title: States' rights

text: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which became part of the Principles of '98, along with the supporting Report of 1800 by Madison, became final documents of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. Gutzman argued that Governor Edmund Randolph designed the protest in the name of moderation. Gutzman argues that in 1798, Madison espoused states' rights to defeat national legislation that he maintained was a threat to republicanism. During 1831–33, the South Carolina Nullifiers quoted Madison in their defense of states' rights. But Madison feared that the growing support for this doctrine would undermine the union and argued that by ratifying the Constitution states had transferred their sovereignty to the federal government.


title: States' rights

text: The most vociferous supporters of states' rights, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, were called "Old Republicans" into the 1820s and 1830s.


title: States' rights

text: Tate (2011) undertook a literary criticism of a major book by John Taylor of Caroline, "New Views of the Constitution of the United States." Tate argues it is structured as a forensic historiography modeled on the techniques of 18th-century Whig lawyers. Taylor believed that evidence from American history gave proof of state sovereignty within the union, against the arguments of nationalists such as U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall.


title: States' rights

text: Another states' rights dispute occurred over the War of 1812. At the Hartford Convention of 1814–15, New England Federalists voiced opposition to President Madison's war, and discussed secession from the Union. In the end they stopped short of calls for secession, but when their report appeared at the same time as news of the great American victory at the Battle of New Orleans, the Federalists were politically ruined.


title: States' rights

text: One major and continuous strain on the union, from roughly 1820 through the Civil War, was the issue of trade and tariffs. Heavily dependent upon international trade, the almost entirely agricultural and export-oriented South imported most of its manufactured goods from Europe or obtained them from the North. The North, by contrast, had a growing domestic industrial economy that viewed foreign trade as competition. Trade barriers, especially protective tariffs, were viewed as harmful to the Southern economy, which depended on exports.


title: States' rights

text: In 1828, the Congress passed protective tariffs to benefit trade in the northern states, but that were detrimental to the South. Southerners vocally expressed their tariff opposition in documents such as the "South Carolina Exposition and Protest" in 1828, written in response to the "Tariff of Abominations". "Exposition and Protest" was the work of South Carolina senator and former vice president John C. Calhoun, formerly an advocate of protective tariffs and internal improvements at federal expense.


title: States' rights

text: South Carolina's Nullification Ordinance declared that both the tariff of 1828 and the tariff of 1832 were null and void within the state borders of South Carolina. This action initiated the Nullification Crisis. Passed by a state convention on November 24, 1832, it led, on December 10, to President Andrew Jackson's proclamation against South Carolina, which sent a naval flotilla and a threat of sending federal troops to enforce the tariffs; Jackson authorized this under color of national authority, claiming in his 1832 Proclamation Regarding Nullification that "our social compact in express terms declares, that the laws of the United States, its Constitution, and treaties made under it, are the supreme law of the land" and for greater caution adds, "that the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."


title: States' rights

text: Over following decades, another central dispute over states' rights moved to the forefront. The issue of slavery polarized the union, with the Jeffersonian principles often being used by both sides—anti-slavery Northerners, and Southern slaveholders and secessionists—in debates that ultimately led to the American Civil War. Supporters of slavery often argued that one of the rights of the states was the protection of slave property wherever it went, a position endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 Dred Scott decision. In contrast, opponents of slavery argued that the non-slave-states' rights were violated both by that decision and by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. While historians in the 21st century agree on the centrality of the conflict over slavery, they disagree sharply on which aspects of this conflict (ideological, economic, political, or social) were most important.


title: States' rights

text: Southern states had a long tradition of using states' rights doctrine since the late eighteenth century. A major Southern argument in the 1850s was that federal law to ban slavery discriminated against states that allowed slavery, making them second-class states. In 1857 the Supreme Court sided with these states' rights supporters, declaring in "Dred Scott v. Sandford" that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories.


title: States' rights

text: Southern states sometimes argued against "states' rights" in the context of fugitive slave laws. For example, Texas challenged some northern states having the right to protect fugitive slaves, with the argument that this would make the institution null once a particular slave had crossed into a free state. The question was pivotal in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.


title: States' rights

text: The historian James McPherson noted that Southerners were inconsistent on the states' rights issue, and that Northern states tried to protect the rights of their states against the South during the Gag Rule and fugitive slave law controversies.


title: States' rights

text: The historian William H. Freehling noted that the South's argument for a state's right to secede was different from Thomas Jefferson's, in that Jefferson based such a right on the unalienable equal rights of man. The South's version of such a right was modified to be consistent with slavery, and with the South's blend of democracy and authoritarianism.


title: States' rights

text: Historian Henry Brooks Adams explains that the anti-slavery North took a consistent and principled stand on states' rights against federal encroachment throughout its history, while the Southern states, whenever they saw an opportunity to expand slavery and the reach of their political influence, termed "Slave Power", often conveniently forgot the principle of states' rights—and fought in favor of federal centralization:


title: States' rights

text: Sinha and Richards both argue that the Southerners only advocated states' rights when they disagreed with a policy. Examples given are a states' right to engage in slavery or to suppress freedom of speech. They argue that it was instead the result of the increasing cognitive dissonance in the minds of Northerners and (some) Southern non-slaveowners between the ideals that the United States was founded upon and identified itself as standing for, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, and the reality that the slave-power represented, as what they describe as an anti-democratic, counter-republican, oligarchic, despotic, authoritarian, if not totalitarian, movement for ownership of human beings as the personal chattels of the slaver. As this cognitive dissonance increased, the people of the Northern states, and the Northern states themselves, became increasingly inclined to resist the encroachments of the Slave Power upon their states' rights and encroachments of the Slave Power by and upon the federal government of the United States. The Slave Power, having failed to maintain its dominance of the federal government through democratic means, sought other means of maintaining its dominance of the federal government, by means of military aggression, by right of force and coercion, and thus, the Civil War occurred.


title: States' rights

text: In "Texas v. White", the Supreme Court ruled that Texas had remained a state ever since it first joined the Union, despite claims to have joined the Confederate States of America; the court further held that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were "absolutely null" under the constitution.


title: States' rights

text: A series of Supreme Court decisions developed the state action constraint on the Equal Protection Clause. The state action theory weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments, in that the clause was held not to apply to unequal protection of the laws caused in part by complete lack of state action in specific cases, even if state actions in other instances form an overall pattern of segregation and other discrimination. The separate but equal theory further weakened the effect of the Equal Protection Clause against state governments.


title: States' rights

text: With "United States v. Cruikshank" (1876), a case which arose out of the Colfax Massacre of blacks contesting the results of a Reconstruction era election, the Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to the First Amendment or Second Amendment to state governments in respect to their own citizens, only to acts of the federal government. In "McDonald v. City of Chicago" (2010), the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and therefore fully applicable to states and local governments.


title: States' rights

text: Furthermore, "United States v. Harris" (1883) held that the Equal Protection Clause did not apply to an 1883 prison lynching on the basis that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to state acts, not to individual criminal actions.


title: States' rights

text: In the "Civil Rights Cases" (1883), the Supreme Court allowed segregation by striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a statute that prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodation. It again held that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to acts done by states, not to those done by private individuals, and as the Civil Rights Act of 1875 applied to private establishments, the Court said, it exceeded congressional enforcement power under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment.


title: States' rights

text: By the beginning of the 20th century, greater cooperation began to develop between the state and federal governments and the federal government began to accumulate more power. Early in this period, a federal income tax was imposed, first during the Civil War as a war measure and then permanently with the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913. Before this, the states played a larger role in government.


title: States' rights

text: States' rights were affected by the fundamental alteration of the federal government resulting from the Seventeenth Amendment, depriving state governments of an avenue of control over the federal government via the representation of each state's legislature in the U.S. Senate. This change has been described by legal critics as the loss of a check and balance on the federal government by the states.


title: States' rights

text: Following the Great Depression, the New Deal, and then World War II saw further growth in the authority and responsibilities of the federal government. The case of "Wickard v. Filburn" allowed the federal government to enforce the Agricultural Adjustment Act, providing subsidies to farmers for limiting their crop yields, arguing agriculture affected interstate commerce and came under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Clause even when a farmer grew his crops not to be sold, but for his own private use.


title: States' rights

text: After World War II, President Harry Truman supported a civil rights bill and desegregated the military. The reaction was a split in the Democratic Party that led to the formation of the "States' Rights Democratic Party"—better known as the Dixiecrats—led by Strom Thurmond. Thurmond ran as the States' Rights candidate for President in the 1948 election, losing to Truman.


title: States' rights

text: During the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement was confronted by the proponents in the Southern states of racial segregation and Jim Crow laws who denounced federal interference in these state-level laws as an assault on states' rights.


title: States' rights

text: Though "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) overruled the "Plessy v. Ferguson" (1896) decision, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were largely inactive in the South until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 () and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Several states passed Interposition Resolutions to declare that the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown usurped states' rights.


title: States' rights

text: There was also opposition by states' rights advocates to voting rights at Edmund Pettus Bridge, which was part of the Selma to Montgomery marches, that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.


title: States' rights

text: In 1964, the issue of fair housing in California involved the boundary between state laws and federalism. California Proposition 14 overturned the Rumsford Fair Housing Act in California and allowed discrimination in any type of housing sale or rental. Martin Luther King Jr. and others saw this as a backlash against civil rights, while actor and future (1967) governor of California Ronald Reagan gained popularity by supporting Proposition 14. The U.S. Supreme Court's "Reitman v. Mulkey" decision overturned Proposition 14 in 1967 in favor of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.


title: States' rights

text: Conservative historians Thomas E. Woods Jr. and Kevin R. C. Gutzman argue that when politicians come to power they exercise all the power they can get, in the process trampling states' rights. Gutzman argues that the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 by Jefferson and Madison were not only responses to immediate threats but were legitimate responses based on the long-standing principles of states' rights and strict adherence to the Constitution.


title: States' rights

text: Another concern is the fact that on more than one occasion, the federal government has threatened to withhold highway funds from states which did not pass certain articles of legislation. Any state which lost highway funding for any extended period would face financial impoverishment, infrastructure collapse or both. Although the first such action (the enactment of a national speed limit) was directly related to highways and done in the face of a fuel shortage, most subsequent actions have had little or nothing to do with highways and have not been done in the face of any compelling national crisis. An example of this would be the federally mandated drinking age of 21, upheld in "South Dakota v. Dole". Critics of such actions feel that the federal government is upsetting the traditional balance between itself and state governments.


title: States' rights

text: More recently, the issue of states' rights has come to a head when the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission recommended that Congress and the Department of Defense implement sweeping changes to the National Guard by consolidating some Guard installations and closing others. These recommendations in 2005 drew strong criticism from many states, and several states sued the federal government on the basis that Congress and the Pentagon would be violating states' rights should they force the realignment and closure of Guard bases without the prior approval of the governors from the affected states. After Pennsylvania won a federal lawsuit to block the deactivation of the 111th Fighter Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, defense and Congressional leaders chose to try to settle the remaining BRAC lawsuits out of court, reaching compromises with the plaintiff states.


title: States' rights

text: Current states' rights issues include the death penalty, assisted suicide, same-sex marriage, gun control, and cannabis, the last of which is in direct violation of federal law. In "Gonzales v. Raich", the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government, permitting the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to arrest medical marijuana patients and caregivers. In "Gonzales v. Oregon", the Supreme Court ruled the practice of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon is legal. In "Obergefell v. Hodges", the Supreme Court ruled that states could not withhold recognition to same-sex marriages. In "District of Columbia v. Heller" (2008), the United States Supreme Court ruled that gun ownership is an individual right under the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the District of Columbia could not completely ban gun ownership by law-abiding private citizens. Two years later, the court ruled that the Heller decision applied to states and territories via the Second and 14th Amendments in "McDonald v. Chicago", stating that states, territories and political divisions thereof, could not impose total bans on gun ownership by law-abiding citizens.


title: States' rights

text: These concerns have led to a movement sometimes called the State Sovereignty movement or "10th Amendment Sovereignty Movement".


title: States' rights

text: The Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution has been used as a prominent tool of invoking nullification, a common tactic of those that believe in the primacy of States' rights. The Tenth Amendment reads as follows: Notably, the Tenth Amendment has been successfully utilized to nullify restrictive federal laws pertaining to gun rights, immigration, cannabis, and more. Additionally, organizations such as the Tenth Amendment Center seek to utilize the Tenth Amendment to achieve, "Liberty through decentralization". The Tenth Amendment center chiefly focuses on encouraging state representatives to submit bills that nullify federal laws by providing model legislation on their website that provides a rubric for state legislators to follow.


title: States' rights

text: In 2009–2010 thirty-eight states introduced resolutions to reaffirm the principles of sovereignty under the Constitution and the 10th Amendment; 14 states have passed the resolutions. These non-binding resolutions, often called "state sovereignty resolutions" do not carry the force of law. Instead, they are intended to be a statement to demand that the federal government halt its practices of assuming powers and imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution.


title: States' rights

text: The Supreme Court's "University of Alabama v. Garrett" (2001) and "Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents" (2000) decisions allowed states to use a rational basis review for discrimination against the aged and disabled, arguing that these types of discrimination were rationally related to a legitimate state interest, and that no "razorlike precision" was needed." The Supreme Court's "United States v. Morrison" (2000) decision limited the ability of rape victims to sue their attackers in federal court. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist explained that "States historically have been sovereign" in the area of law enforcement, which in the Court's opinion required narrow interpretations of the Commerce Clause and Fourteenth Amendment.


title: States' rights

text: "Kimel", "Garrett" and "Morrison" indicated that the Court's previous decisions in favor of enumerated powers and limits on Congressional power over the states, such as "United States v. Lopez" (1995), "Seminole Tribe v. Florida" (1996) and "City of Boerne v. Flores" (1997) were more than one time flukes. In the past, Congress relied on the Commerce Clause and the Equal Protection Clause for passing civil rights bills, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964.


title: States' rights

text: "Lopez" limited the Commerce Clause to things that directly affect interstate commerce, which excludes issues like gun control laws, hate crimes, and other crimes that affect commerce but are not directly related to commerce. "Seminole" reinforced the "sovereign immunity of states" doctrine, which makes it difficult to sue states for many things, especially civil rights violations. The "Flores" "congruence and proportionality" requirement prevents Congress from going too far in requiring states to comply with the Equal Protection Clause, which replaced the ratchet theory advanced in "Katzenbach v. Morgan" (1966). The ratchet theory held that Congress could ratchet up civil rights beyond what the Court had recognized, but that Congress could not ratchet down judicially recognized rights. An important precedent for "Morrison" was "United States v. Harris" (1883), which ruled that the Equal Protection Clause did not apply to a prison lynching because the state action doctrine applies Equal Protection only to state action, not private criminal acts. Since the ratchet principle was replaced with the "congruence and proportionality" principle by "Flores", it was easier to revive older precedents for preventing Congress from going beyond what Court interpretations would allow. Critics such as Associate Justice John Paul Stevens accused the Court of judicial activism (i.e., interpreting law to reach a desired conclusion).


title: States' rights

text: The tide against federal power in the Rehnquist court was stopped in the case of "Gonzales v. Raich", 545 U.S. 1 (2005), in which the court upheld the federal power to prohibit medicinal use of cannabis even if states have permitted it. Rehnquist himself was a dissenter in the "Raich" case.


title: States' rights

text: Since the 1940s, the term "states' rights" has often been considered a loaded term or dog whistle because of its use in opposition to federally-mandated racial desegregation and, more recently, same-sex marriage and reproductive rights.


title: States' rights

text: During the heyday of the civil rights movement, defenders of racial segregation used the term "states' rights" as a code word in what is now referred to as dog-whistle politics: political messaging that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. In 1948 it was the official name of the "Dixiecrat" party led by white supremacist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond. Democratic Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who famously declared in his inaugural address in 1963, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" later remarked that he should have said, "States' rights now! States' rights tomorrow! States' rights forever!" Wallace, however, claimed that segregation was but one issue symbolic of a larger struggle for states' rights. In that view, which some historians dispute, his replacement of "segregation" with "states' rights" would be more of a clarification than a euphemism.


title: States' rights

text: In 2010, some claimed that Texas Governor Rick Perry's use of the expression "states' rights" was "reminiscent of an earlier era when it was a rallying cry against civil rights." During an interview with "The Dallas Morning News", Perry made it clear that he supports the end of segregation, including passage of the Civil Rights Act. The Texas president of the NAACP, Gary Bledsoe, stated that he understood that Perry was not speaking of "states' rights" in a racial context, but others still claimed to feel offended by the term because of its past misuse.


title: Talent (measurement)

text: The talent was a unit of weight that was introduced in Mesopotamia at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and was normalized at the end of the 3rd millennium during the Akkadian-Sumer phase, divided into 60 minas or 3,600 shekels. In classical antiquity, the talent (, from Ancient Greek: , "talanton" "scale, balance, sum") was the heaviest of common weight units for commercial transactions. An Attic weight talent was approximately (approximately the mass of water of an amphora), and a Babylonian talent was . Ancient Israel adopted the Babylonian weight talent, but later revised it. The heavy common talent, used in New Testament times, was . A Roman talent (divided into 100 librae) was Attic talents, approximately ; an Egyptian talent was 80 librae, approximately .


title: Talent (measurement)

text: The Akkadian talent was called kakkaru in the Akkadian language, corresponding to Biblical Hebrew "kikkar" כִּכָּר (translated as Greek τάλαντον 'talanton' in the Septuagint, English 'talent'), Ugaritic "kkr" (𐎋𐎋𐎗), Phoenician "kkr" (𐤒𐤒𐤓), Syriac "kakra" (ܟܲܟܪܵܐ), and apparently to "gaggaru" in the Amarna Tablets. The name comes from the Semitic root "KKR" meaning 'to be circular', referring to round masses of gold or silver. The talent was divided into 60 minas, each of which was subdivided into 60 shekels (following the common Mesopotamian sexagesimal number system). These weights were used subsequently by the Babylonians, Sumerians, and Phoenicians, and later by the Hebrews. The Babylonian weights are approximately: shekel (), mina (), and talent (). The Greeks adopted these weights through their trade with the Phoenicians along with the ratio of 60 minas to one talent. A Greek mina in Euboea around 800 BC weighed 504 g; other minas in the Mediterranean basin, and even other Greek minas, varied in some small measure from the Babylonian values, and from one to another. The Bible mentions the unit in various contexts, like Hiram king of Tyre sending 120 talents of gold to King Solomon as part of an alliance, or the building of the candelabrum necessitating a talent of pure gold.


title: Talent (measurement)

text: The original Homeric talent was probably the gold equivalent of the value of an ox or a cow. Based on a statement from a later Greek source that "the talent of Homer was equal in amount to the later Daric [... i.e.] two Attic drachmas" and analysis of finds from a Mycenaean grave-shaft, a weight of about can be established for this original talent. Homer describes how Achilles gave a half-talent of gold to Antilochus as a prize. The later Attic talent was of a different weight than the Homeric, but represented the same value in copper as the Homeric did in gold, with the price ratio of gold to copper in Bronze Age Greece being 1:3000.


title: Talent (measurement)

text: An Attic weight talent was about . Friedrich Hultsch estimated a weight of 26.2 kg, and offers an estimate of 26.0 kg.


title: Talent (measurement)

text: An Attic talent of silver was the value of nine man-years of skilled work, according to known wage rates from 377 BC. In 415 BC, an Attic talent was a month's pay for a trireme crew, Hellenistic mercenaries were commonly paid one drachma per day of military service.


title: Talent (measurement)

text: The Aeginetan talent weighed about 37 kg. The German historian Friedrich Hultsch calculated a range of 36.15 to 37.2 kg based on such estimates as the weight of one full Aeginetan "metretes" of coins, and concluded that the Aeginetan talent represented the water weight of a Babylonian "ephah": 36.29 kg by his reckoning (the "metretes" and the "ephah" were units of volume). Percy Gardner estimated a weight of 37.32 kg, based on extant weights and coins.


title: Talent (measurement)

text: The talent (, "kikkar"; Aramaic: , ) in late Hebrew antiquity (c. 500 CE) was the greatest unit of weight in use at the time, and which weight varied depending on the era. According to the Jerusalem Talmud ("Sanhedrin" 9a, "Pnei Moshe Commentary", s.v. ), the weight of the talent at the time of Moses was double that of the Roman era talent, which latter had the weight of either 100 "maneh" (), or 60 "maneh" (Roman ), each "maneh" ("libra") having the weight of 25 "sela"s ("sela" being a term used for the biblical Shekel of Tyrian coinage, or 'shekel of the Sanctuary', and where there were 4 provincial "denarii" or "zuz" to each "sela"; 25 "sela"s being equivalent to 100 "denaria").


title: Talent (measurement)

text: The standard talent during the late Second Temple period was the talent consisting of 60 "maneh". According to Talmudic scholars, the talent ("kikkar") of 60 "maneh" (and which sum total of 60 "maneh" equals 1,500 "sela"s, or 6,000 "denarii" (the "denarius" also being known in Hebrew as "zuz"), had a weight of 150 "dirham" for every 25 "sela"s. The anatomic weight of each "dirham" at that time was put at 3.20 grammes, with every "sela" or 'shekel of the sanctuary' weighing-in at 20.16 grammes. The sum aggregate of the 60 "maneh" talent (or 1,500 "sela"s) came to c. . According to Adani, in the silver coinage known as the Mughal India "rupaiya", minted during British colonial rule (each with a weight of grammes (1 tola), of which weight only 91.7% was of fine silver), one talent (Heb. "kikkar") would have amounted to 2,343 of these silver coins in specie (), in addition to the minuscule weight of 12 "ma’in" (10.08 grammes).


title: Talent (measurement)

text: The talent as a unit of value is mentioned in the New Testament in Jesus' parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30). The use of the word "talent" to mean "gift or skill" in English and other languages originated from an interpretation of this parable sometime late in the 13th century. Luke includes a different parable involving the mina. According to Epiphanius, the talent is called "mina" ("maneh") among the Hebrews, and was the equivalent in weight to one-hundred denarii. The talent is found in another parable of Jesus where a servant who is forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents refuses to forgive another servant who owes him only one hundred silver denarii. The talent is also used elsewhere in the Bible, as when describing the material invested in the Ark of the Covenant. Solomon received 666 gold talents a year.


title: Talent (measurement)

text: In Revelation 16:21, the talent is used as a weight for hail being poured forth from heaven and dropping on mankind as punishment in the end times: "And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great." (NIV) Various definitions are provided in different translations:


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace is an area in south London, England, named after the Crystal Palace Exhibition building, which stood in the area from 1854 until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. Approximately


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Until development began in the 19th century, and before the arrival of the Crystal Palace, the area was known as Sydenham Hill. The Norwood Ridge and an historic oak tree were used to mark parish boundaries. The area is represented by three parliamentary constituencies, four London Assembly constituencies and fourteen local councillors. After the Crystal Palace burned down in 1936, the site of the building and its grounds became Crystal Palace Park, the location of the National Sports Centre which contains an athletics track, stadium and other sports facilities. Crystal Palace Park has also been used as the setting for a number of concerts and films, such as "The Italian Job" and "The Pleasure Garden" and contains the Crystal Palace Park Concert Platform, in place since 1997. Two television transmitter masts make the district a landmark location, visible from many parts of Greater London. Local landmarks include the Crystal Palace Triangle, a shopping district made up of three streets forming a triangle; Westow Park, a smaller park that lies off the triangle to the south west of Crystal Palace Park; and the Stambourne Woodland Walk.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: A pneumatic railway was briefly trialled in the area in 1864. Once the railways arrived, Crystal Palace was eventually served by two railway stations, the high level and low level stations, built to handle the large volume of passengers visiting the exhibition building. After the Palace was destroyed by fire, and with railway travel declining, passenger numbers fell and the high level station was closed in 1954 and demolished seven years later. Rail services gradually declined, and for a period in the 1960s and 1970s, there were plans to construct an urban motorway through the area as part of the London Ringways plan. With rising passenger numbers, additional London Overground services began stopping at the station and a major station redevelopment


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace was named in the "Sunday Times" newspaper's top ten list of "the best places to live in London" of 2016. In April 2022 Crystal Palace was named the best place to live in London by the Sunday Times.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The ridge and the historic oak tree known as The Vicars Oak (at the crossroads of the A212 Church Road and A214 Westow Hill) were used to mark parish boundaries. This has led to the Crystal Palace area straddling the boundaries of five London Boroughs; Bromley, Croydon, Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham. The area also straddles three postcode districts: , , and . The ancient boundary between Surrey and Kent passes through the area and from 1889 to 1965 the area lay on the south eastern boundary of the County of London. It included parts of Kent and Surrey until 1889 and then parts of Kent, London and Surrey between 1889 and 1965.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: For centuries the area was covered by the Great North Wood, an extensive area of natural oak forest that formed a wilderness close to the southern edge of the then expanding city of London. The forest was a popular area for Londoners' recreation right up to the 19th century, when it began to be built over. It was also a home of Gypsies, with some local street names and pubs recording the link, and the area still retains vestiges of woodland.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton, was a remarkable construction of prefabricated parts. It was a cast-iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Following the success of the exhibition, the Palace was moved and reconstructed in 1854 in a modified and enlarged form in the grounds of the Penge Place estate at Sydenham Hill. The buildings housed the Crystal Palace School of Art, Science, and Literature and Crystal Palace School of Engineering. It attracted visitors for over seven decades.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Sydenham Hill is one of the highest locations in London; 109 metres (357 ft) above sea level (spot height on Ordnance Survey Map); and the size of the Palace and prominence of the site made it easy to identify from much of London. This led to the residential area around the building becoming known as Crystal Palace instead of Sydenham Hill. The Palace was destroyed by fire on 30 November 1936 and the site of the building and its grounds is now known as Crystal Palace Park.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The area is formed by Westow Street, Westow Hill and Church Road, and has a number of restaurants and several independent shops, as well as an indoor secondhand market and a farmer's market on Haynes Lane. The triangle also contains a range of vintage furniture and clothing stores, as well as galleries, arts and crafts shops and other businesses. There is an ongoing campaign to turn a building recently converted into a church at 25 Church Road back into a cinema, after the former bingo hall was purchased by the Kingsway International Christian Centre.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace still retains much of its Victorian architecture, although housing styles are mixed, including Victorian terraces, mid-war terraces and blocks of modern flats. Crystal Palace Park is surrounded by grand Victorian villas, many of which have been converted into flats and apartments.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Television transmission has been taking place from Crystal Palace since at least the 1930s and two TV transmitter towers — Crystal Palace Transmitter – tall — and Croydon Transmitter – tall — stand on the hill at Upper Norwood, making the district a landmark location visible from many parts of London. The towers may appear similar in height and design, but the Crystal Palace mast, constructed in 1956, stands on a slightly higher elevation. The current Croydon tower was built in 1962.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace Park is a large Victorian pleasure ground occupying much of the land within Crystal Palace and is one of the major London public parks. The park was maintained by the LCC and later the GLC, but with the abolition of the GLC in 1986, control of the entire park was given to the London Borough of Bromley. Crystal Palace railway station is located by the park, as is the National Sports Centre. The park was formerly used for sports such as cricket, football and motor racing, and has been a venue for concerts often performed at the site of the Crystal Palace Park Concert Platform. In recent years the park has played host to organised music events such as Wireless Festival and South Facing Festival.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The park is situated halfway along Norwood Ridge at one of its highest points. This ridge offers views northwards to central London, east to the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge and Greenwich, and southward to Croydon and the North Downs. It is also one of the starting points for the Green Chain Walk, linking to places such as Chislehurst, Erith, the Thames Barrier and Thamesmead. Section 3 of the Capital Ring walk round London goes through the park.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: A smaller park occupying lies to the south west of the triangle on Church Road. Westow Park hosts the annual Crystal Palace Overground festival, a free community festival held over four days during the summer.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: To the south of the triangle is a small area of woodland occupying 1.92 hectares, containing the Stambourne Woodland Walk. It was opened in 1984 and covers an area between developments on Stambourne Way and Fox Hill. The land originally formed the gardens of Victorian villas built on the hill overlooking Croydon, but fell into disrepair. In 1962, the Croydon Council approved terms for buying the land from the Church Commissioners and other local freeholders, allowing the construction of a link. Paths and benches were installed but much of the vegetation was left undisturbed, creating a woodland pathway.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: On the Church Road/Westow Street corner is an ornate Greek Orthodox Church which serves the Greek Cypriot and Orthodox community in the surrounding area. Formerly an Anglican church, the walls are now dressed in ornate Byzantine-style art.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace lies approximately 7 miles (13 km) to the south east of Charing Cross on Norwood Ridge and includes one of the highest points of London at 112 metres above the mean sea level (OS map reference TQ337707). The Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, in the centre of the park, lies at 88 metres above the mean sea level. The soil in the area has been classified as typically "Slowly permeable, seasonally wet, slightly acid but base-rich loamy and clayey soils", with impeded drainage, moderate fertility and a loamy profile. The nearest Met Office climate station is based in Greenwich Park.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace sits on the boundary of four London boroughs – Bromley, Croydon, Lambeth and Southwark. A fifth borough – Lewisham – is nearby. As a result, the area is served by a diverse range of local government bodies and Members of Parliament (MPs).


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Several local authority councillors in the area were elected on 22 May 2014, at the same time as the European Elections. All seats are now held by Labour party candidates, after 2 Liberal Democrats in Bromley and 1 Conservative in Southwark lost their seats. The elected officials by ward for Crystal Palace local authorities in May 2016 were:


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The area is represented by four constituencies in the London Assembly. Their elected assembly members in May 2016 were:


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The area is represented by three constituencies in the Westminster Parliament. In May 2015, their elected MPs were:


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: "The Italian Job" has a scene filmed at the athletics track in the Crystal Palace sports centre, in which Michael Caine says, "You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" "The Pleasure Garden" was also filmed in the park and "Our Mother's House" has a scene featuring Dirk Bogarde with several children on the park's boating lake.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The park features prominently as the setting of an outdoor rave in the music video for The Chemical Brothers' number 1 single "Setting Sun".


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Arthur Conan Doyle was active in the area between 1891 and 1894. Although he lived in nearby South Norwood, he visited the Crystal Palace and Upper Norwood area regularly in connection with the Upper Norwood Literary and Scientific Society. The Foresters Hall on Westow Street was then known as the Welcome Hall (or just Welcome), and it was in that hall in May 1892 that Arthur Conan Doyle was elected President of the society. He was re-elected to the post in 1893 and resigned in 1894. Each occasion was held in the same hall.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The writer Deborah Crombie sets her 2013 mystery, "The Sound of Broken Glass", in the Crystal Palace area of London.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The club were formed in 1905 and initially played their home games at the sports stadium situated inside the grounds of The Crystal Palace. However, in 1915 they were forced to leave due to the First World War and played at nearby Herne Hill Velodrome and the Nest before moving to their current home at Selhurst Park in 1924.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The historical grounds also hosted the first England Rugby Union match against New Zealand in 1905, which New Zealand won by 15–0. The London County Cricket Club also played their matches here, having been formed by The Crystal Palace Company with the help of W. G. Grace.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: In 1964, a 15,500 seater athletics stadium and sports centre was built on the former site of the football stadium in Crystal Palace Park. The athletics stadium was known as the National Sports Centre and between 1999 and 2012 hosted the London Athletics Grand Prix among other international athletics meetings. The Crystal Palace triathletes club is also based here. Since the London 2012 Olympics, the status of the stadium and aquatics centre as the main facilities for their sports in London has been superseded by the London Aquatics Centre and Olympic Stadium. This led to Crystal Palace F.C. submitting plans to rebuild the stadium as a 40,000 capacity football stadium.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: A motor racing circuit was opened around the Park in 1927 and the remains of the track now make up some of the access roads around the park. The track was extended to in 1936, before being taken over by the Ministry of Defence at the start of World War II. Race meetings resumed in 1953, and the circuit hosted a range of international racing events, continuing until the last races in 1974. For three years, from 1997, parts of the circuit were used for a once-a-year sprint time trial similar to a hillclimb before stopping due to development work. The event resumed in 2010 and continued until 2019.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace contains three primary schools, Paxton Primary School, Rockmount Primary School and All Saints C of E Primary School, and one secondary school, Harris City Academy. Crystal Palace Park also contains a branch of Capel Manor College, offering courses in Animal Care, Arboriculture and Countryside, Horticulture and Landscaping and Garden Design along with other short courses.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: In 2013, due to a shortage of primary school places in both Crystal Palace and London, proposals to open a new primary school by September 2015 were put forward, with plans submitted to the Department for Education in January 2014. The proposals were approved as part of wave 6 of the Free Schools Programme and the school is scheduled to open in September 2015. As of October 2014, the school is considering three possible building configurations – with the Greater London Authority running a public consultation on each option – all of which would involve demolishing one of the existing seated stands around the athletics track at the National Sports Centre.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The area is served by the A212, A214, A234 and A2199 roads. The roads that make up the triangle (Westow Hill, Westow Street and Church Road) form part of a one-way system and are in a 24-hour controlled parking and loading zone. There is a coach park inside Crystal Palace Park.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The area would have been affected by the cancelled London Ringways motorway plans, as one of the radial routes connecting the South Cross Route to Ringway 2 (the South Cross Route to Parkway D Radial) would have run through a part of Crystal Palace Park, following the railway line.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: London Cycle Network routes 23 and 27 travel through Crystal Palace. Route 27 runs from Anerley Hill through part of Crystal Palace Park towards Bromley and route 23 runs through the Crystal Palace triangle to connect to Borough and Croydon.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Transport for London have proposed to build Quietway route 7 that runs from Crystal Palace to Elephant and Castle. The route was subject to consultation processes in the London Boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark in 2016, with construction to begin in 2017.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace is accessible by rail from Crystal Palace railway station, where Southern trains run between Victoria on the Crystal Palace Line and London Bridge on the Brighton Main Line, and where London Overground trains run to Highbury & Islington on the East London Line. In addition, Southern services run to Beckenham Junction, Sutton and Epsom Downs. Crystal Palace railway station is one of the few stations to border two zones, Zones 3 and 4. The South Gate of the Park is accessible by rail via Penge West, which is served by Southern trains from London Bridge and London Overground services.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Crystal Palace used to have a second railway station, the Crystal Palace (High Level) railway station. The station was built to serve passengers visiting the Crystal Palace, but after the fire in 1936, traffic on the branch line declined. During World War II, the line serving the station was temporarily closed due to bomb damage. Although repairs were made and the line was reopened, the requirement for reconstruction work and the drop in traffic led to the decision to close the station and branch line in 1954, followed by the demolition of the station in 1961. Despite the demolition, a Grade II listed subway remains under Crystal Palace Parade. The Crystal Palace pneumatic railway was also built in Crystal Palace c.1864.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The low level station remain open, although passenger numbers at that station also fell after the fire of 1936 and many services were diverted to serve London–Croydon routes instead of the Victoria–London Bridge route. Rail travel was in decline across the UK in the 1960s and 1970s when the Beeching Axe was imposed. During the 1970s, two outer platforms used by terminating trains were abandoned and the third rail was removed.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: More recently rail travel at the station has seen a resurgence and new services have started running. Passenger numbers increased each year between 2004 and 2013. Since May 2010, the station has served the East London Line branch of the London Overground, connecting with the Docklands and Shoreditch. In 2011 services were extended to Highbury and Islington. The station underwent redevelopment in 2012, which brought the original Victorian booking hall back into use, created a new cafe in the station building and provided wheelchair access through the installation of three lifts; this work was completed by the end of March 2013.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Tram services from Surrey used to operate up Anerley Hill to the Crystal Palace Parade until the 1930s. More recently there have been proposals to connect Tramlink to Crystal Palace, with mayoral candidates citing the desirability of the initiative.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The area is served by multiple bus routes, many of which terminate at Crystal Palace Bus Station situated on the Parade. These services include routes N2, 3/N3, N63, 122, N137, 157, 202, 227, 249, 322, 358, 363, 410, 417, 432 and 450.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The nearest major international airports are Heathrow and Gatwick. London City Airport and Biggin Hill Airport are also nearby.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Marie Stopes, early promoter of sex education and contraception, was raised in a house on Cintra Park shortly after her birth in Edinburgh in 1880.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace itself and instrumental in having the building reassembled on Sydenham Hill following the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, lived in a house called "Rockhills" at the top of Westwood Hill.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, artist and sculptor who created the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs in the park, lived in Belvedere Road between 1856 and 1872.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: The French novelist Émile Zola lived in what is now the Queen's Hotel on Church Road between October 1898 and June 1899. Zola fled to England after being convicted of criminal libel in France on 23 February 1898, a direct consequence of the publication of his open letter "J'Accuse…!".


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Francis Pettit Smith, one of the inventors of the screw propeller and a contributor to the construction of the SS "Archimedes", lived in the area between 1864 and 1870.


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: British rapper Speech Debelle was born in Crystal Palace. She left the area because of "traffic and parking problems".


title: Crystal Palace, London

text: Camille Pissarro, Danish-French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter, stayed in Crystal Palace between 1870 and 1871.


title: FBI (franchise)

text: The "FBI" franchise (also called The "FBI"s) is an American media franchise composed of three television series that are currently broadcast on CBS. It began with the premiere of "FBI" in 2018 and has since been expanded with spin-offs "" and "". Dick Wolf created "FBI" with Craig Turk and "FBI: International" with Derek Haas, while "FBI: Most Wanted" was created by René Balcer. All three series are produced by Wolf Entertainment and deal with different aspects of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).


title: FBI (franchise)

text: Multiple characters have appeared in more than one series of the franchise through occasional crossover appearances and the franchise has also had two crossover events. The franchise is also connected to NBC and Wolf Entertainment's "Chicago" franchise, and as a result the "Law & Order" franchise, through an appearance by Tracy Spiridakos in "FBI", as her character from "Chicago P.D".


title: FBI (franchise)

text: The first series in the "FBI" Franchise focuses on the inner workings of the New York office criminal division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This elite unit brings to bear all their talents, intellect, and technical expertise on major cases in order to keep New York and the country safe.


title: FBI (franchise)

text: "Most Wanted" centers on the work of the FBI's Fugitive Task Force, a small and unique team designed to track and capture notorious fugitives on the Bureau's Most Wanted List. The series is more about profiling and analyzing fugitives in order to catch them unlike "FBI" and "FBI: International" which are more about the crime and the investigation.


title: FBI (franchise)

text: "International" follows the elite operatives in the FBI's International Fly Team which is headquartered in Budapest. They are charged with locating and neutralizing threats against American interests, wherever they may be.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: Mongolian cuisine predominantly consists of dairy products, meat, and animal fats. The most common rural dish is cooked mutton. In the city, steamed dumplings filled with meat—"buuz"— are popular.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: The extreme continental climate of Mongolia has influenced the traditional diet. Use of vegetables and spices are limited. Due to geographic proximity and deep historic ties with China and Russia, Mongolian cuisine is also influenced by Chinese and Russian cuisine.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: Details of the historic cuisine of the Mongolian court were recorded by Hu Sihui in the "Yinshan Zhengyao", known to us from the 1456 Ming Dynasty edition manuscript, also surviving in fragments from the Yuan dynasty. Presented to Tugh Temür in 1330, at the height of Mongol power and cultural influence, the Yinshan Zhengyao is a product of the cultural exchange (notably with the Islamic heartland in Mongol Iran) that enriched the Mongol Empire. Food scholars consider the Yinshan Zhengyao evidence for the cultural influence of the Middle East on Mongol food culture, comparable to the Columbian exchange.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: Wang Yuanling gives an eyewitness report of a feast at Kubilai khan's court where kumiss is served with scallions and onions, horse meat, roast mutton, venison, quail, pheasant, diced chicken ("tianji") and bear meat, with red wine and congee. According to Marco Polo the Mongols hunted daily in December, January and February when the court was resident at the capital, with a portion of the lions, stags, bears and wild boars sent to the court of the Khan. The Khan was said to keep trained leopards, eagles, and wolves for hunting, and very fine lions that could hunt wild boars, cattle, stags and bears.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: Little is known of the early Mongol cuisine, other than the assumption that it would be similar to the general pastoral nomadic foodways of the Steppe. Mongols supplemented the staples of the pastoral nomadic diet (mostly milk and herd) with hunting and gathering, especially as stores of dry curd and cheese grew scarce in the late winter months. Sheep were the most important product of animal husbandry, providing milk for dairy products, some fermented goods, and meat. Horses could provide milk for the iconic kumys, and valued for their hearty, nutritious meat and blood. Less common herd animals were reindeers and "sarlag," a type of yak.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: As far as hunting, Mongols hunted the wild animals of the steppe. The "marmot" is one such mentioned in the Yinshan Zhengyao. Grain was often limited in supply, mostly traded for or taken as pillage, although some evidence of agricultural activity is known from 12th century Western Mongolia. The importance of vegetables, fungi and fruits and berries is unknown, but speculated to have been significant. According to the "Secret History", Genghis Khan's mother Hoelun was forced to resort to feeding her children from the pastures after the Tatars poisoned her husband Yesugei. The context of this story implies that these types of foods were consumed only out of necessity. The roots and wild fruits mentioned are:


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: The nomads of Mongolia sustain their lives directly from the products of domesticated animals such as cattle, horses, camels, yaks, sheep, and goats, as well as game. Meat is either cooked, used as an ingredient for soups and dumplings, such as buuz, khuushuur, , manti, or dried for winter (borts). The Mongolian diet includes a large proportion of animal fat which is necessary for the Mongols to withstand the cold winters and their hard work. Winter temperatures are as low as −40 °C (−40 °F) and outdoor work requires sufficient energy reserves. Milk and cream are used to make a variety of beverages, as well as cheese and similar products.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: The nomads in the countryside are self-supporting on principle. Travelers will find gers marked as "guanz" in regular intervals near the roadside, which operate as simple restaurants. In the ger, which is a portable dwelling structure (yurt is a Turkic word for a similar shelter, but the name is ger in Mongolian), Mongolians usually cook in a cast-iron or aluminum pot on a small stove, using wood or dry animal dung fuel ("argal").


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: The most common rural dish is cooked mutton, usually without any other ingredients. To accompany the meats, vegetables and flour products may be used to create side dishes as well. In the city, every other local displays a sign saying "buuz". Those are steamed dumplings filled with meat. Other types of dumplings are boiled in water (, manti), or deep fried in mutton fat (khuushuur). Other dishes combine the meat with rice or fresh noodles made into various stews ("", "budaatai khuurga") or noodle soups ("guriltai shöl"). Sülen is a type of hot pot dish.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: The most surprising cooking method is only used on special occasions. In this case, the meat (often together with vegetables) gets cooked with the help of stones, which have been preheated in a fire. This either happens with chunks of mutton in a sealed milk can (khorkhog), or within the abdominal cavity of a deboned goat or marmot ("boodog").


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: Milk is boiled to separate the cream ("öröm", clotted cream). The remaining skimmed milk is processed into cheese ("byaslag"), dried curds (aaruul), yogurt, kefir, and a light milk liquor ("shimiin arkhi"). The most prominent national beverage is airag, which is fermented mare's milk. A popular cereal is barley, which is fried and malted. The resulting flour (arvain guril) is eaten as a porridge in milk fat and sugar or drunk mixed in milky tea. The everyday beverage is salted milk tea (süütei tsai), which may turn into a robust soup by adding rice, meat, or bansh. As a result of the Russian influence during socialism, vodka has also gained some popularity with a surprising number of local brands (usually grain spirits)". Boortsog" or bawïrsaq is a type of "fried dough" food found in the cuisines of Central Asia, Idel-Ural, Mongolia and the Middle East. It is shaped into either triangles or sometimes spheres. The dough consists of flour, yeast, milk, eggs, margarine, salt, sugar, and fat.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: Vodka is the most popular alcoholic beverage; Chinggis vodka (named for Genghis Khan) is the most popular brand, making up 30% of the distilled spirits market.


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: The Mongol people had rules of hospitality and social support similar to the Germanic "Gastfreundschaft" (where it was customary to extend hospitality even to enemies). An account of this survives in the "Secret History of the Mongols":


title: Mongolian cuisine

text: After that, when Dobun-mergen one day went to hunt on Toqocaq Rise, he encountered Uriangqadai people in the forest. They had killed a three year old deer and were cooking its ribs and intestines. When Dobun-mergen spoke he said: "Please give me (some meat) as the share of meat due another ("nökör sirolqa ke'ejü'ü")." Taking [only] half a breast side of the meat with the lungs, and the hide, they gave all (the rest of the) three year old deer's meat to Dobun-mergen.


title: Al Capp

text: Alfred Gerald Caplin (September 28, 1909 – November 5, 1979), better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip "Li'l Abner", which he created in 1934 and continued writing and (with help from assistants) drawing until 1977. He also wrote the comic strips "Abbie an' Slats" (in the years 1937–45) and "Long Sam" (1954). He won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year, and their 1979 Elzie Segar Award, posthumously for his "unique and outstanding contribution to the profession of cartooning". Capp's comic strips dealt with urban experiences in the northern states of the USA until the year he introduced "Li'l Abner". Although Capp was from Connecticut, he spent 43 years writing about the fictional Southern town of Dogpatch, reaching an estimated 60 million readers in more than 900 American newspapers and 100 more papers in 28 countries internationally. M. Thomas Inge says Capp made a large personal fortune through the strip and "had a profound influence on the way the world viewed the American South".


title: Al Capp

text: Capp was born in New Haven, Connecticut, of East European Jewish heritage. He was the eldest child of Otto Philip Caplin (1885–1964) and Matilda (Davidson) Caplin (1884–1948). His brothers, Elliot and Jerome, were cartoonists, and his sister, Madeline, was a publicist. Capp's parents were both natives of Latvia whose families had migrated to New Haven in the 1880s. "My mother and father had been brought to this country from Russia when they were infants", wrote Capp in 1978. "Their fathers had found that the great promise of America was true – it was no crime to be a Jew." The Caplins were dirt-poor, and Capp later recalled stories of his mother going out in the night to sift through ash barrels for reusable bits of coal.


title: Al Capp

text: In August 1919, at the age of nine, Capp was run down by a trolley car and had his left leg amputated above the knee. According to his father Otto's unpublished autobiography, young Capp was not prepared for the amputation beforehand; having been in a coma for days, he suddenly awoke to discover that his leg had been removed. He was eventually given a prosthetic leg, but only learned to use it by adopting a slow way of walking which became increasingly painful as he grew older. The childhood tragedy of losing a leg likely helped shape Capp's cynical worldview, which was darker and more sardonic than that of the average newspaper cartoonist. "I was indignant as hell about that leg", he revealed in a November 1950 interview in "Time" magazine.


title: Al Capp

text: "The secret of how to live without resentment or embarrassment in a world in which I was different from everyone else", Capp philosophically wrote (in "Life magazine" on May 23, 1960), "was to be indifferent to that difference." The prevailing opinion among his friends was that Capp's Swiftian satire was, to some degree, a creatively channeled, compensatory response to his disability.


title: Al Capp

text: Capp's father, a failed businessman and an amateur cartoonist, introduced him to drawing as a form of therapy. He became quite proficient, advancing mostly on his own. Among his earliest influences were "Punch" cartoonist–illustrator Phil May and American comic strip cartoonists Tad Dorgan, Cliff Sterrett, Rube Goldberg, Rudolph Dirks, Fred Opper, Billy DeBeck, George McManus, and Milt Gross. At about this same time, Capp became a voracious reader. According to Capp's brother Elliot, Alfred had finished all of Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw by the time he turned 13. Among his childhood favorites were Dickens, Smollett, Mark Twain, Booth Tarkington, and later, Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman.


title: Al Capp

text: Capp spent five years at Bridgeport High School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, without receiving a diploma. He liked to joke about how he failed geometry for nine straight terms. His formal training came from a series of art schools in the New England area. Attending three of them in rapid succession, the impoverished Capp was thrown out of each for nonpayment of tuition—the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Designers Art School in Boston—the last before launching his career. Capp already had decided to become a cartoonist. "I heard that Bud Fisher (creator of "Mutt and Jeff") got $3,000 a week and was constantly marrying French countesses", Capp said. "I decided that was for me."


title: Al Capp

text: In early 1932, Capp hitchhiked to New York City. He lived in "airless rat holes" in Greenwich Village and turned out advertising strips at $2 each while scouring the city hunting for jobs. He eventually found work at the Associated Press when he was 23 years old. By March 1932, Capp was drawing "Colonel Gilfeather", a single-panel, AP-owned property created in 1930 by Dick Dorgan. Capp changed the focus and title to "Mister Gilfeather" but soon grew to hate the feature. He left the Associated Press in September 1932. Before leaving, he met Milton Caniff and the two became lifelong friends. Capp moved to Boston and married Catherine Wingate Cameron, whom he had met earlier in art class. She died in 2006 at the age of 96.


title: Al Capp

text: Leaving his new wife with her parents in Amesbury, Massachusetts, he subsequently returned to New York in 1933, in the midst of the Great Depression. "I was 23, I carried a mass of drawings, and I had nearly five dollars in my pocket. People were sleeping in alleys then, willing to work at anything." There he met Ham Fisher, who hired him to ghost on "Joe Palooka". During one of Fisher's extended vacations, Capp's "Joe Palooka" story arc introduced a stupid, coarse, oafish mountaineer named "Big Leviticus," a crude prototype. (Leviticus was much closer to Capp's later villains Lem and Luke Scragg than to the much more appealing and innocent Li'l Abner.)


title: Al Capp

text: Also during this period, Capp was working at night on samples for the strip that eventually became "Li'l Abner". He based his cast of characters on the authentic mountain-dwellers he met while hitchhiking through rural West Virginia and the Cumberland Valley as a teenager. (This was years before the Tennessee Valley Authority Act brought basic utilities such as electricity and running water to the region.) Leaving "Joe Palooka", Capp sold "Li'l Abner" to United Feature Syndicate (later known as United Media). The feature was launched on Monday, August 13, 1934, in eight North American newspapers—including the "New York Mirror"—and was an immediate success. Alfred G. Caplin eventually became "Al Capp" because the syndicate felt the original would not fit in a cartoon frame. Capp had his name changed legally in 1949.


title: Al Capp

text: His younger brother, Elliot Caplin, also became a comic strip writer, best known for co-creating the soap opera strip "The Heart of Juliet Jones" with artist Stan Drake and conceiving the comic strip character "Broom-Hilda" with cartoonist Russell Myers. Elliot also authored several off-Broadway plays, including "A Nickel for Picasso" (1981), which was based on and dedicated to his mother and his famous brother.


title: Al Capp

text: What began as a hillbilly burlesque soon evolved into one of the most imaginative, popular, and well-drawn strips of the twentieth century. Featuring vividly outlandish characters, bizarre situations, and equal parts suspense, slapstick, irony, satire, black humor, and biting social commentary, "Li'l Abner" is considered a classic of the genre. The comic strip stars Li'l Abner Yokum—the simple-minded, loutish but good-natured, and eternally innocent hayseed who lives with his parents—scrawny but superhuman Mammy Yokum, and shiftless, childlike Pappy Yokum.


title: Al Capp

text: "Yokum" was a combination of "yokel" and "hokum", although Capp established a deeper meaning for the name during a series of visits around 1965–1970 with comics historians George E. Turner and Michael H. Price: "It's phonetic Hebrew—that's what it is, all right—and that's what I was getting at with the name Yokum, more so than any attempt to sound "hickish". That was a fortunate coincidence, of course, that the name should pack a backwoods connotation. But it's a godly conceit, really, playing off a godly name—"Joachim" means 'God's determination', something like that—that also happens to have a rustic ring to it."


title: Al Capp

text: The Yokums live in the backwater hamlet of Dogpatch, Kentucky. Described by its creator as "an average stone-age community", Dogpatch mostly consists of hopelessly ramshackle log cabins, pine trees, "tarnip" fields, and "hawg" wallows. Whatever energy Abner had went into evading the marital goals of Daisy Mae Scragg, his sexy, well-endowed, but virtuous girlfriend, until Capp finally gave in to reader pressure and allowed the couple to marry. This newsworthy event made the cover of "Life" on March 31, 1952.


title: Al Capp

text: Capp peopled his comic strip with an assortment of memorable characters, including Marryin' Sam, Hairless Joe, Lonesome Polecat, Evil-Eye Fleegle, General Bullmoose, Lena the Hyena, Senator Jack S. Phogbound (Capp's caricature of the anti-New Deal Dixiecrats), the "(shudder!)" Scraggs, Available Jones, Nightmare Alice, Earthquake McGoon, and a host of others. Especially notable, certainly from a G.I. point of view, are the beautiful, full-figured women such as Daisy Mae, Wolf Gal, Stupefyin' Jones, and Moonbeam McSwine (a caricature of his wife Catherine, aside from the dirt), all of whom found their way onto the painted noses of bomber planes during World War II and the Korean War. Perhaps Capp's most popular creations were the Shmoos, creatures whose incredible usefulness and generous nature made them a threat to civilization as we know it.


title: Al Capp

text: Another famous character was Joe Btfsplk, who wants to be a loving friend but is "the world's worst jinx", bringing bad luck to all those nearby. Btfsplk (his name is "pronounced" by simply blowing a "raspberry" or Bronx cheer) always has an iconic dark cloud over his head.


title: Al Capp

text: Dogpatch residents regularly combat the likes of city slickers, business tycoons, government officials, and intellectuals with their homespun simplicity. Situations often take the characters to other destinations, including New York City, Washington, D.C., Hollywood, tropical islands, the moon, Mars, and some purely fanciful worlds of Capp's invention, including El Passionato, Kigmyland, The Republic of Crumbumbo, Skunk Hollow, The Valley of the Shmoon, Planets Pincus Number 2 and 7, and a miserable frozen wasteland known as Lower Slobbovia, a pointedly political satire of backward nations and foreign diplomacy that remains a contemporary reference.


title: Al Capp

text: According to cultural historian Anthony Harkins: "Indeed, "Li'l Abner" incorporates such a panoply of characters and ideas that it defies summary. Yet though Capp's storylines often wandered far afield, his hillbilly setting remained a central touchstone, serving both as a microcosm and a distorting carnival mirror of broader American society."


title: Al Capp

text: The strip's popularity grew from an original eight papers to eventually more than 900. At its peak, "Li'l Abner" was estimated to have been read daily in the United States by 60 to 70 million people (the U.S. population at the time was only 180 million), with adult readers far outnumbering children. Many communities, high schools, and colleges staged Sadie Hawkins dances patterned after the similar annual event in the strip.


title: Al Capp

text: Li'l Abner has one odd design quirk that has puzzled readers for decades: the part in his hair always faces the viewer, no matter which direction Abner is facing. In response to the question "Which side does Abner part his hair on?", Capp would answer: "Both." Capp said he finally found the right "look" for Li'l Abner with Henry Fonda's character Dave Tolliver in "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" (1936).


title: Al Capp

text: In later years, Capp always claimed to have effectively created the miniskirt, when he first put one on Daisy Mae in the 1930s.


title: Al Capp

text: "Li'l Abner" also features a comic strip-within-the-strip: "Fearless Fosdick" is a parody of Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy". It first appeared in 1942, and proved so popular that it ran intermittently during the next 35 years. Gould was parodied personally in the series as cartoonist "Lester Gooch"—the diminutive, much-harassed and occasionally deranged "creator" of Fosdick. The style of the "Fosdick" sequences closely mimicks "Tracy", including the urban setting, the outrageous villains, the galloping mortality rate, the crosshatched shadows, and even the lettering style. In 1952, Fosdick was the star of his own short-lived puppet show on NBC, featuring the Mary Chase marionettes.


title: Al Capp

text: Besides "Dick Tracy", Capp parodied many other comic strips in "Li'l Abner"—including "Steve Canyon", "Superman" (at least twice; first as "Jack Jawbreaker" in 1947, and again in 1966 as "Chickensouperman"), "Mary Worth" as "Mary Worm", "Peanuts" {with "Peewee" a parody of Charlie Brown with "Croopy" parody of Snoopy" {1968} drawn by Bedley Damp a parody of Charles Schulz}, "Rex Morgan, M.D.", "Little Annie Rooney", and "Little Orphan Annie" (in which Punjab became "Punjbag," an oleaginous slob). "Fearless Fosdick"—and Capp's other spoofs such as "Little Fanny Gooney" (1952) and "Jack Jawbreaker"—were almost certainly an early inspiration for Harvey Kurtzman's "Mad Magazine", which began in 1952 as a comic book that specifically parodied other comics in the same distinctive style and subversive manner.


title: Al Capp

text: Capp also lampooned popular recording idols of the day, such as Elvis Presley ("Hawg McCall", 1957), Liberace ("Loverboynik", 1956), the Beatles ("the Beasties", 1964)—and in 1944, Frank Sinatra. "Sinatra was the first great public figure I ever wrote about," Capp once said. "I called him 'Hal Fascinatra.' I remember my news syndicate was so worried about what his reaction might be, and we were all surprised when he telephoned and told me how thrilled he was with it. He always made it a point to send me a spent condom whenever he happened to see me in a restaurant..." (from "Frank Sinatra, My Father" by Nancy Sinatra, 1985). On the other hand, Liberace was "cut to the quick" over Loverboynik, according to Capp, and even threatened legal action—as would Joan Baez later, over "Joanie Phoanie" in 1967.


title: Al Capp

text: Capp was just as likely to parody himself; his self-caricature made frequent, tongue-in-cheek appearances in "Li'l Abner". The gag was often at his own expense, as in the above 1951 sequence showing Capp's interaction with "fans" (see excerpt), or in his 1955 Disneyland parody, "Hal Yappland". Just about anything could be a target for Capp's satire—in one storyline Li'l Abner is revealed to be the missing link between ape and man. In another, the search is on in Dogpatch for a pair of missing socks knitted by the first president of the United States.


title: Al Capp

text: In addition to creating "Li'l Abner", Capp also co-created two other newspaper strips: "Abbie an' Slats" with magazine illustrator Raeburn van Buren in 1937, and "Long Sam" with cartoonist Bob Lubbers in 1954, as well as the Sunday "topper" strips "Washable Jones", "Small Fry" (a.k.a. "Small Change"), and "Advice fo' Chillun".


title: Al Capp

text: According to comics historian Coulton Waugh, a 1947 poll of newspaper readers who claimed they ignored the comics page altogether revealed that many confessed to making a single exception: "Li'l Abner". "When "Li'l Abner" made its debut in 1934, the vast majority of comic strips were designed chiefly to amuse or thrill their readers. Capp turned that world upside-down by routinely injecting politics and social commentary into "Li'l Abner". The strip was the first to regularly introduce characters and story lines having nothing to do with the nominal stars of the strip. The technique—as invigorating as it was unorthodox—was later adopted by cartoonists such as Walt Kelly ["Pogo"] and Garry Trudeau ["Doonesbury"]", wrote comic strip historian Rick Marschall. According to Marschall, "Li'l Abner" gradually evolved into a broad satire of human nature. In his book "America's Great Comic Strip Artists" (1989), Marschall's analysis revealed a decidedly misanthropic subtext.


title: Al Capp

text: Over the years, "Li'l Abner" has been adapted to radio, animated cartoons, stage production, motion pictures, and television. Capp has been compared, at various times, to Mark Twain, Dostoevski, Jonathan Swift, Lawrence Sterne, and Rabelais. Fans of the strip ranged from novelist John Steinbeck—who called Capp "possibly the best writer in the world today" in 1953 and even earnestly recommended him for the Nobel Prize in literature—to media critic and theorist Marshall McLuhan, who considered Capp "the only robust satirical force in American life". John Updike, comparing Abner to a "hillbilly Candide", added that the strip's "richness of social and philosophical commentary approached the Voltairean". Charlie Chaplin, William F. Buckley, Al Hirschfeld, Harpo Marx, Russ Meyer, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Bakshi, Shel Silverstein, Hugh Downs, Gene Shalit, Frank Cho, Daniel Clowes, and (reportedly) even Queen Elizabeth have confessed to being fans of "Li'l Abner".


title: Al Capp

text: "Li'l Abner" was also the subject of the first book-length scholarly assessment of an American comic strip ever published. "Li'l Abner: A Study in American Satire" by Arthur Asa Berger (Twayne, 1969) contained serious analyses of Capp's narrative technique, his use of dialogue, self-caricature, and grotesquerie, the place of "Li'l Abner" in American satire, and the significance of social criticism and the graphic image. "One of the few strips ever taken seriously by students of American culture," wrote Professor Berger, ""Li'l Abner" is worth studying ... because of Capp's imagination and artistry, and because of the strip's very obvious social relevance." It was reprinted by the University Press of Mississippi in 1994.


title: Al Capp

text: During World War II and for many years afterward, Capp worked tirelessly going to hospitals to entertain patients, especially to cheer recent amputees and explain to them that the loss of a limb did not mean an end to a happy and productive life. Making no secret of his own disability, Capp openly joked about his prosthetic leg his whole life. In 1946, Capp created a special full-color comic book, "Al Capp by Li'l Abner", to be distributed by the Red Cross to encourage the thousands of amputee veterans returning from the war. Capp also was involved with the Sister Kenny Foundation, which pioneered new treatments for polio in the 1940s. Serving in his capacity as honorary chairman, Capp made public appearances on its behalf for years, contributed free artwork for its annual fundraising appeals, and entertained crippled and paraplegic children in children's hospitals with inspirational pep talks, humorous stories, and sketches.


title: Al Capp

text: In 1940, an RKO movie adaptation starred Granville Owen (later known as Jeff York) as Li'l Abner, with Buster Keaton taking the role of Lonesome Polecat, and featuring a title song with lyrics by Milton Berle. A successful musical comedy adaptation of the strip opened on Broadway at the St. James Theater on November 15, 1956, and had a long run of 693 performances, followed by a nationwide tour. The stage musical, with music and lyrics by Gene de Paul and Johnny Mercer, was adapted into a Technicolor motion picture at Paramount in 1959 by producer Norman Panama and director Melvin Frank, with a score by Nelson Riddle. Several performers repeated their Broadway roles in the film, most memorably Julie Newmar as Stupefyin' Jones and Stubby Kaye as Marryin' Sam.


title: Al Capp

text: Other highlights of that decade included the 1942 debut of Fearless Fosdick as Abner's "ideel" (hero); the 1946 Lena the Hyena Contest, in which a hideous Lower Slobbovian gal was ultimately revealed in the harrowing winning entry (as judged by Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff, and Salvador Dalí) drawn by noted cartoonist Basil Wolverton; and an ill-fated Sunday parody of "Gone With the Wind" that aroused anger and legal threats from author Margaret Mitchell, and led to a printed apology within the strip. In October 1947, Li'l Abner met Rockwell P. Squeezeblood, head of the abusive and corrupt Squeezeblood Comic Strip Syndicate. The resulting sequence, "Jack Jawbreaker Fights Crime!", was a devastating satire of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's notorious exploitation by DC Comics over "Superman". It was later reprinted in "The World of Li'l Abner" (1953). (Siegel and Shuster had earlier poked fun at Capp in a "Superman" story in "Action Comics #55", December 1942, in which a cartoonist named "Al Hatt" invents a comic strip featuring the hillbilly "Tiny Rufe".)


title: Al Capp

text: In 1947, Capp earned a "Newsweek" cover story. That same year the "New Yorker's" profile on him was so long that it ran in consecutive issues. In 1948, Capp reached a creative peak with the introduction of the Shmoos, lovable and innocent fantasy creatures who reproduced at amazing speed and brought so many benefits that, ironically, the world economy was endangered. The much-copied storyline was a parable that was metaphorically interpreted in many different ways at the outset of the Cold War.


title: Al Capp

text: Following his close friend Milton Caniff's lead (with "Steve Canyon"), Capp had recently fought a successful battle with the syndicate to gain complete ownership of his feature when the Shmoos debuted. As a result, he reaped enormous financial rewards from the unexpected (and almost unprecedented) merchandising phenomenon that followed. As in the strip, Shmoos suddenly appeared to be everywhere in 1949 and 1950—including a "Time" cover story. A paperback collection of the original sequence, "The Life and Times of the Shmoo", became a bestseller for Simon & Schuster. Shmoo dolls, clocks, watches, jewelry, earmuffs, wallpaper, fishing lures, air fresheners, soap, ice cream, balloons, ashtrays, comic books, records, sheet music, toys, games, Halloween masks, salt and pepper shakers, decals, pinbacks, tumblers, coin banks, greeting cards, planters, neckties, suspenders, belts, curtains, fountain pens, and other Shmoo paraphernalia were produced. A garment factory in Baltimore turned out a whole line of Shmoo apparel, including "Shmooveralls". The original sequence and its 1959 sequel "The Return of the Shmoo" have been collected in print many times since, most recently in 2011, always to high sales figures. The Shmoos later had their own animated television series.


title: Al Capp

text: Capp followed this success with other allegorical fantasy critters, including the aboriginal and masochistic "Kigmies", who craved abuse (a story that began as a veiled comment on racial and religious oppression), the dreaded "Nogoodniks" (or "bad" shmoos), and the irresistible "Bald Iggle", a guileless creature whose sad-eyed countenance compelled involuntary truthfulness—with predictably disastrous results.


title: Al Capp

text: "Li'l Abner" was censored for the first time, but not the last, in September 1947 and was pulled from papers by Scripps-Howard. The controversy, as reported in "Time", centered on Capp's portrayal of the United States Senate. Edward Leech of Scripps said, "We don't think it is good editing or sound citizenship to picture the Senate as an assemblage of freaks and crooks ... boobs and undesirables." Capp criticized Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, calling him a "poet". "He uses poetic license to try to create the beautifully ordered world of good guys and bad guys that he wants," said Capp. "He seems at his best when terrifying the helpless and naïve."


title: Al Capp

text: Capp received the National Cartoonists Society's Billy DeBeck Memorial Award in 1947 for Cartoonist of the Year. (When the award name was changed in 1954, Capp also retroactively received a Reuben statuette.) He was an outspoken pioneer in favor of diversifying the NCS by admitting women cartoonists. Originally, the Society had disallowed female members. Capp briefly resigned his membership in 1949 to protest their refusal of admission to Hilda Terry, creator of the comic strip "Teena". According to Tom Roberts, author of "Alex Raymond: His Life and Art" (2007), Capp delivered a stirring speech that was instrumental in changing those rules. The NCS finally accepted female members the following year. In December 1952, Capp published an article in "Real" magazine entitled "The REAL Powers in America" that further challenged the conventional attitudes of the day: "The real powers in America are "women"—the wives and sweethearts behind the masculine dummies..."


title: Al Capp

text: Highlights of the 1950s included the much-heralded marriage of Abner and Daisy Mae in 1952, the birth of their son "Honest Abe" Yokum in 1953, and in 1954 the introduction of Abner's enormous, long-lost kid brother Tiny Yokum, who filled Abner's place as a bachelor in the annual Sadie Hawkins Day race. In 1952, Capp and his characters graced the covers of both "Life" and "TV Guide". The year 1956 saw the debut of Bald Iggle, considered by some "Abner" enthusiasts to be the creative high point of the strip, as well as Mammy's revelatory encounter with the "Square Eyes" Family—Capp's thinly-veiled appeal for racial tolerance. (This fable-like story was collected into an educational comic book called "Mammy Yokum and the Great Dogpatch Mystery!" and distributed by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith later that year.) Two years later, Capp's studio issued "Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story", a biographical comic book distributed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.


title: Al Capp

text: Often, Capp had parodied corporate greed—pork tycoon J. Roaringham Fatback had figured prominently in wiping out the Shmoos. But in 1952, when General Motors president Charles E. Wilson, nominated for a cabinet post, told Congress "...what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa", he inspired one of Capp's greatest satires—the introduction of General Bullmoose, the robust, ruthless, and ageless business tycoon. The blustering Bullmoose, who seemed to own and control nearly everything, justified his far-reaching and mercenary excesses by saying "What's good for General Bullmoose is good for "the USA!"" Bullmoose's corrupt interests were often pitted against those of the pathetic Lower Slobbovians in a classic mismatch of "haves" versus "have-nots". This character, along with the Shmoos, helped cement Capp's favor with the Left, and increased their outrage a decade later when Capp, a former Franklin D. Roosevelt liberal, switched targets. Nonetheless, General Bullmoose continued to appear, undaunted and unredeemed, during the strip's final right-wing phase and into the 1970s.


title: Al Capp

text: After Capp quit his ghosting job on Ham Fisher's "Joe Palooka" in 1934 to launch his own strip, Fisher badmouthed him to colleagues and editors, claiming that Capp had "stolen" his idea. For years, Fisher brought the characters back to his strip, billing them as "The ORIGINAL Hillbilly Characters" and advising readers not to be "fooled by imitations". (In fact, Fisher's brutish hillbilly character—Big Leviticus, created by Capp in Fisher's absence—bore little resemblance to Li'l Abner.) According to a November 1950 "Time" article, "Capp parted from Fisher with a definite impression, (to put it mildly) that he had been underpaid and unappreciated. Fisher, a man of Roman self esteem, considered Capp an ingrate and a whippersnapper, and watched his rise to fame with unfeigned horror."


title: Al Capp

text: "Fisher repeatedly brought Leviticus and his clan back, claiming their primacy as comics' first hillbilly family – but he was missing the point. It wasn't the setting that made Capp's strip such a huge success. It was Capp's finely tuned sense of the absurd, his ability to milk an outrageous situation for every laugh in it and then, impossibly, to squeeze even more laughs from it, that found such favor with the public," (from Don Markstein's "Toonopedia").


title: Al Capp

text: The Capp-Fisher feud was well known in cartooning circles, and it grew more personal as Capp's strip eclipsed "Joe Palooka" in popularity. Fisher hired away Capp's top assistant, Moe Leff. After Fisher underwent plastic surgery, Capp included a racehorse in "Li'l Abner" named "Ham's Nose-Bob". In 1950, Capp introduced a cartoonist character named "Happy Vermin"—a caricature of Fisher—who hired Abner to draw his comic strip in a dimly lit closet (after sacking his previous "temporary" assistant of 20 years, who had been cut off from all his friends in the process). Instead of using Vermin's tired characters, Abner inventively peopled the strip with hillbillies. A bighearted Vermin told his slaving assistant: "I'm proud of having created these characters!! They'll make millions for me!! And if they do – I'll get "you" a new light bulb!!"


title: Al Capp

text: Traveling in the same social circles, the two men engaged in a 20-year mutual vendetta, as described by the "New York Daily News" in 1998: "They crossed paths often, in the midtown watering holes and at National Cartoonists Society banquets, and the city's gossip columns were full of their snarling public donnybrooks." In 1950, Capp wrote a nasty article for "The Atlantic", entitled "I Remember Monster". The article recounted Capp's days working for an unnamed "benefactor" with a miserly, swinish personality, who Capp claimed was a never-ending source of inspiration when it came time to create a new unregenerate villain for his comic strip. The thinly-veiled boss was understood to be Ham Fisher.


title: Al Capp

text: Fisher retaliated, doctoring photostats of "Li'l Abner" and falsely accusing Capp of sneaking obscenities into his comic strip. Fisher submitted examples of "Li'l Abner" to Capp's syndicate and to the New York courts, in which Fisher had identified pornographic images that were hidden in the background art. However, the X-rated material had been drawn there by Fisher. Capp was able to refute the accusation by simply showing the original artwork.


title: Al Capp

text: In 1954, when Capp was applying for a Boston television license, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received an anonymous packet of pornographic "Li'l Abner" drawings. The National Cartoonists Society (NCS) convened an ethics hearing, and Fisher was expelled for the forgery from the same organization that he had helped found; Fisher's scheme had backfired in spectacular fashion. Around the same time, his mansion in Wisconsin was destroyed by a storm. On December 27, 1955, Fisher committed suicide in his studio. The feud and Fisher's suicide were used as the basis for a lurid, highly fictionalized murder mystery, "Strip for Murder" by Max Allan Collins.


title: Al Capp

text: Another "feud" seemed to be looming when, in one run of Sunday strips in 1957, Capp lampooned the comic strip "Mary Worth" as "Mary Worm". The title character was depicted as a nosy, interfering busybody. Allen Saunders, the creator of the "Mary Worth" strip, returned Capp's fire with the introduction of the character "Hal Rapp", a foul-tempered, ill-mannered, and (ironically) inebriated cartoonist, (Capp was a teetotaler). Later, the "feud" was revealed to be a collaborative hoax that Capp and his longtime pal Saunders had cooked up together. The Capp-Saunders "feud" fooled both editors and readers, generated plenty of free publicity for both strips—and Capp and Saunders had a good laugh when all was revealed.


title: Al Capp

text: Capp, Milton Caniff ("Terry and the Pirates", "Steve Canyon") and Walt Kelly ("Pogo") were close personal friends and professional associates throughout their adult lives, and occasionally, referenced each other in their strips. According to one anecdote (from "Al Capp Remembered", 1994), Capp and his brother Elliot ducked out of a dull party at Capp's home—leaving Walt Kelly alone to fend for himself entertaining a group of Argentine envoys who didn't speak English. Kelly retaliated by giving away Capp's baby grand piano. According to Capp, who loved to relate the story, Kelly's two perfectly logical reasons for doing so were: a. to cement diplomatic relations between Argentina and the United States, and b. "Because you can't play the piano, anyway!" ("Beetle Bailey" creator Mort Walker confirmed the story, relating a slightly expanded version in his autobiography, "Mort Walker's Private Scrapbook", 2001.)


title: Al Capp

text: Milton Caniff offered another anecdote (from "Phi Beta Pogo", 1989) involving Capp and Walt Kelly, "two boys from Bridgeport, Connecticut, nose to nose," onstage at a meeting of the Newspaper Comics Council in the sixties. "Walt would say to Al, 'Of course, Al, this is really how you should draw Daisy Mae, I'm only showing you this for your own good.' Then Walt would do a sketch. Capp, of course, got ticked off by this, as you can imagine! So he retaliated by doing "his" version of Pogo. Unfortunately, the drawings are long gone; no recording was made. What a shame! Nobody anticipated there'd be this dueling back and forth between the two of them ..."


title: Al Capp

text: Although he was often considered a difficult person, some acquaintances of Capp have stressed that the cartoonist also had a sensitive side. In 1973, upon learning that 12-year-old Ted Kennedy Jr., the son of his political rival Ted Kennedy Sr., had his right leg amputated, Capp wrote the boy an encouraging letter that gave candid advice about dealing with the loss of a limb, which Capp himself had experienced as a boy. One of Capp's grandchildren recalls that at one point, tears were streaming down the cartoonist's cheeks while he was watching a documentary about the Jonestown massacre. Capp gave money anonymously to charities and "people in need" at various points in his life.


title: Al Capp

text: In her autobiography, American actress Goldie Hawn stated that Capp sexually propositioned her on a casting couch and exposed himself to her when she was 19 years old. When she refused his advances, Capp became angry and told her that she was "never gonna make anything in your life" and that she should "go and marry a Jewish dentist. You'll never get anywhere in this business."


title: Al Capp

text: Two biographies, one about Goldie Hawn and the other about Grace Kelly, describe Capp as trying to force Kelly into having sex with him, and he later tried to do the same with Hawn.


title: Al Capp

text: In 1971, investigative journalist Jack Anderson wrote that Capp had exposed his genitals to four female students at the University of Alabama.


title: Al Capp

text: In 1972, after an incident at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, Capp was arrested. He pleaded guilty to a charge of attempted adultery, while charges of indecent exposure and sodomy were dropped. He was fined US$500 ().


title: Al Capp

text: In 2019, Jean Kilbourne was inspired by the MeToo movement to publish in "Hogan’s Alley" her own experience of being groped and sexually solicited by Al Capp while doing freelance writing and research work for him in contemplation of a permanent job in 1967.


title: Al Capp

text: Like many cartoonists, Capp made extensive use of assistants (notably Andy Amato, Harvey Curtis, Walter Johnson, and Frank Frazetta). During the extended peak of the strip, the workload grew to include advertising, merchandising, promotional work, public service comics, and other specialty work—in addition to the regular six dailies and one Sunday strip per week. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s, there were scores of Sunday strip-style magazine ads for Cream of Wheat using the "Abner" characters, and in the 1950s, Fearless Fosdick became a spokesman for Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic in a series of daily strip-style print ads. The characters also sold chainsaws, underwear, ties, detergent, candy, soft drinks—including a licensed version of Capp's moonshine creation, Kickapoo Joy Juice—and General Electric and Procter & Gamble products, all requiring special artwork.


title: Al Capp

text: No matter how much help he had, Capp insisted on his drawing and inking the characters' faces and hands—especially of Abner and Daisy Mae—and his distinctive touch is often discernible. "He had "the touch,"" Frazetta said of Capp in 2008. "He knew how to take an otherwise ordinary drawing and really make it "pop". I'll never knock his talent."


title: Al Capp

text: As is usual with collaborative efforts in comic strips, his name was the only one credited— although, sensitive to his own experience working on "Joe Palooka", Capp frequently drew attention to his assistants in interviews and publicity pieces. A 1950 cover story in "Time" even included photographs of two of his employees, whose roles in the production were detailed by Capp. Ironically, this highly irregular policy (along with the subsequent fame of Frank Frazetta) has led to the misconception that his strip was "ghosted" by other hands. The production of "Li'l Abner" has been well documented, however. In point of fact, Capp maintained creative control over every stage of production for virtually the entire run of the strip. Capp originated the stories, wrote the dialogue, designed the major characters, rough penciled the preliminary staging and action of each panel, oversaw the finished pencils, and drew and inked the hands and faces of the characters. Frazetta authority David Winiewicz described the everyday working mode of operation in "Li'l Abner Dailies: 1954 Volume 20" (Kitchen Sink, 1994):


title: Al Capp

text: There was also a separate line of comic book titles published by the Caplin family-owned Toby Press, including "Shmoo Comics" featuring Washable Jones. Cartoonist Mell Lazarus, creator of "Miss Peach" and "Momma", wrote a comic novel in 1963 entitled "The Boss Is Crazy, Too" which was partly inspired by his apprenticeship days working with Capp and his brother Elliot at Toby. In a seminar at the Charles Schulz Museum on November 8, 2008, Lazarus called his experience at Toby "the five funniest years of my life". Lazarus went on to cite Capp as one of the "four essentials" in the field of newspaper cartoonists, along with Walt Kelly, Charles Schulz, and Milton Caniff.