Dubuque Warriors into Workers

I’m currently reading Russell L. Johnson’s Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City, Fordham University Press, 2003. The northern city in this scholarly book is Dubuque, Iowa.

Warriors into Workers examines the impact of the Civil War on the “Key City.” Russell Johnson argues that the war helped transform Dubuque from a frontier community of miners, artisans, and merchants to an urban industrial and manufacturing center. From Johnson’s introduction:

Military service in the Civil War, I argue, made a significant contribution to the creation of American industrial society, a contribution that has been heretofore unappreciated. Soldiers from Dubuque entered the Union army from a midsize, nonindustrialized city, were immersed for up to three years–sometimes more–in an intense urban-industrial experience, and then returned to a city increasingly penetrated by industrial capitalism.

Johnson’s in-depth academic analysis, for example of property data from census records of business class (low and high nonmanual), working class (artisan and unskilled), and other classes of independent soldiers and soldier-sons is, well . . . laborious. Johnson’s analysis, however, is balanced by fascinating firsthand accounts and descriptions of daily life in Dubuque and the Union Army before, during, and after the Civil War.

I’d love to read many of the sources cited by Johnson, for example Josiah Conzett’s Recollections of People and Events, Dubuque, Iowa 1846-1890, Franc B. Wilkie’s The Iowa First: Letters from the War and Pen and Powder, and Joseph B. Dorr’s Diary of Prison Life. I’d also like to learn more about Florence Healey, the controversial young woman who replaced a male clerk in John Bell’s dry goods store during the Civil War.

I’m very interested in Dennis A. Mahony’s The Prisoner of State, 1863. Dennis Mahony, a Dubuque newspaper editor and leader of the large local Irish community, was arrested at his home in Dubuque by a U.S. Marshal and jailed in Washington, D.C. for several months in 1862. Mahony, a Democrat, was an outspoken critic of the Lincoln administration and the war. While never formally charged with a crime or tried in court, Mahony was supposedly imprisoned by authority of the War Department for “discouraging enlistments” and for disloyalty to the government.

I wonder to what extent if any Dubuque’s early Copperhead or anti-war reputation fed into the later perception of Dubuque as a provincial backwater.

Origins of “Double Dubuque” Part Two

In my previous post, I said newspaper columnist Matt Weinstock supposedly wrote a book entitled Double Dubuque, Fables and Foibles of Los Angeles. Weinstock’s Double Dubuque book was mentioned in Fred Beck’s “Farmers’ Market” column in the L.A. Times on July 17, 1945.

Oddly, I could not locate a copy of Weinstock’s Double Dubuque, nor could I confirm that such a book was ever published. Weinstock did publish a book in 1947 called My L.A., so in hopes of discovering the elusive origins of the epithet “Double Dubuque,” I borrowed Weinstock’s My L.A. through interlibrary loan.

My L.A. is a compilation of descriptions and anecdotes of 1930s Los Angeles taken from Weinstock’s then popular Daily News column. Disappointingly, My L.A. contains no references to “Double Dubuque.” The only mention of Iowa, in fact, appears on pages 105-106 where Weinstock jokes about the varying estimates of attendance of the annual Iowa Picnic.

So what happened to Matt Weintsock’s supposed book Double Dubuque? In the introduction to My L.A., written by none other than Fred Beck of the L.A. Times “Farmers’ Market” column, Beck makes the following confession:

At this point, I want to tell you a little secret. Forgive me if I appear to smirk, faintly, but once a long time ago I printed a false statement in a sort of a column that I write and which appears in the West’s most polite daily. I stated that Matt Weinstock was writing a book about Los Angeles. Two things happened. First a lot of people wrote for a copy of the book. Second, a lot of publishers swooped down on Matt. He hadn’t started the book, but these events caused him to do so, which is what I had hoped to see happen.

So Fred Beck’s 1945 hoax fooled me! There never was a book entitled Double Dubuque, and the origins of this phrase remain a mystery.

An unrelated postscript:

In 1934, Frank Merriam defeated novelist Upton Sinclair for the governorship of California. Merriam was born in Hopkinton, Iowa, less than 50 miles southwest of Dubuque. While there appears to be no direct connection between the rise of Governor Merriam and the origins of phrase “Double Dubuque,” the coincidence is notable.

Origins of Nickname “Double Dubuque” for L.A.

The following dialogue between Fred MacMurray (NEFF) and Barbara Stanwyck (PHYLLIS) caught my attention while recently watching the 1944 film noir classic Double Indemnity:

NEFF
Where did you pick up this tea drinking? You’re not English, are you?

PHYLLIS
No. Californian. Born right here in Los Angeles.

NEFF (smirking)
They say native Californians all come from Iowa.

Dubuquers should easily recognize the humor and irony in this allusion to their home state. During the mid-to-late 1940s, Rufus Blair, a publicist for Paramount Pictures, the same studio that produced Double Indemnity, popularized the phrase “Double Dubuque” to describe Hollywood.

In the 40s, Blair’s dispatches containing the latest Hollywood gossip and rumors appeared in newspapers across the U.S., including the Chicago Daily Tribune and Washington Post. Blair wryly listed “Double Dubuque” as the dateline for each of his reports.

On June 9, 1949, the Chicago Daily Tribune explained that Blair was “a former Chicagoan” whose “Double Dubuque” characterization of Hollywood was used in “an admixture of awe, derision, and nostalgia.”

More about Rufus Blair appeared in the Los Angeles Times on March 10, 1987:

Jack Hirshberg, an old-time Hollywood press agent, writes that Blair was also one of that glib breed — a San Francisco newspaperman who was lured south in the 1930s to do national publicity for Paramount.

“Rufus was never taken in by Hollywood,” Hirshberg says. “His irreverence for the sham he, himself, helped create in order to build audiences for the studio’s films and stars was one of his many endearing points.

“Rufus was first of all a newspaperman. . . . His wit was sharp, his typewriter articulate. Rufus was a lovely man. He died two or three years ago in San Francisco.”

Well, at least he got out of Double Dubuque.

Although Rufus Blair popularized “Double Dubuque” as a nickname for Hollywood, he probably was not the first to use it. Newspaper columnist Matt Weinstock reportedly wrote a book in 1945 entitled Double Dubuque, Fables and Foibles of Los Angeles. I cannot verify that such a book exists, but I have requested a copy of Weinstock’s 1947 book My L.A. via interlibrary loan.

Unverified claims that comedian W.C. Fields coined the phrase “Double Dubuque” have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, for example in the column “The TV Scene” by Cecil Smith on January 16, 1964, and in “Putting Down Town” by Ray Hebert, December 14, 1981. W.C. Fields starred in several movies produced by Paramount.

Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken is frequently cited as inventor of the phrase “Double Dubuque” as an epithet for Los Angeles. Mencken savaged L.A. in his writings, describing it as “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis” and “the capital of American idiots,” and by claiming that “there were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on Earth.” But if H.L. Mencken ever called L.A. “Double Dubuque,” I have not been able to find the original source or quotation.

Some scholars assert that Los Angeles was called “Double Dubuque” as early as 1900. For example, see Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions by Edward W. Soja (2000) page 123, or Michael Engh, S.J. in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s edited by Tom Sitton and William Deverell (2001) page 202.

These scholars say Los Angeles was dubbed “Double Dubuque” and “Iowa by the Sea” because of the large numbers of “middlebrow” and “homogeneous” Iowans who settled there around 1900. But again, they do not provide original sources or citations.