1923

Painting by Charlie Russell (blogger's collection).

__________ 

The Senate: “a herd of miscellaneous mediocrities…” 

H.L. Mencken

__________

March 4: Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, elected as a Republican, takes his seat. As I.F. Stone later writes, “To protest against Prohibition, LaGuardia brewed beer in his own office in Washington.” 

    “To illustrate his speech on the high cost of living after World War I,” Stone adds, “he waved a lamb chop before a startled House of Representatives.” 114/46

*

June: Writing in McClure’s Magazine, Myron M. Stearns offers a few observations on Calvin Coolidge. As is so often in this era, the subtle racism of the times comes through. In the White House, Stearns notes the presence of two dogs, Laddie Boy, an Airdale, and Rob Roy, a collie.

 

The dining room is large like the rest. The table is round, with great spaces of green carpet around it, against which the white collie makes a beautiful picture. The White House servants, like the sergeants at the executive offices, in most instances “go with the place.” Presidents come and presidents go, but the old darkies who help you off with your coat stay on. (155/38)

 

 Coolidge is a man who goes to church. He spends many weekends on the Mayflower, dropping down the Potomac on Saturday, and returning on Sunday, with services on the vessel. In town, he attends the First Congregational Church.

 

Every seat in the church is filled. Admission is only to pew-holders, or by card. When the President’s party comes in, at exactly 11 o’clock, the entire congregation rises, at a signal from the preacher.

 

It is a big, oblong room, this main body of the church, with a square-cut gallery along three sides – just such a plain, unornamented hall as my own father used to preach in, in New England forty years ago. The form of service, the music, the hymns, the announcements, all sound as familiar to me as during my boyhood. There is a big bouquet in front of the pulpit, red flowers mixed with yellows of different shades, and white, like a mammoth edition of one of the old-fashioned farm nosegays. The sermon is a plain, homely talk that takes for granted the religious verities and assumptions on which it is based. The singing of the choir, the playing of the organ, are also plain, rather pleasing, rather unfinished performances – music such as I again recall from the nineties.

  

Stearns also tells a famous story of Coolidge, a man “with a reputation for silence such as no man in public life ever possessed,” put one he finds talkative while visiting with the president to write his story. 

He offers two explanations:

 

First, Mr. Coolidge, at times, “withdraws” into silence almost as a turtle draws back into his shell. I noticed a little of this at the table, and occasionally in his office. Much more marked instances, of course, have come to me second-hand. One story tells of a bet made between two men, one of whom was to sit next to the President at a large dinner, that he would not say three words during the entire meal. Towards the end of the evening, getting desperate because Mr. Coolidge had not yet spoken at all, the man next to him told of the bet, ending: “He bet ten dollars you wouldn’t say three words,” but I bet you would. Mr. Coolidge, according to the story, considered the matter for some moments, then turned a little towards his companion. “You lose,” he said. Two words. I take it the President doesn’t feel it worthwhile, on such occasions, to make the necessary effort to start a conversation; the smaller conventions get little attention from him, and “small talk” is the last thing you can imagine him bothering about.

 

    Stearns ends with a complimentary assessment. He finds that Coolidge has surrounded himself with men like himself, “simple, direct, and extremely able.”

 

He secures results that would be perhaps impossible for other men by choosing the men he needs, and then putting behind them his own faith, his own simple reliance, his own unwillingness to change, his own outstanding loyalty.

 

His power is almost unthinkable. When the selection of a new attorney-general came up, the whole matter of law enforcement and justice, our own respect for the government, our own attitude, and that of others towards us, and towards our lives and property, was involved. Matters of taxation, of economy, of tariff, touch the pockets of each of us. Five hundred million dollars annually is spent by the Army and Navy Departments for national defense, to protect us from possible foes; how is that expenditure made – wisely, or foolishly? It is the President, through his selection of the Secretaries of the Army and Navy, and shaping the policies they are to pursue, who, largely, decides. When we commute to the city, when we mail or receive a letter, when we pay the freight on a shipment of household goods, when we tour through the national parks or camp in national forests, we come in contact with the work of the Department of Commerce, or the Department of the Interior, or the Department of Agriculture – all directly affected and guided by the President himself.

 

He must know about telegraph and telephone and radio and railroads and commission men and motion picture censors, as well as about the government forests, and water power, and everyday morality. Through the State Department our entire future, our relation with other powers, our foreign policy, the likelihood of war or the possibility of peace, is at stake. Read, if you will, any of the messages that President Coolidge has sent to Congress, and see how much is involved – and, incidentally, how complete is the grasp which this quiet man has of this subject.

 

A kindly man, I found Calvin Coolidge, and considerate. Friendly, and easy to talk to – at least, it seems to me, for anyone of similar heritage, understanding the same environment and its results. Above all, a competent man who can cooperate with able assistance, securing with them results that more spectacular men might never achieve. Able to come to the great work of government simply. Able to put a full day’s work into every day without fuss or feathers. Accepting the doctrine of human fallibility, keeping himself free from worry and fit for work, attacking the involved and intricate matters of administration directly, with a quiet mind, a step at a time and the nearest one first. Possessing two, at least, of the attributes of true greatness – he is a simple man, and sincere. (155/41-44)

 

*

THE ARTIST Charlie Russell and his wife are wintering in California, as they have done for several years. Charlie writes to friend in Great Falls, Montana. 

I was at the beach the other day, and if truth gose naked like they say it dos folks don’t lie much at the sea shore  a man that tyes to a lady down here after seeing her in bathing ain’t gambling much it’s a good place to pick em but it’s sometimes hell to hold em  this is a good country for lawyers and preachers ones tying the other untying and thair both busy.

Russell drew this picture of domestic bliss when he and his wife were newly married.

*

 

“The man was a boy, simple, artless, genuine, unabashed.”

 

September 4: Babe Ruth hits a baseball that may have traveled 600 feet. Edward “Dutch” Doyle, writing in The Ol’ Ball Game, explains that Babe was playing in a sandlot game in Philly, to help out a priest he knew at Ascension Catholic Church. 

(Red Smith once described Ruth: “The man was a boy, simple, artless, genuine, unabashed.”) 

In any case, later that same day, he had an official game against the Philadelphia Athletics. When Babe first came to the plate, the ump stopped the game, and Father Casey presented him with a diamond stick pin. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Yankee star said “that he could not express how much the gift meant.” 

One of the players for the church team remembered watching Ruth dive for a line drive, and thinking, what if Babe were to break a leg in a sandlot game? At the time, he was batting .390 and the Yankees were in first place. 

When Babe had time during the game, he signed several dozen balls, which Father Casey later sold for $5 each.

 

*

 

September 14:

 

In September 82,000 fans paid $1,000,000 to watch the Dempsey-Firpo fight. Dempsey floored his opponent seven times; but Firpo landed one punch to Dempsey’s jaw that sent him tumbling through the ropes into reporters’ laps. They helped shove the Manassas Mauler back into the ring, where he finally scored a knockout against the “Wild Bull of the Argentine Pampas.” It was, said one newspaperman, “the most savage heavyweight bout that ever was staged.”

 

(From the August 1965 issue of American Heritage.)

Firpo knocks Dempsey out of the ring.
(From the internet.)

 

*

 

October: Allan A. Hunter, a theological student, writing in The Forum, wonders how the next generation of spiritual leaders will address the real-world problems their congregants face.

 

    A few of his thoughts:

 

  The rising generation of ministers who are eager to interpret the progressive revelation of God to the men of today, have had the advantage of learning enough science in college to assume that the world was made not in six days, nor even, as quibbling conservatives put in “in six aeons.” 

   The problem for us who are preparing to be prophets is that we are overwhelmed with too many situations: the situation in the Ruhr, the situation in Russia, the situation in the oil fields abroad and the coal fields at home, the situation in the divorce courts. Our brains ache with them all; we are bewildered by thus having incessantly to bear the weary weights of this unintelligible world’s worries.

___

 

    Hunter quotes another young theologian, beset by doubt: 

    “The business of social injustice lies about me like a bar of heavy lead. I’m not going into churches forever to patter about things that don’t matter. This matters, – and yet I am afraid to speak about it. A great deal of time is needed to think about this and reach a point of surety.” 

   To our gray-haired friends who own stock in the United States Steel Corporation, [Hunter adds] we cannot pretend that our industrial autocracy is a righteous system.

___

 

About divorce, I suppose that most of us entertain views that would make the apostle Paul turn over in his grave, were we to come out with them. Someday we hope to have a science of human relationships, in accordance with which people will not marry until they have thoroughly tested out the compatibility of their temperaments. Meanwhile the Church does little specifically to educate young men and women to marry intelligently and to live together skillfully, happily, hygienically in marriage; and we are inclined to believe that until the Church takes scientific steps to educate against divorce, it has no right arbitrarily to forbid relief from those marriages which have become a crushing bondage.

 

   Real issues of great import were ignored, he argued. “Industrial democracy,” and “birth regulation” in an increasingly crowded world, for example.

 

    It was – and perhaps all periods in history are – an era of doubt. As one disillusioned artist, a veteran of the Great War put it, “It’s no use trying to do anything along the present lines in Europe or at home. What is being done now is just painting cancer with iodine.” (155/133-138)

 

* 

“The honor of my race, family and self are at stake.” 

October 6: According to The New York Times, Jack Trice, Iowa State’s first African American athlete, was forgotten for nearly fifty years. Football was a dangerous game in 1923, when Trice, a sophomore, suited up for his first varsity season. Unfortunately, he would become one of at least 18 players, high school, college, and semi-pro, to die on the gridiron that year. 

    His tale was rediscovered in a journalism class at the school in 1973. Students began pushing for his name to be attached to the stadium. 

    Finally, in 1997, it was. 

    Today, there is some question whether or not Trice was targeted by players on the other team. It is agreed he was trampled on a dangerous play, and suffered “severe bruising of his intestines and inflammation of his abdomen.” It was only his second varsity game and, for the 21-year-old, his last. He died on October 8, 1923, two days after he was injured in a 20-17 loss at Minnesota.

 

    Racism might have stoked an extra degree of violence on the play. Or it may have been the essence of a sport that in those days was far more dangerous. This much is clear. Trice had to deal with racism all his life. 

    Trice played tackle for Iowa State, with some sources listing him at 215 pounds. He hoped to earn a degree in animal husbandry. When he graduated, he hoped to head south to help black farmers. (George Washington Carver, Iowa State’s first African American student, was likely Trice’s role model.) 

    The Times explains: 

    John G. Trice, known as Jack, was born May 12, 1902, in Hiram, Ohio, about 40 miles southeast of Cleveland. According to Iowa State researchers, he was a grandson of slaves. His father, Green Trice, served in the all-Black 10th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army, known as Buffalo Soldiers, during westward expansion after the Civil War. His troop skirmished against the Apache leader Geronimo in the waning Indian Wars.

 

    Jack Trice attended Cleveland’s East Technical High School, a Midwestern football power [and the same school that later produced Jesse Owens], and in 1922, followed his high school coach, Sam Willaman, who was white, to Iowa State. Only a small number of African-Americans—perhaps fewer than a dozen—had played major college football in the Midwest at that point. Less than 1 percent of Iowa’s residents were Black.

 

    Mr. Trice was widely liked, by all accounts, but still faced racial strictures of the time. None of the approximately 20 Black students at Iowa State were permitted to live on campus.

 

(Green Trice was so excited, himself, when he finally had a chance to earn an education, that he enrolled in first grade at the age of 26.)

 

    Trice was newly married in 1923. On October 5, he and his teammates took a train to Minnesota for the game. “It remains unclear whether Mr. Trice stayed in a separate hotel from Iowa State’s white players, but he was not permitted to eat with the team.”

Jack Trice, second from left, in 1923.
(From the internet.)

 

    The night before the game, Trice wrote a letter, said to be found later in his coat and now kept in a university archive: 

    My thoughts just before the first real college game of my life. The honor of my race, family and self are at stake. Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will! My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly about on the field tomorrow. Every time the ball is snapped I will be trying to do more than my part.

 

    On all defensive plays I must break thru the opponents [sic] line and stop the play in their territory. Beware of mass interference, fight low with your eyes open and toward the play. Roll block the interference. Watch out for cross bucks and reverse end runs. Be on your toes every minute if you expect to make good.

 

    Trice was a solid 6 feet and 200 pounds, a big lineman in that era. But football was far more dangerous in those days. Face masks were unknown, helmets gave limited protection, passing was rare and bulling ahead on runs was the norm. Several kinds of blocks, since outlawed, were allowed. 

    “On the second play against Minnesota, Mr. Trice sustained a shoulder injury that was later diagnosed as a broken collarbone.” He kept playing. 

    In the third quarter, according to some accounts, he dived into the legs of Minnesota blockers, trying to impede a ball carrier. The move—the roll block referred to in his letter—was later barred for being too dangerous. He landed on his back instead of on all fours and was stamped by a rush of cleats.

 

    He was taken to a hospital in Minneapolis, then accompanied his teammates back to Ames, Iowa, “lying painfully in a train car on a mattress fashioned from straw. A doctor considered his condition too risky to undergo an operation.” He died two days after the game at the campus hospital.  

    Years later, Cora Mae Trice, his wife, wrote that she looked at her husband in his hospital bed and told him, “Hello, Darling,” but he didn’t respond. She heard the campus bell tower chime at 3 p.m., and “he was gone.”

 

    The next afternoon, classes were canceled, Mr. Trice’s teammates carried his coffin and several thousand students attended a memorial service on campus.

 

    Teammates set out five-gallon milk cans and collected $2,259 to cover funeral costs and settle the mortgage his mother had taken out to pay her son’s tuition. One newspaper elegy that soon followed referred to Mr. Trice as “steel of character,” a “true modern knight” who won glory “upon the fatal field.”

 

    His mother, Anna, wrote a letter to the university president saying that if Mr. Trice had inspired other Black students who came to Iowa State [she called them “colored players” in the letter she wrote], “he has not lived and died in vain.”

 

    Yet she was inconsolable, adding that while she was proud of his honors, “he was all I had, and I am old and alone. The future is dreary and lonesome.”

 

    Years later, George Trice, a cousin said of the fallen player: “He went there knowing segregation was going on, knowing what he was doing was about more than football. It was about persevering, changing your stars.”

 

* 

    While looking for more information about Trice’s high school career, I did find a list of the worst beatings in the history of Ohio scholastic football. On October 5, 1923, Medina beat Spencer 165-0. That was one of more than twenty high school games in Ohio, in which victors scored at least 110 points, while shutting out the losers. 

    According to other sources, Trice was one of six players from his high school to follow his coach to Iowa State. There, he also participated in track, where he excelled at shot up and discus. He also excelled in the classroom, with a 90 average in all his classes, and having piled up 45 credits during freshman year. The idea that racism might have been involved could be bolstered by the fact that Iowa State did not renew a contract to play Minnesota again, and the teams did not meet on the field again until 1989. According to Wikipedia, 4,000 students and faculty members attended Trice’s funeral and his coffin was draped in cardinal and gold, the team colors. 

    Trice was the only African American on the field that day, a game that was even, 7-7, at halftime. Midway through the third quarter, Trice threw a roll block, suffered his injuries, and had to be helped from the field. Minnesota fans chanted, “We’re sorry, Ames, we’re sorry,” in a sign of good sportsmanship. 

    “The fullback, going through the hole, stepped on Jack’s stomach and maybe his groin,” Trice’s teammate Johnny Behm told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in a 1979 interview. “He was badly hurt, but tried to get up and wanted to stay in. We saw he couldn’t stand and helped him off the field.”

 

    Behm, had also been a teammate of  Trice in high school. In that same interview, many years later, he said no better tackle ever played high school ball in Cleveland. Behm said Trice had speed, strength and smarts. 

    In 1922, Trice played on the freshmen team since freshman were not allowed to play varsity sports. 

    He eloped with Cora Mae Starland, in the summer of 1923. He was 20. She was 15; and they had to lie about her age on the marriage certificate. When the young couple returned to campus, they were unable to find housing in a Jim Crow world, and finally took a room at the Masonic Lodge in Ames. 

    Reportedly, several teams refused to play the Cyclones in those years, as long as Trice was going to be on the field. 

    Years later, one player who saw the injury occur told reporters nothing occurred out of the ordinary. 

    A second, however, “said it was murder.”

 

    Trice’s young widow, who had been studying home economics herself, left Ames soon after and returned to Ohio. She never again visited Iowa. She remarried eventually, and started a family.

 

    “She would often talk about him, how she was still in love with him when it happened and how devastated she was,” Betty Armstrong, her daughter from her second marriage said in a 2008 interview for ESPN. “But she didn’t want any part of the history by going back there.”

 

    The fight for equality was long and difficult, as ESPN noted in 2008:

 

    Armstrong was the first black librarian hired by the city of Youngstown, Ohio, in 1953. But she realizes that her own personal struggles in her career were minor compared to those faced by Trice and her mother during their short marriage.

 

    “I’ve gone through a lot of heartbreaks myself,” said Armstrong, who turned 80 last year. “But I can only imagine how my mother and Jack went through things back in those days. It had to be horrible for them.”

 

*

 

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS writes The Red Wheelbarrow. Williams, a doctor, often wrote poems on prescription forms (NYT, 7-7-15).

 

so much depends

upon

 

a red wheel

barrow

 

glazed with rain

water

 

beside the white

chickens

 

*

 

Modigliani died a pauper.

 

    In 1923 The New York Times carried a small “Hundred Dollar Holiday Sale” notice for New Gallery Inc. For sale were important works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse and Van Gogh.

 

    There were also several works for sale by Modigliani, who died a pauper three years before. Modigliani was known for distortion: long noses, longer, slender necks, small mouths. In 2015, he would have been happy to know, one of his paintings a nude, sold for $170.9 million. (NYT; Friday File; 11-13-15)

Woman with red hair.

Nu Couche: for $170.4 million.
(All from the internet.)

 

* 

As loyal as a dog. 

    Note the unspoken racism in an obituary from the Chase County Leader, a Kansas newspaper:

 

    Charles Aldrich, the first colored man to come to Chase  County … was of the type of the old southern Negro slave. He was always polite and respectful in his manner and retiring in his disposition. … Charlie [arrived in] Cottonwood Falls in 1866 and spent almost all of the rest of his life at this place. He was for many years in the service of J. W. McWilliams as stable boy, houseman, valet, and general chore boy. It was often said of him that he was as faithful to his master as was Mr. McWilliams’s dog, which was a real tribute. 100/135

I Read Mein Kampf so You Didn’t Have To.

YOU CAN THANK ME, I suppose. I once read Mein Kampf, plowing through all 687 pages, and took notes. 

I retired from teaching in 2008.
Even then, I had students who did not recognize this face.
(Blogger's collection.)

If you have the stomach, you can get by with just these notes. 

Certainly, the toxic nature of Nazi ideology has always been clear. Hitler’s poisonous ideas are on display on every page. Hatred, particularly, but not exclusively, directed at Jews, is the foundation of his thought. 

For teachers today it can be chilling to realize that as a boy Adolf Hitler was influenced by Dr. Leopold Pötsch. This educator alternately moved Hitler and his classmates to tears and inflamed them with enthusiasm for nationalistic causes. 

Hitler explains: 

What made our good fortune all the greater was that this teacher knew how to illuminate the past by examples from the present, and how from the past to draw inferences for the present. As a result, he had more understanding than anyone else for the daily problems which then held us breathless. He used our budding nationalistic fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor… 

This teacher made history my favorite subject.  

And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became a little revolutionary. (15)

  

Even growing up in Austria, young Adolf said he could see racial danger at every hand: “In the north and south the poison of foreign nations gnawed at the body of our nationality, and even Vienna was visibly becoming more and more of an un-German city.”  

Soon “the granite foundation” of a future ideology was set. Threats to racial purity were as life-threatening as “incurable tumors.” (15; 22; 29) 

Reading Mein Kampf has always been a sickening slog, tedious page after tedious page, punctuated by venomous illogic. Even Hitler’s opinion of the intellectual capacity of his followers drips with cynicism. Political ideas, he says, must be “engraved in the memory and feeling of the people by eternal repetition.”   

“The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak.” (31; 42) 

(From the internet.)

 

LIKE ALL WHO HATE, he first dehumanizes his enemies. He paints them as a racial and religious “threat.” Then he uses the frightening picture he creates to justify violence to advance the Nazi cause. When workers with different political views tried to drive him from a job site when he was a young man, threatening to toss him off a scaffold, Hitler said he had to decide. If ordinary Aryan workers were blind, was he wrong to believe in the greatness of the Aryan race? 

It would be years before he answered that question to his satisfaction. Meanwhile, he watched in dismay as Social Democrats, Communists and other political parties spread their competing ideologies. Newspaper stories in support of other parties infuriated him. He railed against “the brutal daily press, shunning no villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with such a virtuosity that would bend iron beams, all in the gospel of a new humanity.” 

Eventually, it dawned on him that his beloved Aryan people had been terrorized. They were victims. Their enemies – those in politics and the press – were seducers. Hitler promised he would break the grip of opposing political groups, including Communists, whose philosophy he compared to a form of “terror.”  

He would do so by opposing them with “equal terror.” (41-42; 44) 

Hitler writes that he was fooled, growing up in Austria. The Jews he saw had “become Europeanized and had taken on a human look.” Only gradually did he grasp the truth. “Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity.” “By their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers.” 

Worse, “you discovered the moral stains on this ‘chosen people:’” 

Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?  

If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light - a kike! (52; 57) 

 

Hitler warned against a diabolical Jewish influence in the press, in literature, in art and theater. “This was pestilence, spiritual pestilence, worse than the Black Death of olden times, and the people were being infected with it.” He began to examine the worldwide press with clear eyes. What he read was “more akin to lies than honest truth; and the writers were – Jews.” (58) 

He attacks the Jews constantly on the pages of Mein Kampf. At one point he likens them to a “spider” slowly beginning to “suck the blood out of the people’s pores.” 

Race purity must be guarded: 

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. (58; 193; 214) 

 

Students today – and apparently more adults than we’d care to imagine – may need to be reminded. Hitler’s racism and hatred were multifaceted. In one passage he refers to Negroes as “half-apes.” He describes being “repelled” by a “mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats.” Worst of all was “the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews.” (123; 394) 

As early as 1913, he says he had already “expressed the conviction that the question of the future of the German nation was the question of destroying Marxism.” In Hitler’s warped worldview, Communists were as bad as Jews and often one and the same. Marxism, he warned, could take form “only in the brain of a monster – not a man.” In another illogical leap, since Communists oppose all forms of religion, he wrote, “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.” “By defending myself against the Jew,” he continued, “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” (63; 65; 155) 

Western-style democracy posed a grave danger. As Adolf Hitler sees it, “the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature.” Nature intended superior races and superior individuals to dominate. In a Germanic democracy, and by such a road did he dream of rising to power, “the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.” (81; 344) 

In other words, his plans for a dictatorship should have been clear to all. 

 

ADOLF HITLER ALSO HAD DEFINITE PLANS for spreading his ideas. “The broad masses have a very limited understanding of politics. By far the greatest share in their ‘political education,’ which in this case is most aptly designated by the word ‘propaganda,’ falls to the account of the press.” Equally important would be “the mass meeting, the only way to exert a truly effective, because personal, influence on large sections of people” and to win their allegiance to the cause.

Particularly the broad masses of people can be moved only by the power of speech. And all great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they are not the lemonade-like outpourings of literary aesthetes and drawing-room heroes. (85; 106; 107)

 

Hitler believed only key elements of a human population were valuable. So any decision by members of the valuable elements to limit the number of children to whom they gave birth meant “robbing” the nation of its future. The German people must multiply and spread east across Europe.  

[It] can certainly not be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much land and soil in this world as another. In this case we must not let political boundaries obscure for us the boundaries of eternal justice. If this earth really has room for all to live in, let us be given the soil we need for our livelihood. 

True, they [neighbor nations] will not be willing to do this. But then the law of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take. 

 

Poles and Russians and other Slavic peoples barred the path. Someday It would be necessary “to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.” (138-139; 140) 

When World War I erupted in 1914, Hitler says he had been thrilled. “I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time … A fight for freedom had begun, mightier than the earth had ever seen.” 

True. Long years of combat took a toll. Hitler came to accept the “horror” of a war he had anxiously anticipated.  

The enthusiasm gradually cooled and the exuberant joy was stifled by mortal fear. The time came when every man had to struggle between the instinct of self-preservation and the admonitions of duty…often it was only the last remnant of conscience which decided the issue. (161; 165) 

 

Hitler would steel himself and do his duty, and do it well. Here, we might note he won an Iron Cross for bravery, the highest medal the German army bestows. 

The war dragged on for four bloody years. Communist elements inside Germany continued to spread their ideas, what Hitler referred to as “Marxism…this pestilence,” a “venomous plague,” helped by “Jewified universities.” It should have been the duty of any government to destroy this threat, he argued, “to exterminate mercilessly the agitators who were misleading the nation. “If the best men were dying at the front,” he added, “the least we could do was to wipe out the vermin.” (167-169) 

That last statement is typical of almost all his thinking. In his mind his enemies were always subhuman – vermin – scum – parasites – incurable tumors – always a threat to the best racial elements. 

 

HITLER RETURNS OFTEN TO THE IMPORTANCE of propaganda. “[Its] effect for the most part,” he explains, “must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect.” 

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. 

 

Propaganda was a blunt tool to wield ruthlessly in service to the cause. “It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.” The masses are slow to make up their minds “and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.” (180-185) 

Again, he makes clear he has no respect for the intellect of the masses, since “in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that were too big.” (231)  

In years to come, Hitler, backed by a massive Nazi propaganda machine, would become adept at pedaling the Big Lie. 

Even a limited democracy, he complained, left the ballot in the hands of “the mob of the simple or credulous.” A future Nazi government would have to guide the thinking of the simple people. That meant control of all sources of news, as well as control of curriculum in the nation’s schools: 

  The state, therefore, has the duty of watching over their education and preventing any mischief. It must particularly exercise strict control over the press; for its influence on these people is by far the strongest and most penetrating, since it is applied, not once in a while, but over and over again.  

...the state must not forget that all means must serve an end; it must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called ‘freedom of the press’ and let itself be talked into neglecting its duty and denying the nation the food which it needs and which is good for it: with ruthless determination it must make sure of this instrument of popular education, and place it in the service of the state and nation. (242)

 

What exactly was at stake? All the great advances in history, Hitler insisted, “everything we admire on this earth today – science and art, technology and inventions – is only the creative product of a few peoples and originally perhaps of one race.” The key was to protect that one race. “All great cultures of the past perished,” he warned, “only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” 

All the culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word ‘man.’ (288-290) 

 

SCANNING A MAP OF EUROPE, Hitler saw a future filled with a “multitude of lower-type beings standing at their [the Aryans’] disposal as helpers.” Once in power, the Nazis would employ these lesser humans as “suitable beasts.” 

Hitler pounds away at the racial theme: 

Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood.   

All who are not of good race in the world are chaff.  (291; 294; 296)

 

By comparison, the Jews banded together out of a “primitive herd instinct.” Left alone in this world, they “would stifle in filth and offal…” 

He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. And the effect of his existence is also like that of spongers: wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period. (301-302; 305) 

 

The Jew “poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own. The Jew almost never marries a Christian woman; it is the Christian who marries a Jewess. The bastards, however, take after the Jewish side.” “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.”  

To cover the damage, and his own tracks, the Jew, “talks more and more of the equality of all men without regard to race and color. The fools begin to believe him.” (316; 325) 

The Aryan race, cutting across national boundaries, bonded by blood, a folk group, must be preserved, protected and strengthened: 

…the folkish philosophy…by no means believes in an equality of races, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated, through this knowledge, to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe…It sees not only the different value of the races, but also the different value of individuals…in a bastardized and niggerized world all the concepts of the humanly beautiful and sublime, as well as all ideas of an idealized future of our humanity, would be lost forever. (383) 

 

Aryans must remain apart: 

Thus, the highest purpose of a folkish state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements which bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher mankind. We, as Aryans, can conceive of the state only as the living organism of a nationality, which not only assures the preservation of this nationality, but by the development of its spiritual and ideal abilities leads it to the highest freedom.  (394) 

 

IN THE QUEST FOR RACIAL PURITY, the full apparatus of the state would serve as “a mighty weapon” to which “everyone must submit.” Individual rights would not matter. 

[There] is only one holiest human right, and this right is at the same time the holiest obligation, to wit: to see to it that the blood is preserved pure and, by preserving the best humanity, to create the possibility of a nobler development of these beings. 

A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape. (399) 

 

The state “must set race in the center of all life. It must take care to keep it pure. It must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. It must see to it that only the healthy beget children.” 

And conversely it must be considered reprehensible: to withhold healthy children from the nation…the wishes and the selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit… [The government] must declare unfit for propagation all who are in any way visibly sick or who have inherited a disease and can therefore pass it on, and put this into actual practice. Conversely, it must take care that the fertility of the healthy woman is not limited by the financial irresponsibility of a state regime which turns the blessing of children into a curse for the parents. (402; 403-404) 

 

Once he rose to power, the Nazis would facilitate early marriage among desirable elements, increasing the number of racially valuable children. Marriage, he warned, “cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal, the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and task.” Even the “right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race.” 

What about the less desirable elements? 

 “The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.” In other words, the policy outlines of Nazism were laid down. In years to come tens of thousands of handicapped German children would die in gas chambers as a result. (252; 255) 

 

ONCE HITLER TOOK POWER, shaping proper racial attitudes would be a job for schools. He explains: “…education in particular must first of all consider and promote physical health; for taken in the mass, a healthy, forceful spirit will be found only in a healthy and forceful body.” Every day, one hour of physical training in the morning and one in the afternoon would be required. If stress were placed on physical beauty, “the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible.” (407; 412) 

The schools would be a critical tool in spreading Nazi ideology. Science, world history and cultural history would all be taught in such a way as to foster “national pride,” “so that when the young man leaves his school he is not a half pacifist, democrat, or something else, but a whole German.” 

The crown of the folkish state’s entire work of education and training must be to burn the racial sense and racial feeling into the instinct and the intellect, the heart and brain of the youth entrusted to it. No boy and no girl must leave school without having been led to an ultimate realization of the necessity and essence of blood purity. (426; 427) 

 

Nor was there any secret in how Hitler hoped to rise to power. His party would be protected by special guards, organized in military units, and these “monitor troops must be preceded by the reputation of not being a debating club, but a combat group determined to go to any length.” (490) Followers would be stirred with heavy doses of martial music. The movement would be bound by symbols, including the Nazi flag, which Hitler claims he designed in 1920. 

In the red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic. (497) 

 

Once united under Nazi rule, Germany would not repeat mistakes made during World War I. In those years the best young men, “filled with fervent love of their fatherland, with great personal courage or the highest consciousness of duty” volunteered to fight and even die for their country. When Germany was forced to surrender in November 1918, “it was not the German people as such that committed this act of Cain, but its deserters, pimps, and other rabble that shun the light.” (520-521) 

Evil politicians, puppets of Marxists and Jews, had stabbed Germany in the back. Punishment would come once Hitler rose to power. “[A] German national court must judge and execute some ten thousand of the organizing and hence responsible criminals of the November betrayal and everything that goes with it,” he insisted. The future would be filled with gas chambers:

If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of the very best German workers in the field [of battle], the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future. (679) 

 

CALLING ON READERS TO JOIN HIM in a titanic struggle, he promised he and his Nazi party would elevate the “Jewish question… transforming it into the driving impulse of a great people’s movement.” The Jew, Hitler said, was “the mortal enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom.” 

This contamination of our blood, blindly ignored by hundreds of thousands of our people, is carried on systematically by the Jew today. Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile our inexperienced young blond girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world. (545; 561; 562)

 

The French were also a mortal threat. Of them, Hitler says: “This people, which is basically becoming more and more negrified, constitutes in its tie with the aims of Jewish world domination an enduring danger for the existence of the white race in Europe.” The French were a “mulatto state,” infected by the blood of “lower humanity.” The German people must rise as one, having “recognized racial pollution as the original sin of humanity,” and defeat France once and for all. (624; 644) 

Nazi leaders would have to: 

…find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or serving others as a slave nation.  

State boundaries are made by man and changed by man. The fact that a nation has succeeded in acquiring an undue amount of soil constitutes no higher obligation that it should be recognized eternally. At most it proves the strength of the conquerors and the weakness of nations. And in this case, right lies in this strength alone. If the German nation today, penned into an impossible area, faces a lamentable future, this is no more a commandment of Fate than revolt against this state of affairs is an affront to Fate. No more than any higher power has promised another nation more territory than the German nation, or is offended by the fact of this unjust distribution of the soil. Just as our ancestors did not receive the soil on which we live today as a gift from Heaven, but had to fight for it at the risk of their lives, in the future no folkish state will win soil for us and hence life for our people, but only the might of a victorious sword.

 

The Aryan people – the folkish nation – must turn its “gaze toward the land in the east.” The Germans must “shift to the soil policy of the future.” And in that, Hitler’s meaning was again crystal clear. We “can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.” (646; 653-654) 

If war did come what could justify an attack on Germany’s neighbors, Poland and Russia? Hitler explained: “Never forget that the rulers of present-day Russia are common blood-stained criminals; that they are the scum of humanity…that these rulers belong to a race which combines, in a rare mixture, bestial cruelty and an inconceivable gift for lying.” He claimed “the international Jew…completely dominates Russia.” The Bolsheviks were the “spawn of hell.” 

It was imperative that Germany expand: 

Never regard the Reich as secure unless for centuries to come it can give every scion of or people his own parcel of soil. Never forget that the most sacred right on this earth is a man’s right to have earth to till with his own hands, and the most sacred sacrifice the blood that a man sheds for this earth.  

Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy will be acknowledged correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent, and not living penned in as factory coolies for the rest of the world, but: as peasants and workers, who guarantee each other’s livelihoods by their labor. (661-662; 664; 673) 

 

As for the Jew, “No nation,” Hitler wrote, “can remove his hand from its throat except by the sword.” (651) 

 

WRITING IN 1923, Hitler was painting a picture of a grim future ahead. Rising to power a decade later, and with accelerating brutality once World War II had begun, tens of millions would die as a result.