How American Magazine Drove Harry Underground
As the frenzy of mainstream media gushes hundreds of column inches on Harry Smith during his centenary, let’s go back in time 80 years to consider his introduction to national recognition, the March 1943 American Magazine article written by Vance Packard. Allen Ginsberg described Harry as “famous everywhere underground” - is it possible that this early brush with newsprint notoriety drove Harry to avoid fame for the rest of his life?
Harry’s youth in Bellingham and Anacortes is detailed within a community context in Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences. New facts and perspectives resound, drifting through the spell of obscurity that seems to surround Smith’s timeline. Many of the distortions in Harry’s history can be traced to errors in and misinterpretations of this 1943 American Magazine story.
Before considering Harry’s reaction to the publication of the article in 1943, let’s wonder how it came about. Why did Harry Smith’s ethnographic work cross the desk of editor, Sumner Blossom, previously of Popular Science? Why did anti-marketing muckraker, Vance Packard, take an interest?
Young Harry was an outgoing letter writer; he sent an essay on democracy to the Anacortes American in the fall of 1941. We may imagine he sent letters to other publications. During this era, The American Magazine sponsored a nationwide contest, an annual project of the American Youth Forum. Harry must have noticed when Kirvin Smith, civics and history teacher at Anacortes High School, held meetings every week to help students entering the 1940 American Magazine contest. The next year, the 1941 contest was promoted and followed in numerous small-town newspapers around the country:
“These essay contests are to give the students an opportunity to express their thoughts, feelings and hopes for their own future and the future of America. The subject of the article division is “What Americanism Means to Me,” and the subject of the art division is “What my Community Contributes to the Nation.” Youth Forum student awards are $1,000 for the best original article not exceeding 2,000 words and $1,000 for the best painting, drawing or photograph.”
We know that as early as February 1941, when he was 17 years old, Harry was visiting and corresponding with two anthropologists at the University of Washington, Erna Gunther and Melville Jacobs. The local press was aware of Harry’s interest in Northwest Indians, covering his 1942 public presentations on the subject in Anacortes, and then Bellingham. Perhaps these Herald and American pieces rippled toward Park Avenue.
The likelier scenario is Harry catching the eye of Packard or Blossom by sending photographs of his ethnographic work for the 1941-42 American Youth Forum contests. Vance Packard, working in the “Interesting People Section” of the magazine, then sent a query to Professor Jacobs at UW, whose reply of October 30, 1942 opined that Harry had done “very impressive work,” that “should be treated with utmost seriousness and respect.”
Here are some dots of fact (in bold below) with a few imaginary lines running between them:
After Harry sent his photographs and descriptions of his studies at local reservations to American Magazine, they replied to the Apex cannery, saying that he hadn’t won, but they wanted to do an article on him. The letter was forwarded to the Smith’s new South Bellingham home in the summer of 1942. Kenneth S. Brown, a commercial photographer based in Seattle, was assigned to contact Harry and schedule a photo session for the planned article. Harry got in touch with Julius Charles and Chief August Martin – who both had appeared, with a Lummi group wearing regalia, in an April 1942 Bellingham Herald photograph. With Martin and Charles, Smith arranged a similar group photograph in the Lummi Smokehouse. Harry got a fresh haircut, and black and white flash photographs were shot by Brown late in 1942. (Harry later gave two of these photos to Bill Holm, who noted the K. S Brown stamp on the back when he supplied them to the Harry Smith Archives). As the publication date neared, Blossom decided to run a color photo. So Brown was assigned again and reached out to Harry, whose hair had grown out a few weeks. Under deadline, perhaps early in 1943, the color session was arranged for Harry’s house. Lummi tribe members, Chief August Martin, Patrick George and Jimmy Morrice, came to the Smith family’s Fairhaven home. They posed with Harry engineering an acetate recording, there in his bedroom, with a Coast Salish cattail mat hanging in the background.
How did it affect young, idealistic Harry’s feelings and hopes about community and the future of America when - despite Melville Jacobs suggestion to Packard - his work was trivialized, and his Lummi collaborators were disrespected? The whole framing of the feature was distorted by the headline’s racist play on words: “Injuneer.”
There are the then-routine 20th century racist tropes, stating that Harry “has studied many variety of redskins” and “primitive Indian tribes” and “found Indians friendly except when drunk.” Having his cross-cultural project summarized so offensively had to disappoint Harry, both in relation to his own pursuit of notoriety and the media’s incapacity for constructive journalism. Harry seemed to eschew mainstream publicity from that point forward, though he was interviewed and written about by the underground press later in life.
Some of the other errors in the American Magazine simply distort Harry’s timeline, like stating that “at age 15 began making expeditions by bicycle from his home in South Bellingham, Wash.,” when he actually lived in Anacortes until almost age 19. Everyone loves a child prodigy, but there is no record of Harry’s ethnographic field work prior a letter to Melville Jacobs dated December 2nd, 1941, in which 18-year-old Harry wrote from Anacortes, “It might interest you to know that I have collected several hundred Samish and Skagit nouns in the phonetic alphabet that you gave me, and am now starting on verbs.”
Lest folks think this age skepticism unwarranted, Harry himself said of his film catalog dating: “…there’s confusion in the notes, because I tend to glamorize that I did such and such at a much earlier age than I did it.” (Sitney interview, 1965) Does it matter if Harry may not have begun Coast Salish field work at 15? The earliest of his surviving Lummi acetate recordings notes they occurred in 1942, when Harry was 18 and 19. Bill Holm also questioned the Packard piece: “It also says he started his work from there when he was 15, which I believe is not accurate.” In Bill’s Northwest Film Forum presentation on Harry he states, “He was a young man, a young teenager 17, 18, 19 years old, doing work that I felt was probably the equivalent of graduate student work in anthropology.”
Harry had a knack for being written and talked about: it started early and continues to this day. Stan Brakhage speaks with mirth about Harry’s gamesmanship in interviews, advising that reading between the lines is a necessity for trying to understand Harry. Substantiation of ideas viewed this way are not always dependable and are often refuted by the historical record (e.g., Crowley paternity). Harry made fun and people remembered him for that.
Freaking out about Harry’s myth-making is not the concern (he admits to exaggeration, and then there’s the natural margin of error when recalling anyone’s past of over 20 years prior to the time of interviews). That said, interpretative errors around Harry’s statements (or stories about Harry) that enter his 21st century public creative timeline might as well be examined - and reexamined - and corrected if necessary.
Next month (or year) I’ll write more about Mary Louise Hammond Smith’s teaching career. The 1943 American Magazine article on Harry Smith states: “Picked up his interest in Indians from his mother, who taught school among them in her maiden days,” that is, prior to marriage and Harry.
