Archive for March, 2023
Review: The White Pill
Michael Malice
The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil
Independently Published, 2022
Margot Metroland
What a joy to open this book and find that whatever the author’s White Pill is supposed to be, it somehow involves Ayn Rand. It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand (1971, by Jerome Tuccille) was the name of an actual book that came out when I was in my teens and going through my own brief Objectivist period. The book is a funny saga about the author’s time as a militant libertarian. I’m sure it meant a lot to people who came of age in the late 60s and were getting tired of Randianism by 1971. But you may find it dreary and overly granular today
Anyway, now we have Michael Malice, literally beginning the book with Ayn Rand! She disappears from view for long sections of the book, but she keeps bouncing back into the story. Her keen insight comes through in one of the early passages, when she’s asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about Communist-tainted Hollywood films, and they want to focus mainly on Song of Russia (an anodyne movie with Robert Taylor, set at the period of the German invasion). But AR goes no sir; explicit pro-Soviet propaganda is not the issue here. The real problem is subtle, almost undetectable nuances in theme, plot, even set design. This is vintage Ayn Rand, as anyone who’s read her criticism (e.g., The Romantic Manifesto) can sense. Smoking cigarettes defiantly, enjoying illicit sex, breaking the rules for the hell of it—everything in the Rand universe is fraught with serious meaning.
The persistence of Ayn Rand in popular (and high) culture is impressive. About 15 years ago a relative of mine, a history professor, wrote a well received biographical study of Rand, her Objectivist movement, and their effect upon conservatism and libertarian economics. I go to her website now, and by gosh and by golly, she’s still plugging AR on her website. “The leading independent expert on Ayn Rand” she boasts…and then farther down the page…she mentions she’s a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution! She knows what she’s doing. “Ayn Rand” continues to be eye-candy for an awful lot of people.
And me. I went through my Randian period many many years ago, gradually coming to the realization that her didactic manner served to hide the fact that her philosophy and precepts were pretty much flapdoodle. Oh, I still remember The Fountainhead fondly, Atlas Shrugged not so much (her idea of a heroic industrialist is a guy who runs a railroad), and I still hold fast to some of the crackbrained notions about economics that I learned from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. And I will still defend Rand against all comers, while yet admitting her wacky errors in logic and literary criticism.
The White Pill has the look and feel of a YA nonfiction read (“Young Adult” literature being books actually aimed 12-year-olds). However it is not dumbed down in any way. What it’s largely about is the politics of terror, as utilized by the Bolsheviki. I emphasize this because a few years ago i was reading James Burnham’s The Struggle for the World (1947), and therein Burnham identifies and skewers that aspect of Communism. Terror is not some expedient, some short-term solution to simplify operations; no, it’s the whole deal. And Communism is not some theory of economics—or, Lord knows, an idealized “humanist” plan to give people free healthcare and borscht.
George Orwell read and reviewed Burnham’s book just as he was struggling with the early chapters of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It gave him the golden key to the plot and backstory of his book. He practically puts Burnham’s words into O’Brien’s mouth. A boot stamping on a human face—forever. Of course, then and now, the Reds sell themselves to the gullible masses by denying Communism is a system of institutionalized cruelty; oh no, it’s a way or providing you with free healthcare, and, uh…kasha varnishkes! [1]
Terror and torture figure bigly in The White Pill. When I was still in grade school there was a scary book that was sometimes required reading. The Bridge at Andau (1957) by James Michener. It’s about oppression and atrocities in Communist Hungary during the postwar era, and I’ll tell you it is a real horrorshow. Fortunately it’s very un-Michener in one respect: it’s not a ten-pound doorstop, in fact it’s quite slim. Persistent rumor hath it that the CIA hired Michener to crank it out as slick hackwork, based on some light research and heavy interviews from the November 1956 refugees. Much in the same way that Dr Tom Dooley and ghostwriters were supposedly ginned up to knock out torture-and-mutilation bestsellers about Indochina during the same era. I just don’t know. I do know the characters in the book are mainly composites, so much so that Wikipedia used to list the book as fiction.
Less terrifyingly…the book has the oddest endnoting apparatus I’ve ever seen. Lower-case roman numerals are used. Like, you know, lxxiv instead of note 74. I’ve been reading the Kindle version, so they really stand out on the page, in bright orange. One of the advantages of Kindle editions and some other e-books is that you can flip back and forth from the page you’re reading to the notes in the back, then click again to go back to the text.
Villains in the book include many of the famous apologists for the Stalin era, including Walter Duranty, who spent years denying the famines and death squads. Harold Laski is here too, crueler and snider than he’s usually portrayed. He has to be there, after all he was Ayn Rand’s model for Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. [2]
Upton Sinclair makes an appearance as a “democratic socialist” who loathes totalitarianism but praises Soviet Union because, “I say that its record is pretty nearly perfect.” This is truly cognitive dissonance, or fear of being a contrarian, like people who sign onto the Global Warming hoax today because they don’t wish to be stigmatized as concave-brain weirdos. Like most of these villains, Sinclair pooh-poohed the idea that defendants in the Stalin Purge Trials were innocent.
Another “democratic socialist,” George Orwell, is a Good Guy who recognized the Trials for what they were. His eyes were opened for good when he went to fight in Spain in 1937, and found that Stalin’s Red brigades were more interested in shooting their “allies,” the socialists and Trotskyists and anarcho-syndicalists, than in fighting the “fascists” (as the Reds liked to refer to the Nationalist forces). Now Orwell goes back to England and tries to publish his new memoir of that war, Homage to Catalonia, but his usual publisher, Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club, won’t touch it. You see, Orwell’s criticism of the Reds in Spain went against the ideal of Popular Front-style solidarity: socialists and communists united against the “fascist” foe. [3]
But there are minor Bad Guys too, including the Algonquin wit Dorothy Parker, and novelist-critic Granville Hicks, who were among the signatories of a notorious 1938 letter published in The Daily Worker and New Masses. The subject was the Stalin Purge Trials of the previous two years, and these literary lights wished the world to know (or at least the world of literary fellow-travelers) that those culprits who had been tried and tortured, and imprisoned, and often shot—yes indeed, they were arch-criminals, guilty as hell.
A noticeably absent Bad Guy in the text is Joseph Davies, a lawyer and Federal bureaucrat who served as ambassador to the Soviet Union 1936-1938, about which he wrote a pro-Stalin memoir called Mission to Moscow. Davies had been a prosperous corporate attorney and Democrat Party fundraiser when he married the rich fabulously rich Marjorie Merriwether Post (General Foods and Post Cereals) in 1935. You don’t need to read Davies’ book, just look at the film version starring Walter Huston. Joe goes all goofy and goggle-eyed when he’s talking to Stalin, and Stalin explains why he was executing all his old Bolsheviks and trusted generals. Basically, these miscreants were plotting against the state, they were sabotaging factories, they were taking the food out of the mouths of innocent babes. The film shows us vignettes of these arrests: people seized on the street, or at the factory they’re sabotaging. The important aspect of the Davies narrative is that he was not being devious or following some Communist Party discipline.
Bad Guy? Actually just a naïve simpleton, a stooge, of a sort that was not unknown in those days. Like another woolly-headed fool that we’re coming to shortly, Henry Wallace.
Generally Michael Malice and I are on the same page when it comes to Good Guy/Bad Guy rankings. But there are some strange, surprising exceptions. Malice calls author Roald Dahl “one of the vilest people who ever lived.” Is this because of the sadistic violence and little brown Oompa-Loompa “pygmies” in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Not on your tintype.
A giant of a man, [Dahl] was quite vocal throughout his life about his racist and anti-Semitic views. Claims that “Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” paled in comparison to his personal behavior.
Malice then goes on to suggest that Dahl pestered wife Patricia Neal for sex when she was partially paralyzed after suffering a series of strokes and a three-week coma. What he leaves out is that Roald enabled a near-100% recovery by forcing Pat through a rigorous physical therapy protocol at a military base. He also resurrected Pat’s career, getting her roles in films and TV commercials. (Ayn Rand sighting here! Pat’s role in the film of The Fountainhead gives us another opportunity to see the AR bobble-head bounce up again.)
As for those “racist and anti-Semitic comments,” they consist mostly of critical remarks about Israel. Dahl and “anti-semitism,” if that’s what you want to call it, ranks somewhere south of Taki Theodoracopulos. The Forward, a very lively Jewish publication, listed a few of what are ostensibly the five most rancid remarks, but these are pretty tame lot. I’ve known Jews who routinely said much more mordant or vitriolic things. Self-hating? As Larry David said, “Yeah I hate myself but it has nothing to do with being Jewish.” Move over, Ron Unz.
There are some valid criticisms that can be made about Roald Dahl, but Malice sort of drops the ball in this regard. While enjoying the hospitality of generous American friends in Manhattan, Washington DC, Virginia, and Hyde Park, NY (wink wink), he was working as a spy for William (“Intrepid”) Stephenson of British Security Coordination, headquartered in Rockefeller Center. Malice tell the story of how Dahl purloined and copied a secret document prepared by Vice-President Henry Wallace, regarding postwar global strategy (and also control of international airline routes). This had a beneficial outcome, for both Britain and America. Churchill was made aware of Wallace’s planned skullduggery, and America got to give the woolly-minded Wallace the boot as VP, thereby narrowly avoiding having him succeed FDR in April 1945. But still, Dahl’s actions were dirty tricks, literally crimes.
And not to be overly long-winded on the subject of Roald Dahl, Malice writes that Dahl was mainly known in 1944 for having been an RAF pilot who got shot down and badly burned by a crash in Libya early in the war (not in Greece, as Malice says). But no, he had been publishing short stories that were well received, and he wrote a popular kiddy book called The Gremlins, which Walt Disney planned to make into an animated film (but didn’t, because of RAF oversight restrictions). [4]
The second half of The White Pill is mainly about the last few decades of politics in Great Britain and America. I’m not quite sure what the theme is here, but it appears to be a big cheer for libertarian-conservative politics. Yay, Maggie Thatcher!(Cursed in the press a few years earlier as Milk Snatcher, when as Education Secretary she axed free milk at school for 11-year-olds.) Go, Ronald Reagan! Malice seems to like Thatcher more, and disapproves of the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. Grenada was a member of the British Commonwealth, but America clearly had a more vested interest there even if (as I vaguely recall) the Americans were mainly medical students who couldn’t get into a med school at home.
In discussing detente in the Reagan/Thatcher/Gorbachev years, Malice skips over an essential motivating geopolitical factor at work in the early 1980s. America was supplying Pershing II nuclear missiles to NATO, to be positioned in West Germany, and Yuri Andropov (briefly General Secretary at the Kremlin, 1982-1984) pushed the story that Ronald Reagan intended to commence nuclear war.
Actually, for some years Soviet propagandists had been trying to sell the world a chimera called a “Nuclear Freeze.” The propaganda boys gave this campaign a full-court press, something we hadn’t seen since the Popular Front days, or perhaps the immediate postwar years. In America people were encouraged to write SINCERELY, NO NUKES! for the complimentary close of serious office correspondence. You’d see people throughout Western Europe (and even America) wearing cartoon-sun pinbacks that said “Atomkraft? Nej Tak!” (For some reason I remember the one in Danish; readers are more likely to remember the German one, with “Nein Danke!”) And then there was the whiny German girl singer Nena, singing “Neunundneunzig Luftballons,” because helium toy balloons, you see, signify nuclear fallout. Or something. An animated cartoon from Britain, “When the Wind Blows,” about living in the aftermath of nuclear war. And some long, lugubrious essays by Jonathan Schell in The New Yorker called things like “How the World Ends” or “The Fate of the Earth,” all trying to scare you to death about the prospect of nuclear war, or even the use of nuclear energy!
This mad fad all needs to be reviewed, sifted, eviscerated, by someone who has the time and funds. But it’s significant that this propaganda campaign is nearly always ignored by present-day writers. We get maudlin drama and memoirs about po’ widdle commie writers in Hollywood 70+ years ago, as though the time between the Hollywood Ten and the height of the Blacklist was 50 years rather than 5. Nothing on the Nuclear Freeze campaign.
And intelligent people actually bought this Nuclear Freeze nonsense back in the day. My cousin in England was one of the originators of the Greenham Common Women’s Camp in the early 1980s, in a protest which pretended to be about encouraging a Nuclear Freeze. (American military, with nuclear weapons, perhaps, had taken over part of an RAF installation.) Actually it was more of a kumbaya feminist encampment, along the lines of the late, lamented Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. My friend Andrew Paulson would have dinner with me and ask if I’d read the latest Jonathan Schell screed in The New Yorker. “It’s really serious. You must read it! Nuclear war is a clear and present danger!”
So long as I’ve mentioned Andrew Paulson, I’ll sign off with another insubstantial (but funny) story about our favorite bobble-head, the Divine Ayn. Back in the 70s, my late friend Andrew, later to be a highly imaginative international entrepreneur (at least according to Wikipedia) dined out for months on his story of visiting Ayn Rand. He was about 19 at the time. One day, on a lark, he and a friend dropped by her apartment building (East 35th St., I seem to recall). He buzzed her on the intercom, she answered immediately, and invited the lads up for a drink.
“She’s in pretty good shape…for a chain smoker with one lung,” Andy told me. Then a year or two later I happened to bring up that Ayn Rand visit, and Andy just roared with laughter. It turned out to be just a big fat shaggy dog story that he had almost forgotten about. What actually happened that day was that Andy and friend did indeed buzz Rand’s apartment, and she did indeed answer, but in an angry tone. “Who ARE you?” So they gave their names, maybe their college. AR was having none of it. “Yes but who ARE you?”
Yes indeed, Andy had quite an imagination but I think I like the “true” version better. It just seems to nail Ayn Rand.
Notes
[1] I touched on the Burnham influence in this essay: https://counter-currents.com/2019/06/your-nineteen-eighty-four-sources-in-full/
[2] A moment’s thought: Ayn Rand, who was married to Frank O’Connor, not only gave many of her Fountainhead characters Irish names, she even did that to the “Harold Laski” socialist villain, who was well known to be a Lithuanian-Polish Jew from Manchester in the original model, but now gets renamed Toohey! In fact, I don’t think AR had any Jewish characters in her novels. She was like Louis B. Mayer of MGM, intent on presenting a kind of Andy Hardy America (or perhaps Mickey Rooney America) to her audience. No Jews in Anthem, or in The Fountainhead, or in Atlas Shrugged, unless I missed something.
[3] The Communist ringleader in Barcelona who had Orwell and friends in his sights—and may well have been responsible for Orwell’s being shot in the neck—was Ramon Mercader, a wealthy Spanish communist and NKVD operative. Two years after Orwell’s sojourn in Spain, Mercader went to Mexico City on an even bigger mission. He gradually befriended Leon Trotsky, posing as a sympathizer. After a number of months he murdered Trotsky with an ice axe.
[4] The story of The Gremlins and Dahl’s spy-skullduggery is told in detailed narrative in The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, by Jennet Conant (2008).
Robert Brasillach & Notre avant-guerre : La Cagoule
Robert Brasillach & Notre avant-guerre: La Cagoule
Remembering Robert Brasillach, March 31, 1909–February 6, 1945
Preface
Here is another section from Notre avant-guerre (approximately, Our Pre-War Years) by Robert Brasillach. The four earlier installments are here.
Some of the passages in this memoir were lifted from Brasillach’s journalism, mainly from the latter 1930s. I’ve noticed that two were originally written for Revue Universelle or Je Suis Partout. But others, such as the following, are de novo exposition. In this excerpt, Brasillach is mainly discussing the Rightist organizations of the mid-1930s—the nationalist, anti-communist, and monarchist ligues that were suppressed by fiat, by the Popular Front (i.e., socialist and communist) government under Léon Blum in 1936. In their place sprang up new political parties and semi-secret societies. Of the latter, the most significant is La Cagoule (“the cowl,” or “the hood”). If you look it up in old newspapers and magazines, or Google it, you may find it referred to as a terrorist organization. TIME magazine first referred to it (issue of November 29, 1937) as a “fabulous, supposedly extreme Rightist French Ku Klux Klan.” That’s a bit of a stretch, seeing as Cagoulards were largely Catholic alumni of Charles Maurras’s Action Française.
The TIME story I’m looking at is about the arrest of Cagoule members, and seizure of caches of machine guns and rifles by the French Sûreté. It was believed, or suspected—or perhaps merely trumpeted to the popular press—that the Cagoulards were planning a coup. TIME however treats it all as rather a joke, capping the story with:
This week the Duc de Guise, bewhiskered pretender to the vanished throne of France, attempted from his Belgian exile to create an impression that what was afoot was a coup to crown him. “We have decided,” royally manifestoed Guise again, as he often has before, “to reconquer the throne of our fathers.”
The attitude toward La Cagoule among French politicians and journalists wasn’t quite so supercilious. As Brasillach tells us, below, fear of Cagoulards was used to demonize and caricature the French Right as a whole, in much the same way that the American Left has demonized Trump supporters (or simply, “Republicans”) as a dangerous mob of gun-toting, terroristic booboisie.
As we return to our story here, we find Brasillach has been talking about another pretender to the French throne, Henri d’Orleans, Comte de Paris (1908-1999) a popular public figure in the mid-1930s. Henri is the direct descendant of a younger brother of Louis XIV, Philippe, Duc d’Orleans (1640-1701). The main Bourbon line, the so-called “Legitimists” (Louis XIV’s descendants) finally died out in the 1880s, leaving their Orleans cousins as the primary claimants to the throne. Action Française and other nationalist and monarchist political factions are watching him with fervent interest. Henri is an aviator, with a very handsome family, Brasillach told us last time, and he publishes a monarchist newspaper, the Courrier Royal.
But as we rejoin the story, there is some disappointing news…
From Notre avant-guerre:
The following year [i.e., 1937] we were astonished to discover that the Comte de Paris had condemned Action Française in the course of a manifesto. No doubt his advisers had persuaded him that his cause would be served by the abandoning this discredited party. What happened, happened: and people on the Left weren’t broken up by it, that’s for sure. And so that old wrestler, Charles Maurras, suffered yet another blow. We consoled ourselves by repeating to ourselves that the character of the king did not matter, that ingratitude is a royal virtue, and that time arranges many things.
And there was other bad news. There was the great [Francois de] La Rocque defamation lawsuit, where the leader of the Parti Social Français [1] was accused of having received funds from Prime Minister Tardieu. [2]
Disgusted with all the political parties, some adventurous young people looked for something else. They organized secret societies, in the style of the Carbonari. The first ones were some dissidents from Action Française who got hosed down by the police, in the usual fashion. This baptism gave them the ironic name Cagoulards. [3] Meantime, out in the provinces, they were founding societies to fight against communism. Everyone knew that there was coordination between the organizations’ commandants and the towns’ civic leaders to prevent a sudden uprising or coup. But otherwise these groups were very different from each other. The police surveilled them all the time, while the marxists did their best to spread lies and confusion. One fine day, supposedly, a vast conspiracy against the Republic would be launched with great fanfare, and only the Cagoulards knew what the next chapter of the story would bring.
Some very good people got arrested, and even authentic heroes. For example, General Duseigneur [4], who would disappear at the beginning of the coming war; or Sergeant Darnand [5], thanks to whom a forthcoming German offensive in July 1918 was revealed. And yet, personally I never knew any Cagoulard, of any kind whatsoever.
Nevertheless one knew that these these enigmatic and varied organizations were shot through with police informers, scoundrels, fanatics, and dimwits—even if the majority were just brave young men driven by a need for virtuous activism. The end result was that everything on the nationalist side looked confused—defensive organizations got lumped in with Carbonari—while meantime the strongly disciplined and ordered communist cells were themselves accumulating caches of armaments and plotting intricate conspiracies. So for two or three years La Cagoule functioned as a scarecrow of the Popular Front, with the Left blaming it for everything.
But that was just an indication of how mixed up people were in those years, caught in a kind of romantic despair that seized many patriots. At the same time, André Tardieu abandoned politics entirely and published books about the parliamentary regime’s incompetence.
One encouraging development, however, was the emergence of Jacques Doriot. [6] I’d always been curious about his character, this skinny, hairy little devil of whom the bourgeoisie were so afraid, and also the most outstanding leader of the Communist Party. He had founded the Communist network of Saint-Denis (there were some splinter groups, the most important of which was in the Chamber of Deputies as the P.U.P. or Party of Proletarian Unity). In that old royal town of Saint-Denis, we knew he was well liked, and took care of the people; also that he was hated by the Muscovite Communists. Doriot’s people had a song:
Forward, Saint-Denis,
For revolutionary unity!
Notes
[1] François de La Rocque (1885-1946) was the leader of a nationalist and Catholic “league” in the 1920s and 30s, the Croix de Feu. When the Léon Blum’s Popular Front government banned all the Rightist leagues in 1936, La Rocque founded the Parti Social Français (P.S.F.). During the Vichy years, 1940-1944, La Rocque remained in France but opposed close collaboration with the Germans, and formed his own Resistance network, in contact with British intelligence. He and his followers were arrested by German security in Clermont-Ferrand in 1943, and interned with other French officials until freed by American forces in early 1945.
[2] André Tardieu (1876-1945) was premier of France for three brief periods between 1929 and 1932. Brasillach speaks of a «grand procés», literally a 1937 trial in which La Rocque and an old follower of his were accusing each other of defamation. The ex-colleague had been told by Tardieu that he, Tardieu had made payments to La Rocque in 1932 out of secret government funds. La Rocque lost the case.
[3] It literally means the hooded men, but there doesn’t seem to have been an actual uniform, in the manner of today’s Gilets Jaunes.
[4] Édouard Duseigneur (1882-1940), military officer and leader of the Cagoule. He died in the Ardennes in early 1940. According to Wikipedia, he was arrested 25 November 1937 with other leaders of this secret society. (See also introductory notes about the TIME magazine article.)
[5] Joseph Darnand (1897-1945), member of the Cagoule, later leader of the Milice française during the Vichy years. A sergeant in the Great War, he got behind enemy lines and found the plans for a new Ludendorff offensive in July 1918. During the 1939-1940 war he was a lieutenant. Executed in 1945 by firing squad.
[6] Jacques Doriot (1898-1945), sometime Communist, later quasi-fascist, founder of the Parti Populaire Français. During the Second World War he volunteered to fight with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, and was there visited by Robert Brasillach. He died in early 1945 while he was driving to Sigmaringen and his car was strafed by Allied planes.
Reviewing the Unreviewable
Margot Metroland
Deborah Cohen
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial:
The Reporters who Took on a World at War
New York: Random House, 2022
Kathryn S. Olmsted
The Newspaper Axis:
The Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022
Did you ever have to write a book review, but when the time came you really weren’t that into it, so you decided to wing it, and just write a few thousand words on some tangential subject that was mostly unrelated? I’ve never dared to do that myself, but it sounds like something George Orwell would do on a bad-hair day. Or better yet, the windy, orotund Thomas Babington Macaulay. [1]
Anyway, foreseeing a long day at the courthouse, I brought along a copy of the London Review of Books to sit out the waits. It’s a pretty good issue (January 19, 2023). I had already devoured John Lahr’s piece about his father’s friend Buster Keaton, as well as a massive, irresistible Geoffrey Wheatcroft review of the scandalous diaries of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon (three big doorstop volumes!). But there was still plenty of meat left on the bone. I settled in with a review of two intriguing books about 20th century journalism. One is called Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, a group biography of mostly American foreign correspondents, 1920-1960. The other is The Newspaper Axis, ostensibly about “press barons” who were isolationist or Nazi-friendly, but really a denunciation of nationalist journalism in England and America, from about 1900 to the recent age of Brexit and Donald Trump.
However the reviewer, an LRB staffer named Deborah Friedell, chose not to really review the books at all, but rather to spend 4000 words gushing about Dorothy Thompson, a character who has a small part in Last Call. Sometime wife of Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson was one of the highest-paid, most controversial columnists-broadcasters-social crusaders of the era. Dorothy interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931 for the Saturday Evening Post, and seemed rather to like him, while sagaciously predicting he’d never come to power. “When the article was republished as a short book [I Saw Hitler] it included Thompson’s suggestion, barely veiled, that Hitler was probably gay,” writes reviewer Friedell. Perhaps she was peeved that Adolf didn’t make a pass at her. To continue: “When she returned to Berlin in 1934, she knew better than to expect a warm welcome from the new chancellor.” She settled in at the Hotel Adlon for a few weeks and filed a few local-color stories. Then a courteous young Gestapo guy in a trenchcoat met her at the hotel and handed her an order to leave Germany within 24 hours. Dorothy assumed this was all Goebbels’s doing. But no, this turned out to have been ordered by Adolf himself. “By the time she got back to the US, Thompson had been transformed into the most famous anti-Nazi writer in the country. She made a thirty-city lecture tour and began a column in the Herald Tribune, opposite Walter Lippmann.” [2]
A large-bodied, boisterous woman rather in the Eleanor Roosevelt mold, Dorothy seemed for years a flaming liberal, decrying “fascism”—she gave her husband Mr. Lewis the background and inspiration for It Can’t Happen Here. She raised money for Jewish refugees, taunted America Firsters and Bundists. By Pearl Harbor, though, she was calling herself a conservative, and at war’s end she was denouncing the Morgenthau Plan and blaming the war on the Jews. And that’s how she faded out. But she’d had a good run. Dorothy Thompson may have her points as a historical curio, a popular punchline in gag cartoons [3] but she appears, in passing, in only one of these two books being reviewed. I suppose reviewer Friedell has read a lot of books on Dorothy, maybe is writing one herself, and chose to go with her strengths. I don’t think she gave either book more than a cursory flip-through. This is too bad, because it shortchanges the other nine or ten characters in this book, most of them stars in the (mostly) American journo firmament in the interwar and war years…yet mostly forgotten today.
There’s John Gunther, with his 25-year series of geopolitical bestsellers, perennial cash-cows for the Book-of-the-Month-Club (Inside Europe, Inside Europe Today, Inside Asia, Inside Russia Today, etc. etc.); his wife Frances Fineman, a diminutive, neurotic Jewish blonde with serial enthusiasms for Indian nationalism, Jawaharal Nehru, and the violent Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky; as well as the Gunthers’ son, Johnny, the Deerfield Academy student who died of galloping brain cancer in 1947, thereby giving his father subject matter for the classic Death Be Not Proud (the only John Gunther book still in print). Then there’s John Gunther’s fellow University of Chicago alumnus James Vincent Sheean, known as Vincent to family and booksellers, otherwise invariably called Jimmy; the preeminent journalist/spy of the era, and the only one to have a memoir (Personal History) turned into a Hitchcock movie (Foreign Correspondent, starring Joel McCrea, whom Jimmy slightly resembled till he lost his looks through boozing). Then H. R. Knickerbocker from Texas, who moved to Munich to study psychology, published several books in German, and eventually got in tight with the Nazi hierarchy, at least until they got tired of his jokes and gave him the heave-ho. And Wiliam Shirer, the bespectacled, mousy, longtime CBS correspondent from Paris and Berlin. And of course Dorothy Thompson and her sometime husband Sinclair Lewis; Rebecca West the libertine and her longtime paramour H. G.Wells; and Wilhelm Stekel, the platitudinous Viennese psychoanalyst (whom the unctuous Mr. Antolini in The Catcher in the Rye memorably quotes to Holden Caulfield before he tries to seduce him). Minor characters include Sigmund Freud, Clare Boothe Luce and husband Harry; Harold Nicolson and his brother-in-law, the sinuous aesthete Eddy Sackville-West, who apparently had a fling with Jimmy Sheean; Ben Hecht, H. L. Mencken, Putzi Hanfstaengel, and a dozen other distracting cameos.
If it seems the author of Last Call, Deborah Cohen, has bitten off more than can be comfortably chewed and digested, well, that is a fair estimate. But she is trying to give a portrait of a forgotten age and idiom, along with her mostly forgotten cast of characters, who were often longtime colleagues, friends, rivals and cuckolds. When they weren’t getting drunk, or drying out, or having breakdowns, or filing their foreign-correspondent stories for their newspapers in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia or London, these people were usually sleeping with their friends’ wives, husbands, and spare lovers. I suspect Last Call at the Hotel Imperial will be mainly useful as a reference book, particularly for screenwriters and novelists who want to recreate the flavor and idiom of the celebrity-correspondent world during the 1920s through 1950s.
Much more approachable and better organized is the other book, Kathryn S. Olmsted’s The Newspaper Axis. It has a much more limited cast (mainly the McCormick-Patterson cousins, W. R. Hearst, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothmere), and all the characters are intrinsically interesting, and politically powerful too. They do more than get drunk, sleep around, and scribble nasty columns (though they do those things as well). In addition Olmsted has an insight or two that will warm the heart of any researcher who spends a lot of time with old newspapers. Our knowledge of journalism and popular opinion from the 1920s-50s is limited and skewed because only a few major newspapers—the Washington Post, the New York Times, maybe the Times of London—have been adequately digitized. If you wish to research a lively and opinionated paper such as Cissy Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald, you have to find a library that has it on microfilm spools, and spend hours and hours scrolling—whirr-whirr-whirr-whirr—through the scratched and blotchy page images. [4] Eugene Meyer’s Washington Post bought the Times-Herald many decades ago in order to take over its features and put it out of business. There’s no question that the Times-Herald was a far better paper, so i have to wonder if WaPo is not at least partly responsible for pushing the Times-Herald–the biggest paper in DC during the 30s and 40s—down the memory hole. When WaPo reviewed this book, they accompanied it with the ugliest (no doubt heavily retouched?) photo of the 57-year Cissy Patterson they could come up with. Old grudges die hard.
Alas, The Newspaper Axis is made unnecessarily lurid on a number of levels. There’s the name, which Olmsted apparently took from Marshall Field III’s far-Left newspaper in New York, PM. In the early 1940s, PM would refer to the Patterson-McCormick papers (NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times-Herald) as the “Newspaper Axis” … because they were purportedly pro-Axis! Then there’s the cover, an impossibly lurid design of a newspaper-strip swastika against a background of garish, Blutfahne red. So over-the-top it put me in mind of Alan Coren’s Punch collection, Golfing for Cats, back around 1974. I gather the publishers decided this was all a bit much, so they removed the swastika for the Audible and Audio Books versions.
But there’s more. The author addresses us in a insistent, hyperventilating manner. On just about about every page she’s denouncing antisemitism or calling someone an antisemite. She manages to do this even though there are practically no Jews whatever in the whole book. This sort of obsession should always be a red warning light to the reader.
On the other hand Olmsted makes a pretty good case for some of these personalities, as lovable, opinionated eccentrics. Jolly old-fashioned, upper-class Jew-wise raillery runs like a thread through the whole book. Newspaper proprietor Eleanor “Cissy” Paterson being introduced at luncheon to a Jewish guest: “Oh I know all about Jews, I was married to one for four years!”—while her friends sit and cringe. Reputed to be a mean drunk and a bully, she made a lot of enemies before and after she became a “newspaperman” (as she described herself). She was quoted telling TIME, “The trouble with me is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch.” Cissy was once married to an Austrian-Polish count who beat her and then kidnapped their daughter (William Howard Taft and the Tsar had to intervene to get the child back), after which she bought a ranch in Jackson Hole and became an avid hunter. She was easily the most interesting person in her family, though followed close behind by first cousin “Col.” Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. The Colonel liked to practice his polo shots on a mechanical horse at the top of the Tribune Tower, all the while lecturing his senior editors. Then there’s Cissy’s older brother Joseph, who wrote pro-socialist novels before founding the NY Daily News with part of the family fortune, and making it the biggest newspaper in America in five years.
When she got to age 48, Cissy persuaded her friend William Randolph Hearst to let her edit one of his failing Washington DC newspapers, the Herald. She took it and turned it into the liveliest, most popular daily in town. Some years later, nearing bankruptcy, Hearst sold both his Washington papers to Cissy. She merged them into the Times-Herald and ran them until her death in 1948.
Hearst himself is sort of the odd man out here, as no one ever accused him of being anti-Jewish, and he spent much of his career presenting himself as a populist progressive. Apparently he makes the team because he was a) a nationalist, b) a non-interventionist in the prewar period, and c) paid both Mussolini and Hitler to write columns for his papers. The columns, generally ghostwritten, weren’t very good and often arrived late, but for a while Hearst was paying them $1000-$2000 a shot. Il Duce supposedly used the money to buy himself a summer estate in Romagna.
The English press lords, literally Lords, don’t really qualify for Olmsted’s swastika badge either. Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, gets slammed mainly because he was “pro-appeasement” and anti-intervention in the late 1930s. And because his biggest newspaper, the Daily Express, continued to be anti-Europe long after he died, so that when the Brexit vote succeeded in 2016, that paper cheered and credited the shade of old Max. Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, was basically just a buffoon, despite his slavish praise of Hitler, and his cheers in the Daily Mail for Sir Oswald Mosley and company in 1934 (“Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”).
Much more amusing is Lord Rothermere’s connection to “Princess” Stephanie Hohenlohe, a Viennese adventuress whom Rothermere kept on a fat retainer as a go-between to Nazi hierarchy and other European notables. Stephanie was Jewish, a fact that apparently did not bother Rothermere (or Hitler either). Olmsted doesn’t mention that (could she not know it?) even though she gives Stephanie a lot of ink. But it surely is relevant to the denouement of this story. After some years, with war clouds gathering, Lord Rothermere ended the retainer, whereupon Stephanie decided to blackmail him by threatening to expose all the smarmy letters he had written to the Führer. Rothermere didn’t give in, so she sued for breach of contract. Stephanie ended up losing the suit; it turned out she didn’t really have access to that embarrassing correspondence. However, always a gentleman, Lord Rothermere paid her court fees.
Olmsted often misses out on a good side story because she doesn’t think the tale would be of interest or more likely because she’s missing information. Just a few examples here:
She repeatedly mentions a 1930s foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune named Donald Day, and excoriates Col. McCormick of the Tribune for employing him as the paper’s representative in Eastern Europe. She tells us again and again that Mr. Day was sympathetic to the German National Socialists, and even became a propaganda broadcaster in Berlin toward the end of the war. But what’s equally intriguing, and what Olmsted leaves out, is that his sister was Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker. So here we have two siblings, both resourceful and idealistic radicals, marching to somewhat different drummers. [5]
Then you have the story of John O’Donnell, longtime “Capitol Stuff” columnist for the New York Daily News and Washington Times-Herald, whom Lefties variously called a pro-Nazi, a Naziphile, and an antisemite. One of his fiercest enemies was a newspaper publisher named J. David Stern, who roundly slandered O’Donnell in a Philadelphia Record editorial after O’Donnell reported in 1941 that Navy and Coast Guard ships were being used, illegally, to guard convoys of food and equipment going to Britain. This name-calling led to $50,000 libel suit against Stern, which O’Donnell eventually won, though the judgment was whittled down to $8000 after five years in litigation. Olmsted completely leaves out Stern’s name and the tale of the libel suit, which was big news at the time. [6] This looks to be deliberate, and dishonest.
Then there’s the story about Cissy Patterson and the comic-strips war. The Washington Post went bankrupt in 1933 and was sold at auction to Eugene Meyer (father of Kay Meyer Graham). Cissy’s family owned the Chicago Tribune – Daily News syndicate that distributed some of the most popular strips in the Post. (They actually concocted some of the most legendary ones in-house, eg Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy.) However the Post‘s bankruptcy voided the syndicate contract—according to the syndicate. So Cissy picked up these strips and ran them in her paper, the Herald. Meyer meanwhile insisted the Post still had valid rights to them, and sued. So for the next year and a half these rival papers in Washington were running the same comic strips, while a bitter legal battle went on. Finally a settlement was reached, with Meyer winning the rights to run the syndicate’s comic strips. Olmsted skips over most of these details, but is careful to tell how the furious Cissy reacted: she sent Meyer a gift box with a pound of meat inside. But it was more exciting than that. It was a hunk of hamburger meat gift-wrapped like an orchid, with a card that (allegedly) said “Here’s your pound of flesh, Shylock.” [7]
Olmsted makes errors that a quick check in reference books, or even an internet search, would have avoided. In discussing Col. Robert McCormick and his cousin Joe Patterson she mentions they both went to Groton and Yale, and while doing so she reveals that she is under the impression that the Groton School is in Connecticut. Which is pretty funny, seeing as this book is published by Yale University Press where, as I recall, they used to have fact-checkers and proofreaders. (There is indeed a place called Groton, Connecticut, but it is renowned for submarines, rather than Endicott Peabody’s austere boarding school in Massachusetts). And once or twice she refers to the Independent Labour Party in Britain as an offshoot of the regular (or “Parliamentary”) Labour Party. No, it’s quite the other way around: Keir Hardie’s ILP came first, and the other Labour Party came about a decade later, in the early 20th century.
But now I am just being pedantic and paying too much attention to this enjoyably silly book.
Notes
[1] Macaulay once chose to review a three-volume Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1840) by the German scholar Leopold Ranke. He wound up writing a 16,000-word essay on a subject that had almost nothing to do with Ranke’s book. Macaulay disposes of Ranke’s work in short order (“It is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book excellently translated…”), then jumps onto his hobby-horse, which is, basically: “Why is Protestantism failing us? Why does the Catholic Church keep growing, and why do they nurture their eccentrics and enthusiasts so much better?” This was during the time of the Oxford Movement, so the question was very much on the mind of Macaulay, a vaguely Evangelical low-churcher who found both High Anglicanism and Catholicism suspect. Macaulay almost certainly didn’t read all three of Ranke’s dense volumes about 16th and 17th century popes—he was in the government at the time, as War Minister—but this busy fellow nonetheless managed to turn out a mighty monograph on a distantly related subject; and I don’t know that anyone ever complained.
[2] Because I have a subscription, I can share this archived LRB review with my friends: here you go. You might also check out this piquant bit on the Red Lewis – Dotty Thompson marriage in the zombie-like revival of SatEvePost revival:”‘What a Woman!’ The Story of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis.”
[3] I recall Thurber’s angry-man-at-typewriter, with his wife going, “He’s giving Dorothy Thompson a piece of his mind.” Or another cartoonist’s gag, with the doctor telling his middle-aged patient in the examining room: “And no more Dorothy Thompson!” Some real knee-slappers!
[4] Tom Tryniski at fultonhistory.com has done a valiant one-man job of digitizing old 19th and 20th century newspapers from New York State and elsewhere. But the lacunae are vast and deep. I tried to search for Washington Times-Herald and mainly got denunciations of the Patterson-McCormick “triumverate” (Times-Herald, NY Daily News, Chicago-Tribune) from 1942 issues of the crazy-Lefty PM newspaper. No Times-Herald itself.
[5] Donald Day also joined the Finnish army for a while, much against the objection of the Tribune.
[6] I wrote about this feud back in 2015, in my series on Fortean Society weirdoes. Stern was one of the society founders, while O’Donnell was a friend of the eccentric 1940s chairman, novelist Tiffany Thayer. Almost Fortean!
[7] Women’s Wear Daily, Oct. 26, 2011: https://wwd.com/business-news/media/the-art-of-accuracy-5334867/#!