Iowa Heritage Illustrated

English

Iowa Heritage Illustrated, vol.87 no.3, Fall 2006

Hanke, Sheila

COURTESY ÀBRAMOWTTZ CREATIVE STUDIOS
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Stitch by Stitch, Step by Step
by Sheila Hanke
magine sn ipp ing  and d e lica te ly  rem o v ing  
4,000 stitches, one at a tim e, from  layers o f 
soiled, b rittle  gauze. In 18 8 1,1894, and sometime 
after 1904, w h ite  co tton  gauze was sewn on to  
the fro n t and back o f the silk battle flags in the 
capitol in the belief that this would stabilize and 
pro tect them. Today, a firs t step in conserving the 
flags here at the State H istorical Society’s Battle 
Flags Conservation Laboratory is to  remove the 
deteriorating gauze, stitch by stitch.
The layers o f gauze were machine-sewn in 
horizontal rows across the flag. The number o f 
rows varied, from  7 to  KM.The length o f the stitch
varied too, from  3 stitches per inch to  22. Remov­
ing the stitches can take up to  a week fo r each 
layer o f gauze. A bou t every 45 minutes, my lab 
assistant and I have to  take a break to  relieve eye 
stress and muscle tension.
Once the stitches are removed, the rows o f 
holes left by the sewing machine are like perfora ­
tions. Too much tension o r pressure can shatter 
the silk right along that perforated line.
W hen the gauze is removed, you see what 
the layers o f fabric have hidden from  your eyes. 
So this is what it really looks like! N ow  you begin 
to  understand the flag.
Summer 2006 71
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COURTESY ABRAMOWITZ CREATIVE STUDIOS
A  lo w -v e lo c ity  vacuum  is a ttached to  a sterile end chamber, which is moved over 
the flag’s surface to  pick up particulate matter. 
W e have found trace amounts o f food, soil, po l­
len,gunpowder,and soot from  campfires. Further 
study o f these collected particles w ill help an­
swer more questions about the flag.
W hen we clean the fringe we often find inter­
esting items because the fringe was flapping in 
the w ind and snagging things. W e ’ve identified 
seeds, feathers, bits o f branches, even pieces o f 
money. On one flag we found a tiny piece o f wall­
paper. I still have no idea where that came from.
72 Iowa Heritage Illustrated
v
COURTESY ABRAMOWfTZ CREATIVE STUDIOS
I
I
T he surface o f each flag is gently vacuumed to  remove dust, soot, and o th e r surface de­
bris accumulated over the past 140 years. A  fine 
screen is placed over the vacuum nozzle to  pre­
vent any damage to  fragments o f the flag.
Every flag is different. H ow  and where the flags 
were used during the w ar and how they were 
stored after the w ar mean that each requires an 
individual conservation plan.
A lthough the original colors have aged con­
siderably, the battle flags must have been beauti­
ful in the ir g lo ry— deep blues, rich reds, silver
eagles, yellow-gold fringe. Just stunning.
Summer 2006 73
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COURTESY ABRAMO WITZ CREATIVE STUDIOS
A n u ltra so n ic  hum id ify ing  to o l called a Preservation Pencil cleans the painted ar­
eas on the silk, and the darkened paint gradually 
becomes bright again. O f course, the flags had to  
be brightly colored so they could be seen in battle.
Flag makers chose silk because of its beauty 
and because it gave the flag loft. The paint on flags 
might have been applied by a local individual if it 
was a flag from  a community, o r by a professional 
artis t in places like Philadelphia where flags were 
mass produced. A rtis ts  used a variety o f chemi­
cal additives, o r  diffusers, in the paints. This 
speeded up the drying time but made the paint 
unstable.
O ver the years, the rigid paint and the silk con­
tracted at different rates.The humidifying tool intro­
duces contro lled m oisture allowing fabric dis­
torted by years of hanging to  be gently repositioned.
74 lozcn Heritage Illustrated
To relax and flatten the surface, glass plates 
and a 100 percent cotton-rag barrier are placed 
over the flag fo r a period o f tim e ranging from  a
few hours to  as long as tw o  days.
4
COURTESY ABRAMOWHZ CREATIVE STUOIOS
U
sing m icro dissecting tweezers, we care- how  rapidly a flag was p ro d u ce d  in o rd e r to
fully move minuscule fragments back to  f i l l orders from  th e  army,
the ir p roper locations. Some are as sho rt as a N o te  the narrow  rectangle in the right fo re ­
quarter o f an inch. Mylar polyester film  and PH- ground. Pieces o f battle flags were sometimes cut
neutral tissue p ro tec t the flag and help hold the and removed by soldiers as mementos o r souve-
fragments in place. nirs o f the ir m ilita ry service.
As we w o rk  on the flags, we try  to  get into 
the heads o f the people w ho sewed and painted 
them. W e need to  understand how they were 
constructed and w hat materials were used, and 
where they were flown in the w ar— as a regi­
mental banner in camp, fo r instance, o r as a national 
flag in the heat o f battle.
If a com m unity made a flag, there m ight have 
been several people who sewed it, perhaps using 
different kinds and shades o f thread. Even the 
stitches might vary in the ir style, length, o r ten ­
sion. The methods o f construction also hint at
Summer 2006 75
F inally the flag is placed between tw o  layers o f a m icrofiber fabric called Stabiltex fo r stabil­
ity and protection. W ith o u t piercing the flag, we 
sew around each fragment to  hold it in position 
(see right).
To minimize handling, the flags are stored flat 
in large pullout drawers here in the State His­
torical Society o f Iowa museum collections, w ith  
tem perature and hum idity controls, minimal light 
exposure, and protection from  fire and theft.
During the Civil War, the battle flags received 
the care, attention, and respect of those who made 
them and those who fought under them.Today, 
we are again giving them care, attention, and re­
spect, w ith  the advantage o f state-of-the-art con­
servation techniques. ❖
Sheila Hanke is the collection manager/flag conservator for the Battle 
Flags Project and has worked on the project for six years.
COURTESY ABRAMOWrrZ CREATIVE STUDIOS
76 loica Heritage Illustrated


Stitch by Stitch, Step by Step

Swaim, Ginalie

Boosting the Home Team

Bauer, Douglas

Hocksy and Hoop

Iowa's Passion for the Game

Liepa, John

Not Yet Ready for the Big Leagues: The 1875 Keokuk Westerns, Iowa's First Professional Baseball Team

Hockett, Philip G

As if in a Dream: Automobile Projects and Production in Iowa, 1870-1983

Bergman, Marvin

Reading the Past
Arc o f Justice: A 
Saga o f Race, Civil 
Rights, and Mur­
der in the  Jazz 
Age, by Kevin 
Boyle (New York: 
H. Holt, 2004), 
4 15 pages.
! ARC OF 
JUSTICE
A SAGA OF RACE.  C IV IL  R IGHTS, 
A N D  M URDER IN THE JAZZ AGE
istorian Kevin Boyle's Arc 
of Justice: A Saga of Race, 
Civil Rights, and Murder in 
the Jazz Age relates the 
dramatic and true story 
surrounding the trial of 11 African 
Americans for murder in the mid- 
1920s. It's not only good history, 
but just plain a good book—a 
good reading experience.
At the center of the story are a 
young, emotionally scarred, and 
therefore somewhat insecure 
African American doctor, Ossian 
Sweet, and his young, self-assured 
wife, Gladys. The story, as Profes­
sor Boyle tells it, begins with the 
couple, along with nine friends 
and relatives, defending their 
newly purchased home from the 
threat posed by a white mob 
gathered outside. In the confusion, 
someone in the house opens fire 
from an upstairs window, injuring 
one bystander and killing another. 
All 11 of the people in the house 
are rushed to police headquarters, 
interrogated at length, and 
charged—all 11 of them—with 
murder.
Then Boyle takes us back to 
the rural Florida of Ossian Sweet's 
childhood and the brutal racism 
he witnessed there as Florida's 
white citizens retracted most of 
the gains African Americans had 
made under Reconstruction. We 
follow Sweet to Wilberforce 
University and then to Howard 
Universitv, where he trains toj 9
become a doctor. He decides, 
along with thousands of others 
seeking to escape the Jim Crow
South for opportunities in the 
North, to participate in what 
historians know as the Great 
Migration and to settle in Detroit.
There, as the African American 
community expands dramatically, 
white neighborhoods band to­
gether to defend their communi­
ties from the declining property 
values they fear will follow the 
migration of African Americans 
into their communities. In 1925, 
the year the Sweets move into 
their new home, the Second Ku 
Klux Klan is at its height and has 
even become a powerful political 
force in Detroit. The preceding 
decades have seen race riots in 
many cities North and South, riots 
in which whites—at the least 
provocation—invade African 
American communities, wreaking 
havoc and destruction. (Boyle calls 
them "pogroms” to distinguish 
them from the very different race 
riots many readers will recall from 
the 1960s and 1970s.)
A
s the trial opens, we are
introduced to a fascinating 
cast of characters, many of 
them, like Ossian Sweet, 
unlikely heroes. James 
Weldon Johnson and Walter White 
of the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People 
(NAACP) hope to use the case as a 
wedge to prevent the spread of 
institutionalized, enforced, resi­
dential segregation—and as a tool 
to build an NAACP legal defense
Summer 2006 95
fund. In one of the many elegant 
characterizations that mark the 
book, Boyle comments that 
Johnson "infused NAACP activism 
with an extraordinary dramatic 
flair, beginning with his master­
piece, the 1917 Silent Parade down 
Fifth Avenue, a peerless example 
of protest as performance art, and 
reaching full flower in the literary 
renaissance of 1920s Harlem, 
when Johnson helped to make art 
into a performance of protest."
Johnson and White convince 
Clarence Darrow, America's most 
famous attorney, to take the case.
It was his first case after his 
dramatic performance at the Scopes 
"Monkey" trial in Tennessee, the 
trial about the teaching of evolu­
tion immortalized for future 
generations in the film Inherit the 
Wind. Johnny Smith, Detroit's 
mayor, tries to minimize the social 
divisions that the trial represents, 
even as he capitalizes on the 
political divisions it spawns. Frank 
Murphy, the surprisingly fair- 
minded judge in the trial, will 
eventually become mayor himself 
and later be appointed to the U.S. 
Supreme Court by Franklin 
Roosevelt. Reinhold Niebuhr, 
America's most prominent 20th-
century theologian, is a young 
pastor in Detroit at the time and 
heads a commission to study 
Detroit's race problem.
W
hat makes this book so
special is the extraordi­
nary way it blends 
three tools in the his­
torian's toolkit. First 
and foremost, Boyle is a masterful 
storyteller with a dramatic story to 
tell, which he tells with literary 
flair. He ends chapters and sections 
the way good mystery writers do, 
making you want to keep reading 
to see what happens next.
Second, Boyle engagingly fills 
in the back story. As he pushes the 
history of the U.S. civil rights 
movement back to the 1920s, he 
educates readers about the many 
larger forces that impinge on this 
narrowly focused story. Even 
readers who are well informed 
about many of these large move­
ments in American history— 
Reconstruction, the Great Migra­
tion, urbanization, residential 
segregation, the rise of the Second 
Ku Klux Klan, the founding of the 
NAACP, and the division between 
the followers of Booker T. Wash­
ington and W. E. B. DuBois—will 
learn things they don't know, 
while those who don't recognize 
the terms will be enlightened but 
not overwhelmed.
Finally, Boyle never forgets 
that these large forces in American 
history affect and are transformedJ
by real individual human beings. 
He relates both the dramatic story 
and the accounts of the larger 
forces through the eyes of people— 
flawed heroes and villains whose 
motives he makes understandable.
Alas, this story has little direct 
connection to Iowa (though we do 
learn that Dr. Edward Carter, a 
fellow doctor and fraternityJ
brother to whom Ossian Sweet 
increasingly turned for advice as 
he settled into Detroit society, was 
"the first black doctor to graduate 
from the University of Iowa's 
College of Medicine"). But anyone 
who is interested in history will 
find this to be an illuminating and 
engaging story. ❖
Marvin Bergman's occasional column, 
"Reading the Past," introduces selected 
books to our readers. Bergman is editor of 
the Annals of Iowa, published by the 
State Historical Society.
96 loica Heritage Illustrated


Reading the Past: Arc of Justice

African Americans in Iowa Baseball

Iowa Women in Baseball