In his effort serve his editors at Focus Magazine and alert their curious readers just how Europeans saw the American culture, German photographer Bernd Lohse (1911 – 1995) traveled throughout the country taking snap-shots of everything that charmed and repulsed him – take a look for yourself.
An interesting W.W. II story was passed along by actor, announcer, producer and screenwriter John Nesbitt (1910 – 1960), who is best remembered as the narrator for the MGM radio series Passing Parade. Five months after the end of the war, Nesbitt relayed to his audience that during the Battle of the Bulge, U.S.-born Nazi agents, having been ordered to kill General Eisenhower, did not even come close to fulfilling their mission, suffered incarceration among other humiliations – all due to a lack of knowledge where American comic strips were concerned. Read on…
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel: 1904 – 1991) was all of 33 years of age when this one page piece of fiction appeared in The Stage Magazine; that same year his first book went to press, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
The article is illustrated by one of his delightful drawings that future generations would come to know so well.
A single paragraph from the late Forties explains who was behind the rise and fall of the oft-photographed sidewalk apple vending stands in New York City.
Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…
Kate Douglas Wiggin recalled her childhood train ride in the 1840’s in which she was able to have a chat with one of her favorite authors, Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870), as he traveled the United States on a reading tour.
‘Of course, I do skip some of the very dull parts once and a while; not the short dull parts but the long ones.’ He laughed heartily. ‘Now that is something that I hear very little about’ he said.
A late Forties travel article that simultaneously announced the end of Aspen, Colorado, as a ghost town and the beginning of it’s reign as a ski resort of the first order.
Aspen is a tiny Colorado village tucked away in one corner of a lush green valley ringed by snow-capped peaks rising to altitudes of more than 14,000 feet…
Nasty adjectives fly in this nifty essay concerning the friendship that soured between American writers Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) and Bret Harte (1836 – 1902). The two men were quite close during their younger days as journalists in San Francisco; in 1877 the bond between them was so strong that the two agreed to collaborate on a play, which they titled, Ah, Sin. However, Twain insisted that it was notoriety that killed his friend and it might have been better …if Harte had died in the first flush of his fame:
There was a happy Bret Harte, a contented Bret Harte, an ambitious Bret Harte, a bright, cheerful, easy-laughing Bret Harte to whom it was a bubbling effervescent joy to be alive. That Bret Harte died in San Francisco. It was the corpse of that Bret Harte that swept in splendor across the continent…
This is a portion of a longer article about American children and their collective sufferings during the Great Depression that can be read here. The column attached pertains to a White House conference and the sorry state of American schools in 1940.
From Amazon: Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher
Fashion and Hollywood costume designer Howard Greer
wrote of Lady Duff Gordon
(born Lucy Sutherland, 1863 – 1935):
…she was the first to introduce the French word chic into the English language, particularly in relation to fashion. She was the first dressmaker to employ mannequin parades (ie. models) in the showing of clothes…She was responsible for many fads and her clothes made many people famous. She was the most expensive dressmaker of her time, and the most aloof.
Lucile was one of the few souls to survive the TITANIC sinking; click here to read her account of that sad night.
With the opening of Camp Nordland (Dorkland?) in Andover, New Jersey, the two streams of American fascism saw fit to convene there and join hands. The Italian side was lead by the American Duce Salvatore Caridi and Yankee Fuhrer Fritz Kuhn stood at the head of the American Bundists.
Amidst much heiling, drinking of imported beer and assorted flag-waving, was celebrated the cementing of the twenty-first link in a chain of camps which has been gradually growing. By car they came and by train, until the countryside was increased by ten thousand inhabitants.
One of the loyal confederates of the American Bund was Anastasy Vonsyatsky (1898 – 1965). It was his sincere belief that Fascism was the only force capable of defeating international communism – and once he conceived of this idea, he was all in: Fascism could do no wrong. Although he worked closely with the American Bund, his true allegiance stood with the Russian Fascist Party in far-off Manchukuo, China
(you can read about Manchukuo here). Vonsyatsky was arrested by the FBI five months after Pearl Harbor and released in 1946.
The Volksbund early identified itself with Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Furthermore, its members at times have indulged themselves in parades, Nazi salutes and loud ‘heils’. For these reasons the organization has drawn much criticism for ‘un-American’ activities.
As you can see by glancing at some of the other articles on this page, the Italians and Germans were not the only nations to cultivate a taste for fascism; a franchise office was opened in the United States in the mid-Thirties. This article is essentially a photo-essay consisting of twenty-six images and a brief explanation regarding the American Nazi movement that once existed in New Jersey:
The pictures on these pages were not made in Germany. They may look like accurate shots of a foreign political movement, which they are, but they were made right here in these United States. Almost coincidentally with Hitler’s assumption of power in the Reich, our free democracy began to feel the long paw of Nazi propaganda…
Read about the American reporter who became a Nazi…
Click here to read about an admired American hero who was also attracted to fascist theology.
A semi-flattering profile of Benito Mussolini that explains his difficult childhood and the periodic beatings he suffered at the hands of his Marxist father. No references are made to his favorite pastimes – beating up editors and closing newspapers:
Significantly, his god is Nietzsche, the German philosopher who wrote: ‘Might makes right.’
You can read about his violent death here…
Fascist Rome fell to the Allies in June of 1944, click here to read about it…
If Facebook existed in 1923, their über censor meisters would see to it that the uncharitable opinions of U.S. Representative French Strother (1868 – 1930) would never appear upon their fair pages. Strother’s thoughts on the failure of the immigration system were shared by many of his countrymen and in this column he lists many examples illustrating the collapse of America’s ability to assimilate the new-comers:
In fairness to the aliens, be it said that some of them have brought rich gifts to our civilization. But what shall profit a nation if it gain the whole world, and lose it’s own soul?
A 1941 article by the screenwriting, piano playing novelist Eliot Paul (1891-1958) who put-forth a sincere effort to define that popular 1940s music known as Boogie-Woogie.
Paul went to great lengths explaining the roots of Boogie-Woogie, the origin of the term and the finest performers and composers of the music:
First, one can say that Boogie-Woogie is an authentic, soul-satisfying genre of piano music, native to America and for which America is indebted to the Negro people…If you ask Al Ammons (1907 — 1949), one of the foremost exponets of boogie-woogie, what boogie-woogie is, he would smile, his eyes would light up, and probably he would say:
‘Man! It scares you‘
-and it does. There are deep reasons why it tugs at our memories and slumbering instincts.
By clicking the blue title link above, you will be treated to a postmortem appraisal of the American composer George Gershwin (1898 – 1937). The article was written by one of his contemporaries; Gershwin is admired in this article, but not idolized:
No one could have been more surprised than George Gershwin at the furor the Rhapsody caused in highbrow circles. He had dashed it off in three weeks as an experiment in a form that he only vaguely understood. In no sense had he deliberately set out to make an honest woman out of jazz.
Ten years after the death of Big Band legend Glenn Miller (1904 – 1944), it was found that his record sales were going through the roof at 16,000,000 per annum, and Hollywood had attempted to cash-in on his memory by releasing a (bland) Technicolor bio-pic, appropriately titled, The Glenn Miller Story(Universal) – with Jimmy Stewart starring in the title roll. The band leader’s popularity was obvious to everyone in 1944, when he was killed in the war, but no one could have predicted this.
