to Russia, lured by the mirage of the great anti–Bolshevik conspiracy. Food was obtained by exchanging the clothes they had received in the Amcross packages. The escapees brushed with arrest several times. They were, after all, moving across completely unknown territory with neither a compass nor a map. Cooper recalled that he spent one night up to his neck in water. In any case in an expedition covering over 800 kilometers, the sympathy, or at least indifference, of the local population had to play a crucial role. The last five days of the route to the border was on foot through mud and swamps. At the last minute, a smuggler they had engaged tried to betray the escapees by refusing to lead them across the border. Only threatened with death did he decide to fulfill his part of the contract. The border was crossed at 2:00 A.M. on April 23, 1921. “We came to ‘Amcross’ in rags and without shoes, hungry and completely fatigued,” as Cooper wrote in his first dispatch from Riga.

The shoes were payment for the smuggler who had led them across the border. Cooper would not have been himself if he had not immediately expressed his gratitude to Amcross and brought attention to the need for better care of the American prisoners still held by the Bolsheviks. He wrote about this a few weeks later, to Hoover among others, including a few practical hints. He brought attention to the still existing legal avenues of action by Western charitable organizations in Russia, he stressed the attitude of the two Polish officers and the local population. As an eyewitness, he was also a credible source of information about the conditions prevailing under the communist rule in Russia: “Cooper, a prisoner in Russia, states that Russia is full of propaganda against United States, France and Great Britain; people are told that these countries are responsible for all trouble in Russia. German influence is strong and popular.” In another report he confirmed the level of control by the new regime. “Absolute control of Bolsheviks, either they will stay in control or anarchy.” This experience of the nature of the communist system, gained through direct contact with the iron hand of terror, remained with Cooper throughout his life. He became an unrelenting opponent of the system, and he intended to write a book about his experiences. However he never fully realized his intention. The only fragments were included in his book Things Men Die For. It is worth mentioning here the durability of the anti–American propaganda, whose influence is present even in contemporary academic works. Simonenko, already mentioned in these pages, states in an article about the Kościuszko Squadron that after the signing of the Polish-Bolshevik peace in Riga, Cooper was most ordinarily released from prison and arrived to Poland without any problems. He does not say, however, why he had to overcome the boundless Russian territory in rags and on foot, nor why he crossed the border illegally.

…

Meanwhile, the Polish authorities and the squadron airmen awaited the miraculous rescue of their comrade. His journey from Riga to Warsaw began on April 29, his train reached the capital on May 3, the day celebrated by Poles as Constitution Day. As a witness to the event recalled, “he received a great ovation.” It so happened that this was the first time that Constitution Day had been celebrated without a major war being waged, although the borders had not yet been officially recognized by the Conference of Ambassadors. It is true that in Silesia the third uprising had broken out against the Germans, but Poland was not officially involved in that conflict. Help was provided to the insurgents unofficially using paramilitary organizations such as the Polish Military Organization. Thus, the 3rd of May in 1921 was celebrated solemnly and in an atmosphere of peace, as the new constitution was declared in March and a peace treaty was signed with Russia.

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Filed under Baltics, language, migration, military, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 6 November 2025 · 8:41 am

Pilot Captured by Bolsheviks, 1920

From Kosciuszko, We Are Here!: American Pilots of the Kosciuszko Squadron in Defense of Poland, 1919-1921, by Janusz Cisek (McFarland, 2025), Kindle Loc. 2636ff.

The Bolshevik Cavalry immediately captured him and took him to the HQ of the 2nd Brigade of the 6th Division of Budenny’s Konarmia [‘Horse Army’]. Peasants who managed to see the events gave an exact description of the airman’s appearance, and on the basis of this, Fauntleroy identified Cooper.

As it happened, the plane was damaged during the landing and Cooper himself lost consciousness. When he came round, he found himself surrounded by Budenny’s cavalrymen. At that moment, the wounds and burns he had suffered in action in September 1918 were his succor. One of the basic Bolshevik practices towards prisoners and people of the captured areas was to seek out the “representatives of the Bourgeousie.” One of the most popular tests of class membership was an analysis of their hands. The so-called “white hands” signified a man who had never done any manual work and therefore was an “enemy of the people.” However, Cooper’s hands were burnt. His second lucky break was his army discharge underwear, which he had on that day. The underwear was stamped with the name of the previous owner, who was Corporal Frank Mosher. Both lucky events allowed Cooper to maintain that he was in reality a corporal of that name who had been enlisted into the Polish Armed Forces. Of course, the Bolsheviks did not entirely believe that story, because even within their ranks the names of the American pilots were known. Apart from that, Cooper had some incriminating documents in his pocket, such as notes addressed to Fauntleroy and, even worse, his memo to Col. Castle regarding the importance of the air force. Its content was unambiguous. Cooper wrote that through their participation in the war, the airmen of the squadron were gaining experience of the role of the air force in a war of maneuvers in geographically wide-open country. This experience, he noted, could have significance in the event of a revival of the war with Mexico. He also summarized his thoughts on the subject of the air force combat effectiveness against the infantry and cavalry. They were certainly not commensurate with even the most sharp-witted corporal.

Cooper was transported to the Division HQ, where he was interrogated by the komdyw, or Division Commander, Timoszenko, who was later to become a Soviet Marshal. They tempted him with the proposition of service as an instructor of the Bolshevik Air Force, but he consistently refused. Even a five-day visit to the Bolshevik Air Squadron did not help to change his mind. Early in his captivity, Cooper attempted to escape. Unfortunately after two days he was caught and imprisoned with a heavy guard. He found himself in Moscow, where in all he spent as much as ten months in various penal facilities. Prison food rations consisted of barely half a pound of black bread per day—and not always. Years later, he recalled his experiences in a reply to a letter from Capt. Marek Mażyński, a Polish airman of 303rd Squadron who in the first years of World War II was also a Soviet prisoner. The men compared notes on prison conditions in the 1920s and the 1940s. Cooper wrote:

For a week in Moscow, nobody had a bite of eat—nothing. One of the prisons I was in was fairly good. The second one was just about as you describe. The third was rougher and tougher than any you describe; there was a good reason for this as my imprisonment was during the starvation period of 1920–1921, where for one week in January (as I have already said) there was absolutely no food in Moscow. Not only had the transportation broke down, but this was the first time the peasants refused to give food to the city workers…. Nothing is more terrible than the breaking of the human spirit by torture, starvation, and the sadistic questioning by “Cheka.” I want to say that in the toughest prison I was in, where men died every night from lack of food and typhus, there were two prisoners who kept other prisoners from complete disintegration. One of the men had lost all his teeth while working in the coal mines of Siberia; he was a 30-year-old baker who had only one tooth. He was from Łódź, Poland. The other man was a man who spoke only a little Polish. This, of course, was me. I take no credit, but credit only the tough training I had at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.

The prisoners’ situation was saved by food parcels from “Amcross” and one of the English charitable organizations. The living conditions in jail were also severe for other reasons. Cooper recalled gaining permission from the prison authorities to hold prayers in the presence of a priest on Christmas Eve. It was an evening when companions in misery were people of differing confessions and nationalities, including prisoners related to the richest American families. On that day they were joined in prayer, although not all of them were believers. The prisoners’ prayers cemented the Bolsheviks’ hatred towards them as representatives of the social order that they had vowed to destroy.

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by | 23 October 2025 · 4:53 pm

Goodwill Tours of Japan, 1927

From Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer, by Bill Staples, Jr. (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Locations 904-910:

In January, the FAC [Fresno Athletic Club] announced its arrangements to make a second tour of Asia in March with 40 games in Japan scheduled and plans to take the team to China and Korea with a stop in Honolulu on the way home. There were a number of new players on the team. Not included in the initial news wire was the fact that the FAC were visiting Japan at the invitation of Meiji University, or more specifically, Zenimura’s cousin, friend and colleague, Takizo Matsumoto, the man formerly known as Frank Narushima, one of the cofounders founders of the FAC. In February, the Japanese American newspaper Rafu Shimpo announced similar news about Lon Goodwin and his Philadelphia Royal Giants.

According to historian Kazuo Sayama, the Philadelphia Royal Giants traveled to Japan on its own budget and “on recommendation by a certain Japanese American entrepreneur in California.” Although he is never mentioned by name, historians believe that the entrepreneurial Californian is Zenimura based on his previous interactions with Goodwin and their teams throughout the 1925-26 seasons.

Much more about the goodwill tours online here.

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by | 23 October 2025 · 3:02 am

California Japanese Baseball League, 1926

From Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer, by Bill Staples, Jr. (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Locations 846-853:

On March 5, the Associated Press announced that “a Japanese baseball league for California, the first of its kind to permanently organize, has been formed for a schedule of Sunday day afternoon games. Fresno, Stockton, Alameda and Sacramento are represented on the circuit. The players are all Japanese, and the games will be played in private parks owned by the Japanese baseball associations in the respective cities on the circuit. The Stockton team has incurred considerable expense in importing a number of players from the Hawaiian islands, while Fresno has gathered in star athletes from various parts of the United States. The schedule starts next Sunday and closes November 3, with an intermission during the summer months.”

In the first game of the season for the California Japanese Baseball League (CJBL), the Fresno Athletic Club blanked the Yamato Club of Stockton, 4 to 0, at the Japanese Ballpark in Fresno. Nitta held the Stockton lineup to two hits, while Nushida and Munishi were touched for 11 hits by the Fresno crew. The big sticks for the Japanese were carried by Nakagawa, who drove in two runs – base runners Zenimura and Sukita – with a long single in the fifth. Yoshikawa, Kunitomo, and Iwata all got wood on the ball to drive in the other two runs.

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by | 21 October 2025 · 6:57 pm

Japan vs. U.S. Baseball, 1924

From Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer, by Bill Staples, Jr. (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Locations 695-708:

Captain Zenimura and his boys lost two of the three games against the Salt Lake Bees in the spring of 1924, but ultimately they – and to some degree, Japanese American baseball itself – won the respect of their Caucasian peers in the Pacific Coast League. After the series with Salt Lake, the FAC looked forward to some heated contests against Japanese American ball clubs. In April they welcomed the Stockton Yamato to the Firemen and Policemen’s ballpark and defeated them, 5 to 4. The Fresno Bee also announced that Zenimura’s club “will play a two game series with the Meiji University team here on May 10th and 11th, after which they will plan an invasion of the Orient.”

The Meiji University team – the college champions of Japan – planned to tour the East and Midwest, in addition to its games against West Coast clubs including Zenimura’s, and then return home on June 29. As it turned out, the San Jose Asahi would be the only Japanese American team to defeat the 1924 Meiji ballclub on its tour in the U.S.” Ironically, while the Meiji University ballclub was in the United States touring, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924 which effectively ended all Japanese immigration to the U.S. During the months of June and July, Zenimura was busy making plans for the upcoming tour to Japan. Once all the details were addressed and players secured, Zeni distributed the following information on the Associated Press night wire:

FRESNO, July 17. – The Fresno Athletic Club will sail from San Francisco September 2 on board the President Pierce for a tour of the Hawaiian Islands and Japan, it was announced today. The regular team will be reinforced by Pitcher Miyahara of Centre College, Kentucky; Outfielder Tsuda of Whitman College, Washington, Pitcher Nushida of Stockton and a couple of Fresno players yet to be selected. The Fresno Athletic Club claims the Japanese baseball championship of America.

In preparation for the tour, Zenimura had the club increase workouts from three to four times a week. In addition, he scheduled a best-of-three-game series against the tough Fresno Tigers, an independent team led by new manager Art Ramage. The Tigers’ new skipper competed at Santa Clara College and enjoyed brief stints in professional baseball with the New York Americans (1916) and Sacramento Senators (1918).

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by | 20 October 2025 · 8:31 pm

California Baseball in 1921

From Kenichi Zenimura, Japanese American Baseball Pioneer, by Bill Staples, Jr. (McFarland, 2011), Kindle Locations 487-499:

According to historian William F. McNeil, the California Winter League (CWL) experienced an increase in talent during the 1920-21 season. McNeil called it a “breakthrough” year with competition playing at the AA and AAA level. The CWL rise in talent was attributed to the participation of Negro Leagues caliber players with the L.A. White Sox, Lincoln Giants and Alexander Giants. They played all of their games at the newly constructed Anderson Park (aka White Sox Park), named after local black businessman Doc Anderson, and their rosters boasted future Hall of Famers Andy Cooper and Biz Mackey, and a host of local black athletes, including University of Southern California star running back Johnny Riddle. Zenimura and his FAC team would get their chance four years later to test their mettle against these great ballplayers.

In February 1921 in New York, a group of Japanese representatives from Waseda, Tokyo, Yokohama and Kobe universities announced that they were eager to take “an all-star baseball team made up of members of the Race,” also known as Negro League players, to Japan. Spokesmen for the delegation told reporters that they were eager to see a first-class team of Negro Leaguers play Waseda University, with the goal of helping to foster interest in the pastime in Japan.

Waseda University would have to wait another six years to play a first-class team of Negro League players in Japan. Yet, they only needed to wait three weeks to compete against a first-class team of Japanese American players in Hawaii. On May 9, 1921, the college boys from Waseda battled the Hawaiian Asahi, featuring many of Zeni’s former Island teammates and future FAC [= Fresno Athletic Club] teammates. The visiting ballclub was walloped by the Asahis to the tune of 8 to 2.

But U.S.-Japanese baseball relations flourished in the later part of 1921. The Los Angeles Times reported that nine clubs from the Pacific Coast and Hawaii had either made the trip or were making plans to tour Japan. The list of teams invading Japan included a PCL [= Pacific Coast League] all-star star team led by Seattle baseball man Frank Miya; semipro players from Canada and Hawaii; the Seattle Asahi, the top Nisei team of the West Coast; college teams, including the University of California and University of Washington; and the Sherman Indian School of Southern California.

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