the man who signs a dictated letter but hasn't read it

Above World War II American ship camouflage, as applied to the USS Gladiator (1944), a minesweeper. US Navy photograph, public domain, AI colorized.

•••

Sophie Irene Loeb, WHAT IS CAMOUFLAGE? in The Washington Post, January 31, 1918, p. 7—

…The husband who pretends to be furious because his wife was so slow in letting him in the house that she forgets to scold him for being out late. When a man tells a woman he understands her perfectly. When a strange saleslady calls you "dearie," while waiting on you. The eating place that decreases the portion and increases the price on the plea of patriotism. When wifey buys her husband a lovely sofa cushion for his birthday. When a stranger tells you how much he is respected in his own home town. When a dressed up doll keeps talking about how she "doesn't care a thing about money." The new spring crepe shirtwaists. The youthful old lady who hasn't a gray hair in her head. The lounge lizard who prates about what a grand family he came from. The small boy who brings home a playmate to help square things. The individual who congratulates you on what a fine man your grandfather was and wants to borrow $5. The middle-aged chap who goes to the circus to amuse the neighbor's little boy. The city uplifter who goes to the farmer's wife to tell her how to can fruit. The landlord who tells his shivering tenants how long and hard he has tried to get coal. The climber who invites newspaper reporters to her "exclusive" pink teas. The woman who writes applications to serve near the trenches while she is having her breakfast in bed. The salesman who invites you to dinner because he is "so lonely" and charges it to his firm, from whom you are to buy. The "pillar" in the church who loudly prays for sinners, having yesterday quietly foreclosed the mortgage on the home of the widow and her children. When hubby tells his wife he has a very important meeting at the lodge or must sit up with a sick friend. The fellow in the party who is very busy telling a story when the waiter presents the bill. The man who is always "in a conference" when you telephone. He who signs a letter "dictated," but not read. Many a knitting bag carried in public. The politician who tells newly enfranchised women that his party secured the vote for them. Public officers sitting in skyscrapers and telling how they are reducing the cost of living. The storekeeper who tells you that the thing you asked for is not being "used this year."…

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

hidden moonshine | teddy bear stomachs suspected

Camouflaged intoxicants

CAMOUFLAGE LIQUOR TO SOLDIERS AROUSES JUDGE in Boston Globe (April 14, 1918), p. 16—

NEW YORK—Discovery of camouflage in the disposal of liquor to soldiers and sailors in uniform led to the announcement by United States Judge Hand today that imprisonment and not fines would be the punishment hereafter of persons convicted of violating the Federal law forbidding the sale of intoxicants to Army and Navy men.

Stomachs of Teddy Bears, paper bags left on mailboxes, taxicab rides around the block at $1.50 a ride, and cigar boxes passed over the counter at cigar stores are some of the methods through which servicemen here have been served with liquor recently, according to testimony in the Federal court at the arraignment of more than 300 persons, many of whom are now in prison.

Huge phonograph is camouflaged delivery car

NEW METHOD FOR DELIVERY Novel Delivery Car Is Built Like Phonograph By R.W. Whiteside in San Bernardino News Vol 45 No 77, April 1, 1918, p. 5—

When a red buzz wagon carrying a huge “phonograph” on the rear end drew up in front of the home of a certain well-known citizen today, said citizen nearly died of heart failure. Also, he locked his checkbook in the safe before he dashed wildly to the door.

“Say,” he shouted to R.W. Whiteside, the driver, “that isn’t the phonograph I bought from you. What do you think I am, a millionaire?”

“Be calm, ladies and gentlemen,” whispered the music man; whereupon he gently unlocked a concealed door in the “phonograph” and drew forth from the open portals a “regular” machine.

“I just deliver them in this other one,” he said.

The camouflage idea was evolved by Whiteside as an advertising stunt. A huge imitation phonograph has been constructed on the rear end of the machine and is used as a delivery compartment for phonographs sold by the Whiteside Music Company on Fourth Street.

A camouflaged cure for a morning hangover

Below This camouflage cartoon by American artist Walter Hoban (1890-1939) was featured in his comic strip Jerry on the Job. It was published in the Oregon Daily Journal (Portland OR) on August 16, 1917.

A CAMOUFLAGE DRINK in the Times-Tribune (Scranton PA) on December 11, 1917—

Making the morning after seem like the night before is the mission of the camouflage, the newest drink. Camouflage, as every student of the war knows, means "making things seem what they ain't." Thus the camouflage looks like a glass of milk, but has the far different effect so much desired on cold, gray mornings. In a word it is a "pick me up" that no man need blush to order after he gets into his working clothes. It is composed as follows: One-half jigger of apple brandy, a half jigger of dry gin, white of an egg, tablespoon of cream and a pinch of powdered sugar. The mixing glass should then be filled with cracked ice, the contents shaken well and strained into a small tumbler. Take two of these and, it is said, one hears sweet music; three and one grabs the next ship for the land of hot dogs, limburger and sauerkraut to take a wallop at the kaiser.

•••

CAMOUFLAGE in the Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer (Bridgeport CT) on October 13, 1917—

If I could use war tactics,
Said the football player fellow,
I'd camouflage the pigskin
By painting it bright yellow;
We'd then fool our opponents,
And win the game hands high,
'Cause they'd think we had a pumpkin
And were going to make a pie.

Englishwomen's Clothing Styles Go Bang in 1921

Above Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians, oil on canvas (1921). Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wikipedia (public domain).

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LONDON FROCKS TO DAZZLE U.S. in Wisconsin State Journal (Madison WI), April 16, 1920, p. 8—

LONDON—This summer will find Englishwomen “dazzle-painted.”

A society dressmaker announces that the coming frocks will reveal the mostly startling color London has ever seen. Hitherto Englishwomen have shown a decided preference for clothes of the neat-but-not-gaudy type.

Many an American, commenting on the clothes which adorn England’s fair sex, has remarked: “But they’re so drab. I’ve never seen an Englishwoman wearing a color which goes bang!”

Well, this summer Americans are going to witness all the explosions in women’s garb that futurist inspiration can devise. Dresses will be fantastic, materials will be dyed to resemble the patchwork quilts with which the Victorian grand-dame was wont to camouflage her beds and sofas.

Chintz, too, is to be worn quite a lot. Curtains and cushion covers will be torn from their moorings and converted into little “coatees,” and the housewife will look like one of her own pieces of furniture—decked out in summer coverings.

All those futurist artists who saw the war in streaks and splashes are busy painting dazzle designs of the same nature for the cloth manufacturers.

Harlequin Beetle

Camouflage Cartoon by Futurist Felix Del Marle 1919

Felix Del Marle (1919)

Above Felix Del Marle, cartoon titled "League of Nations" (predecessor to the United Nations), as published in Le Rire (April 19, 1919). An accompanying caption reads—

The President: No more wars! Those who want to provoke will have to dread the big cannon of the League.

A Voice in the Crowd: Yes, if it's not just camouflage. 

Felix Del Marle, Self Portrait (1913)

Camouflaged Bathing Suit | A Swimming Idea WWI

IT’S HERE ON THE BEACHES AT LAST—THE CAMOUFLAGED BATHING SUIT in Boston Sunday Post, August 18, 1918—

Have you seen it? What does it look like? Is it really invisible? How perfectly absurd!

But yet it’s a fact.

We’ve seen camouflaged ships and camouflaged tanks, and camouflage eats…but it took Leonore Bates at Atlantic City to develop the latest camouflage hit.

It is the camouflaged bathing suit. Hereafter when any of the beach policemen get after any girl who seems to have on not quite the regulation costume, they are more than half apt to be met with the reply:

“Why, of course, this is a ‘proper suit.’ Can’t you see, it’s camouflaged.”

It’s a great thing, the camouflage bathing suit, from many standpoints. In the first place, a person wearing one isn’t near so apt to be submarined by those German U-boats who have taken up their quarters on the coast.

Then again they are ideal for the naval spy, for he can sneak up right on top of a submarine and he can attach his depth bomb or anything else which he brought in his pocket with him without any fear of detection and it may be that through the medium of the camouflage bathing suit we may stop this sort of warfare. And how cheaply it can be done.

What do they look like?

The appearance of some of the milder designs is midway between a design cut from a crazy quilt and a futurist painting of the inferno.

Vivid reds, greens, blues and yellows, etc, mixed in a wavy medley of ghastly pale colors, in utter disregard to color harmony, etc., seems to be the general rule, but camouflage it is called, so why say more.

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DULL DAYS ON SANDS in The Stars and Stripes (France), Friday, July 19, 1918, p. 1—

America, July 18—A lady police corps on the job at Coney Island gives stern moral instruction to lady bathers who think that man wants but little here below or above either.

They spend their time separating many warming embracing couples and altogether spoil the whole day for ardent sea bathers.

A lady camouflage corps has camouflaged the wooden battleship Recruit, in Union Square, New York City, in black, white, pink, green and blue.

•••

CAMOUFLAGE BATHING SUIT IS LATEST STYLE in Boston Post, May 7, 1919, p. 17—

An art of war has survived to these times of peace. It is the art of camouflage which the summertime girl has made her own.  

Even the very bathing suit within which she promenades the sunny sands will not look quite what it is. Camouflaged bathing suits is to be the cry for 1919.

The hot wave brought a striking one to light. It is called the "Sunset" camouflage. This very new suit is black-figured on a white ground with an enormous red setting sun and rainbow colored rays in all directions. So this year the beach frequenters, already grown used to the unusual and the unexpected, may expect to see a hundred setting suns bobbing up and down at sea where once there was one.

More>>

Why Not Try Women Camouflage Artists?

Artist unknown (1917), newspaper cartoon

Above The use of artists as camouflage designers in World War I coincided with the Women's Suffrage Movement. It led to sardonic comparisons of wartime camouflage with the historic use by women of cosmetics, dyes, clothing and fashion-based adjustments. Would it not make sense, this cartoon asks, to assign the task of camouflage to women?—After all, "they've been doing it all their lives." The social context of all this is discussed in an essay published recently, titled "Chicanery and Conspicuousness: Social Repercussions of World War I Ship Camouflage," which is available online. The cartoon above was widely published in American newspapers, such as in The Ogden Standard (Ogden UT), December 3, 1917, p. 11.

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Arthur “Bugs” Baer, CAMOUFLAGE in The Daily Missoulian (Missoula MT), September 2, 1917. Special Features, p. 1. Even when the content is offensive, you have to admit that Bugs Baer had a way with words. He was a well-known American journalist and humorist, and indeed it was Bugs who came up with the nickname the "Sultan of Swat" for Babe Ruth—

This war is being fought on words that ain’t in the dictionary. Old man Noah Webster knew a few spoonfuls, but he didn’t know any more about camouflage than a hog does about Sunday. You can lamp his dictionary until you sprain an eye, but you won’t apprehend anything about camouflage in his unabridged word garage. Camouflage is a bilking industry with the libretto and music written by the French. The theory is to swindle the Germans’ eyes. The Frenchmen cover themselves with lots of leaves. They got the theory from Adam and Eve, but ain’t paying royalties.

•••

After he is camouflaged up in a set of form-fitting leaves, the Frenchman ankles off for a short vegetarian stroll toward the kaiser’s trenches. Some husky boche tosses his optic toward him, but figures him out for a dododendron bush goes democratic and poor old Haus is listed among the slightly killed, totally wounded or partially missing.

•••

The idea of camouflage is to gyp the enemy. Give him one five for two tens. You heard about the cowboy who called on his best girl and found her bivouacking in another cowboy’s lap. He pulled out this 45-caliber revolver to shoot the beauty spot off her false, deceiving chin, when she looks at him like page 256 in any of Ouida’s novels.

“Do you believe your dearie, or do you believe your eyes?” she piped.

The poor fish believed his dearie, and they got married and lived snappily ever after. She had that fool cowboy all camouflaged up with her metropolitan tongue and city ways.

•••

Still, camouflage is no novelty among the unfair sex. A flapper will high-heel along the macadamized turf, all ambushed up in a swarm of Djar Kiss. She will have a gang of summer furs lurking on her shoulders and a mob of paint, powder and other beauty utensils loitering on her face. She will have a complexion fairer than a supreme court decision. But when she gets home and starts to uncamouflage, she puts on ten years for everything she takes off. She has one of those removable complexions. By the time that she has moulted her blonde hair, shed her automatic teeth and discarded her mechanical eye, she is older than hieroglyphics, and gaining every lap.

She has one of these folding complexions that you can carry in your handbag. The French have no monopoly on that camouflage institution. Yea bo.

•••

Under the modern regime of beauty camouflage, everything about a woman’s complexion is detachable except her ears.

There are different branches of study in the camouflage curriculum. In Washington the senators have oratorical camouflage down to a science. Their speciality is painting word pictures, using their chin as a brush. There isn’t a battle that the senate can’t win with a few maxillary calisthenics. Rhetorical camouflage is great stuff, but you can’t bridge the ocean with a pontoon of words. Any union senator with his vocal camouflagers on can guild a fleet in three paragraphs or raise an army with a few chin excursions. Aesop’s jackass had the camouflage idea when he attended the zoo bal masque wearing the lion’s coat and vest, but a few chirps of his fool mule tongue gummed his camouflage.

•••

The gent who disguises himself behind a camouflage of women’s skirts in order to escape military service is smaller than the republican vote in Alabama. A guy that little can ambush himself behind a cancelled postage stamp. The slackers are utilizing a camouflage of women’s skirts, dependent relatives, conscientious objections, flat feet, weak heart and weaker knees. Which is a camouflage that fails to camouflage by quite a few flages. And a culprit who tries to hide behind a woman’s petticoats would have to pass his career in a bureau drawer. That’s where the ladies are wearing their pettiskirts. Nope, we ain’t married, but we read the Delineator.

•••

By camouflaging yourself as a porcupine with a flat wheel, you can secure enough elbow space in the subway to draw in a breath edgeways once in a while. But as drawing in a subway breath is suicide at a nickel a ticket, this camouflage is rather intricate.

Peace hath her camouflages as well as war. With a little cranial dexterity and a few cerebral gymnastics, camouflaging can be utilized to alleviate the inconveniences of civilization.

There will be a camouflage for every ill.

Of course, in the case of a poor henpecked husband we can paint no disguise with a brush.

The only camouflage will be distance. And you will have to point that with your heels.

•••

Camouflage Artist | Genevieve Cowles

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2017)

Anon, TO TELL OF CAMOUFLAGE OF AMERICAN VESSELS: Miss Genevieve Cowles Will Speak at YWCA Tomorrow Night at 8:15 in The Times Dispatch (Richmond VA), February 11, 1919, p. 3—

Miss Genevieve Cowles of the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps of the National League for Women’s Service will speak at the YWCA tomorrow night at 8:15 on “Marine Camouflage, the Art That Saved the Ship.” Miss Cowles was trained under William Andrew Mackay, head camoufleur of the United States Shipping Board, and has proved a capable worker. She was pledged to secrecy during the duration of the war.

•••

Anon, NEW YORK ARTIST TO DESCRIBE CAMOUFLAGE in Hartford Courant (Hartford CT). March 7, 1919, p. 10—

The annual art lecture to be given at the Congregational Church Monday evening at 8 o’clock, by the Currents Events Club, will be free to the public. Miss Genevieve Cowles, a well-known artist of New York, will speak on “Army and Navy Camouflage.” Miss Cowles is a mumber of the Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps under the National League for Women’s Service in New York, and has recently returned from France.

•••

Cartoon caption [signed ERH], A FREE TIP FOR THE ARMY: WHY NOT TRY WOMEN CAMOUFLEURS? in The Ogden Standard (Ogden UT), December 3, 1917, p. 11—

Why don’t some of the armies hire women as camoufleurs, anyhow? They’ve been doing it all their lives. Think of the rouge, the switches and the powder puff. Then ponder over the pads and braces.

Why, as we gather it, half the art of being an up-to-date young woman is camouflage.

Of course there are men, too, like John D. [Rockefeller] who wear wigs; and other brothers who disguise themselves (absent method) as sick patients to help the fourth man in the game to get out for the evening.

Old stuff, this camouflaging.

Scandalous Camouflage Bathing Attire 1919

You may recall earlier posts that included photographs and news reports on scandalous dazzle-camouflaged bathing suits (see below) that began in the UK at the close of World War I, then spread to the US and elsewhere. We've now located an American newspaper cartoon on the same subject (reproduced above). Created by Walter R. Allman as part of his series called DOINGS OF THE DUFFS, it appeared on page 4 of The Palm Beach Post on August 20, 1919. It shows a woman dressed in the same kind of striped bathing suit that had been sighted on the beach.

 

•••

 

William Edward Ross, “America’s Pledge to Humanity’s Cause” in The National Magazine. Vol XLVII No 7 (June 1918), p. 326—

The sudden importance of everything attached to ships has resulted in many new devices for their protection, and perhaps no word coined during the present war has sprung into such instant popularity as the term “camouflage.” Born of necessity, its particular appeal to the need of the hour has rendered it extremely expressive. The general definition of “camouflage” is to deceive the enemy through some subterfuge which leads him to believe that what he sees is not what it is. It has proven one of the most valuable adjuncts to present war tactics, as applied to naval and merchant marine disguise. 

The artists assigned to the camouflage work have a well-appointed studio and theatre [which simulate] conditions that the ships will experience on the ocean as portrayed. It is their duty to devise ways and means, as well as do the actual work, to disguise these vessels in such a way that they will be almost indistinguishable.

Records received from the British Government indicate that camouflage is working even more successfully than was believed possible. A recent test was made when a camouflaged British ship was fired at with blank torpedoes, and the submarine captain insisted that he had made the best shots he had ever made, but the men on the camouflaged vessel hardly knew they were being fired at, the shots went so wide of the mark. On another instance, two vessels were passing each other, one camouflaged, the other au natural. One captain figured that their courses were going to meet. He blew his whistle to signal change of course. The first vessel paid no attention to his signals, and he began to notice that the thing was sliding sideways. They passed about a quarter of a mile apart, although the captain would have sworn the camouflaged ship was coming directly toward him. The entire system is simply a matter of physics and optical illusion. It is what the British call the “dazzle system,” and, when several duly camouflaged ships are passing by in Hampton Roads, it resembles nothing so much as a futurist painting—a conglomerate mass of phantom shapes. The use of camouflage and its value as a protective force furnishes an apt paraphrase on a prominent quotation, namely, “The hand which wields the paint brush saves the ship.”

 

Camouflage Fashion | Swimsuits, Stripes & Headgear

Dazzle-Painted Bathing Suit (1919) [colorized]

Above This is a young, fashionable sun bather at the beach at Margate in 1919, dressed in a scandalous dazzle-painted bathing suit. The fad was enormously popular—it went viral at the time—and widely covered in the press. We've talked about this in earlier posts, the only difference being that this is our colorized version of one of the news photos.

•••

Anon, "Camouflage Finds Use in Fashions" in The Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton OH) (April 15, 1920), p. 7—

LONDON—The artists who decorated our recently almost invisible ships and who hid the armies of the western front behind and under painted canvas and "ersatz" villages are out of a job.

Hence the Spring millinery styles.

The dazzle hat has arrived, and with it a game.

Says one fashion writer:

"If you see coming toward you a woman who in some unaccountable way seems to melt into a sort of rainbow mass above the shoulders, don't be alarmed; try to find her hat."

To the uninitiated the new Spring designs seem to be meaningless collections of colored stripes and zig-zags. Some are even more like forked lightning.

Making Faces | Masking Wartime Horrors

A delightful time was had yesterday while participating in an art and design conference at St Ambrose University in Davenport IA. Titled FAIR PLAY: Art and Social Justice, the two-day conference began Wednesday (April 6) and continued through the following day. Presenters came from various schools, among them Western Illinois University, St Ambrose, University of Iowa, Grinnell College, Augustana College, and the University of Northern Iowa. Above is the title slide from our own presentation titled MAKING FACES: Masking Wartime Horrors, about the work of Allied artists during World War I, in sculpting facial disfigurement masks for men whose identities had been ripped apart during trench warfare. Thumbnail views of other slides are shown below.

•••

US Major-General Smedley Butler (1881-1940) is a fabled hero, the most decorated US Marine in history. While courageous on the battlefield, he was wonderfully candid in public as well. As quoted by Studs Terkel in Touch and Go: A Memoir, this is how Butler summed up his military career in 1935, in an article in Common Sense magazine:

I spent 35 years and 4 months in active [duty] as a member of our country's most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major-general. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism…Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…[and] I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1909-12.

In another context, Butler said—

War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars, and the losses in lives.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Paul J.E. Dezentjé's Art of Camouflage

Above Title panel from Paul J.E. Dezentjé's The Art of Camouflage blogpost at foundnyc.

•••

Anon, A GOOD WAITER in Urbana Daily Courier (Urbana IL), 27 December 1919, p. 1—

In a restaurant in Chicago most of the waiters were returned sailors and soldiers. A traveling man came in and ordered roast beef with tomato sauce over it and a bowl of noodles. The waiter shouted, “Camouflage the calf and a bowl of submarines.”

•••

Anon, SCHOOL NOTES in  Nashua Reporter (Nashua IA), January 17, 1918—

Hank Dana has been nominated for the Naval Academy at Annapolis MD. Gilbert Haugen of this district will take the examinations for the school some time in the near future. Hank should make good and the result of his application will be watched with interest. Hank has been camouflaged for the past few weeks with a mustache which graced his upper lip but since the news of his nomination has come out from behind the brush.

•••

Anon, LeMars Globe-Post (LeMars IA), August 19, 1943—

Pvt. Norman Rohlfs of Craig enjoyed a 3-day pass over the weekend at the home of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Rohlfs, at Craig. He is at present stationed at Harvard NE with a camouflage unit. 

Camouflage in Meat Packing in 1919

Cartoon by Bart O. Foss (1919)

Above A cartoon by Bart O. Foss, titled CAMOUFLAGE—A PACKER ADAPTATION, published in The Nonpartisan Leader (St Paul MN), February 24, 1919, p. 1. The text beneath the drawing reads—

Among the things war has developed is the art of camouflage. It is a very handy weapon for special interests. Cartoonist [Bart O.] Foss here gives a graphic illustration of how the packers have seized on the method to deceive the public. The cleverest means that money can secure are used to make the people believe that there is competition between the big packers, while behind the camouflage they chuckle to themselves on their cuteness and merrily arrange the markets in their own interests. But if the war has developed camouflage it has at the same time made the people aware of it as never before. The farmers of the Northwest have become expert camouflage detectors. They all see "around the corner" of those packer ads, and yet those ads are the last word in camouflage.

Give 'Em Hell | Billy Sunday Camouflaged

Billy Sunday (Wikipedia)

William Ashley Sunday (1862-1935), better known as Billy Sunday, was an Iowa-born fire and brimstone preacher, who played professional baseball in the National League for eight years. He left that profession in 1880 to become a popular, well-known evangelist, whose eccentric preaching style was outlandishly athletic (see photos above and below). He was in part the model for the preacher in Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis, and in Lewis' novel Babbitt, he was the inspiration for the boxer turned evangelist named Mike Monday, described by Lewis as "the distinguished evangelist, the best-known Protestant pontiff in America...As a prize-fighter he gained nothing but his crooked nose, his celebrated vocabulary, and his stage-presence. The service of the Lord had been more profitable."

Of Billy Sunday, the poet Carl Sandburg wrote: "You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist and calling us all damned fools so fierce the froth slobbers over your lips...always blabbing we’re all going to hell straight off and you know all about it...Go ahead and bust all the chairs you want to. Smash a whole wagon load of furniture at every performance. Turn sixty somersaults and stand on your nutty head. If it wasn’t for the way you scare the women and kids I’d feel sorry for you and pass the hat. I like to watch a good four-flusher work, but not when he starts people puking and calling for the doctors." 

Sunday also wrote a syndicated newspaper column, a newsprint homily of sorts, in one issue of which he warned about the evils of camouflage. It makes sense. What better practitioner of duplicitous sales and deception?

Billy Sunday, THE ART OF CAMOUFLAGE, in The Delphi Journal (Delphi IN), December 9, 1920—

There's a Lot of Chatter, these days, about Camouflage! When your Uncle Bill first Harkened to the Word, he thought it was a New French Dish, probably Cooked in a Casserole, and, being the Kind of Geezer who will Try Anything Once in the Line of Eats, he came Pretty near Ordering it from the Dinge in the Diner.

But Camouflage is not that Sort of Thing, it Seems.

It is the Military Art of Kidding the Enemy—of making things Look like What they Ain't, so to speak!

The French Rig Up an old Tree to Pass for a Cannon, and let Fritz waste his Ammunition on This, while a Little Way down the Line, the Real Seventy-five is Blazing Away from what Appears to be an Innocent Domicile.

They can even Paint a Dummy Bridge on Canvas and Stretch it Across the River, and Fake a Rippling Stream to cover the Real Bridge, and Bunk the Flyers who Lamp it from Above.

As a Military Art, Camouflage is a great  thing!

But there is altogether Too Much Camouflaging being done in Ordinary Life. The Dame that Sails down the Boulevard in a Get-up which is the Last Holler in Vogue—and at the Same Time is Skinning Down on the Old Man's Bats, at Home—is practicing Camouflage.

And the Young Buck who Dolls Up like a Million Dollars and has Little More than the Return Fare in his Jeans, he's Trying the Art, too.

But Worst of Them All is the Old Deacon who Sits in the First Pew on Sunday and Pipes Up Strong in the Hymns and on the Amen Stuff, and then spends the Rest of the Week in the Gentle Game of Nicking the Poor Widow for Twelve Per Cent, on the Loan.

There are Enough Experts on Camouflage of This Sort in the USA to equip a whole Army Corps on the Western Front.

But they don't Get Away with it for Very Long. The World gets their Numbers, and the Big Guns of Honesty and Common Sense soon Shoot them to Pieces.

Leave Camouflage to the Military Men, where it Belongs and Does Some Good!

If you're only an Old Log, don’t Pretend you're a Rapid-Fire Field Gun!

Develop yourself, and Maybe you'll Get to Be One. Don't put yourself Higher up the Tree than you Belong, for there's Bound to Be a Fall—and usually with an Awful Bump.

William Jennings Bryan's Camouflage 1918

William Jennings Bryan (1908)

Above William Jennings Bryan during 1908 presidential campaign.

•••

 (Anon, CAMOUFLAGE BY MRS. [WILLIAM JENNINGS] BRYAN: There's A Reason for His Long Locks, Says Former Secretary in Washington Post, March 1, 1918—

Syracuse NY, February 28—Camouflage was invented by Mrs. William J. Bryan way back in 1882 to hide—oh, well, read Mr. Bryan's own explanation, given for the first time today, as to why he maintains the famous flowing locks of hair that tickle his collar:

"It's my wife's idea," he smiled. "The Lord made me for utility rather than for beauty. He gave me ears that stick out a great deal more than artistic standards require.

I had my hair cropped away back in 1882 when I was engaged to my wife and the result was terrible. I nearly lost her. She has made me wear my hair long ever since. It is what I call justifiable camouflage."

Bryan Dollar (1896)

• Re Bryan Dollar, acccording to Wikipedia, "Democratic and Populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan proposed free silver, that is, if you presented silver at the mint, you'd get it back, stamped into silver dollars. At the time, the worth of the metal in a silver dollar was 47 cents, so obviously people would want to do this and it would be inflationary. This piece demonstrates the argument against free silver, championed by Republican candidate William McKinley."

David Bower | Camouflaged Room Interiors

All images © David Bower

We've known about and admired the three-dimensional "camouflaged rooms" of Chicago-area artist David Bower (1936-) for decades, as early as 1980 for sure. One of our favorites is pictured above.

Described by Bower as sculptural "shelf environments," this particular one, titled Sheep Have No Fear Because of Their Whiteness (1980), measures 33 in wide x 11 in high x 7 in deep, and was made with acrylic on wood. Other works of his from this series are shown below, courtesy the artist.

 David Bower, Camouflage Chicago (1977), 24 x 10 x 7, acrylic on wood.

David Bower, Room at Troggerstraus (1977), 24 x 10 x 7, acrylic on wood.

David Bower, Room for Sigmund (1977), 24 x 10 x 7, acrylic on wood.

David Bower, Like a Red Brick Room (1977), 24 x 10 x 7, acrylic on wood.

David Bower, Room for Rollo (1977), 24 x 10 x 7, acrylic on wood.

David Bower, Room at Bebelstrasse (1977), 24 x 10 x 7, acrylic on wood.

For more on American artist David Bower (Emeritus Professor of Art at Northern Illinois University) and his camouflaged room series, see Chapter Eight in False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002).

Laura Levin on Camouflage & Performance Art

Above The dust jacket of a new important book: Laura Levin, Performing Ground: Space, Camouflage and the Art of Blending In. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. The following is an excerpt from its promotional text—

Performing Ground is the first book to explore camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into ones environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities in and through space. Laura Levin tracks contemporary performances of camouflage through a variety of forms—performative photography; environmental, immersive, and site-specific performance; activist infiltration; and solo artworks—and rejects the conventional dismissal of blending in as an abdication of self. Instead, she contemplates the empowering political possibilities of "performing ground," of human bodies intermingling with the material world, while directly engaging with the reality that women and other marginalized persons are often relegated to the background and associated with the properties of space. Performing Ground engages these questions through the works of some of today's most exciting performance artists…
 

Camouflage Skirts: A Sartorial Disaster

Rebecca Palmer (1884), Crazy Quilt

Above An example of a crazy quilt, made with silk and velvet by Rebecca Palmer (1884). Collection of the Brooklyn Museum. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

When Cubist artworks were first exhibited in the US at the Armory Show in New York (1913), followed by the wartime adoption of dazzle painting for ship camouflage (1917), the public compared them to the crazy quilts at county fairs.

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Anon, in “Perth Prattle,” Sunday Times (Perth, Western AU), Sunday, June 2, 1918, p. 15—

The “camouflage” skirt is here, writes “Lady Kitty” in the Adelaide Observer. The cretonne skirt is a sartorial disaster. There is not an article in the whole of ones wardrobe that could possibly “go” with the skirt. It made its first appearance in Sydney, where six and eight guineas were asked—and given—for these camouflage skirts. They are of silk, but such silk! It is most suitably called “crazy.” This demented silk starts at being a wonderful pattern in colors which absolutely pale the gorgeousness of all Eastern color magnificence, when suddenly it is camouflaged with great patches of dullish background. Most weird. Camouflage, you know, is to make things appear other than what they really are—to disguise them, in fact, so that the crazy silk sets out to be a very striking fabric which it is suddenly camouflaged by broad strips of plain color which quite disguise its original identity, but really make it more striking still. Camouflage parties, at which people wear camouflaged fancy dress, have become quite a rage for funding-raising purposes; and if guests are ingenious enough the result is screamingly funny. 

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Anon, in The Week, The World’s News (Sydney NSW), Saturday, April 13, 1918, p. 14—

Dame Fashion is a fool, and that is putting it mildly. She decrees that women must adopt camouflage for their dress. What need is there for any such thing? Hasn’t woman camouflaged ever since Eve took Adam in over the apple? Of course she has, and will continue to do it just whenever it suits her ideas. If she wants to win a post that wheedling won’t accomplish, she camouflages her face with tears, and lo, she arrives at the desired end. And what she can do with rouge and powder passes all understanding. It is camouflage carried to a fine art. What man could tell that the short-frocked, finely-complexioned, sixteen-year-old hatted person at a distance was over forty and the mother of six? This is camouflage, and with a vengeance, and yet Fashion wants to add to it by use of dresses. If it means that plain cotton stuff at 1s 2d the yard, six yards for 6s 6d, can be so faked by the skillful dressmaker as to appear like a silk confection at a guinea a yard, by all means camouflage. But if it means turning a probable ten-guinea costume into a twenty-pounder, then camouflage is a miserable failure. Everything depends upon what that fickle jade, Fashion, is after. Usually she strives to deplete the purse of the hard-working husband or father, but if in this case, as in the case of ships, the object is to save—then camouflage for ever.

Camouflaged Courtship

Grandma Demon Chaperone (1917)

Above A cartoon by F. Fox from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, August 21, 1917, p. 7. An accompanying headline title reads: Grandma the Demon Chaperone Is Certain That Clara's New Striped Dress Is Camouflage, and in the cartoon itself Grandma is saying That young man may be keeping his arm to himself but…

•••

Anon, "SWEET GIRL" IS SHERIFF: Masher Is Nabbed by Officer in Feminine Camouflage in the Idaho Register (Blackfoot ID), October 14, 1919—

Pawnee, Okla.—When Frank Brown of Meramec accosted a beautiful woman "just too sweet to lie," on a street corner the other night, he was rudely shocked. A strong hand gripped his right arm and a voice that was anything but sweet informed him he was under arrest. In the struggle the "sweet thing's" hair came off and the red ribbon about the left wrist was torn from the sleeve, and the features of the sheriff, smeared with paint and powder, were revealed. Brown was charged with improper use of the mails in attempting to make an appointment with a young woman with whom he was not acquainted.

•••

From Questions and Answers in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 24, 1919, p. 6—

Legs—I would like to know how to reduce the size of my legs. One leg is 14 1/2 inches around the heaviest part of the calf, and the other is 15 inches. I weigh 120 pounds, and my body is otherwise slim.

Answer—The calf of the leg measures 14 1/2 inches in the ideal woman. Wear vertical stripes if you wish to camouflage your perfect calves.