Kerry Howley

Stephen Birmingham reviews Plume, a book on the collapse of the ostrich feather industry:

In South Africa, where the Barbary ostrich (prized for its extra-fluffy plumage) was domesticated and raised on ranches, and in London, where the feathers were brokered, and on New York’s Lower East Side, where the feathers were applied to garments, most of the men and women in the feather business were Jewish…

But when world war broke out in 1914, fashion took on a new pose of austerity, and feathers were the first frivolity to go. The epitome of chic in women’s headgear became the simple cloche. Ostrich plumes were suddenly considered not only old-hat but unpatriotic, silly and even vulgar. Quickly they were relegated to feather dusters or to the costumes of carnival kewpie dolls. Fortunes were lost. On South African ostrich farms, thousands of the great, gawky, flightless birds died when ranchers could no longer afford to feed them. And with the collapse, anti-Semitism flared: “Once valued for their extra-regional contacts,” Ms. Stein writes, “Jews were now disparaged for their cosmopolitanism and recast as ruthless speculators inclined to prey on economically vulnerable farmers.”

A farmer in Ootshoorn, South Africa once told me and Will that the industry collapsed with the rise of the automobile; the feathers were so tall that women would have to remove their hats every time they hopped in a car. Tourists probably respond less well to stories about economic nationalism in times of war.