Guest Post: Is Ryan Kelly's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph an American 'Guernica'?

Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University

On Aug. 12, 2017, Charlottesville Daily Progress photographer Ryan M. Kelly captured the moment that Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields, Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. It’s probably the most enduring image to emerge from the weekend of “Unite the Right” rallies in Charlottesville, Va.

Eight months later, Kelly’s iconic photograph from that tragic day has earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

At first glance, the photograph is nearly impossible to make sense of visually or politically. Cars are not supposed to drive into pedestrians; fellow citizens are not supposed to kill each other over political differences. And there’s so much in the frame of the image – so many figures and forms crowded together, most only partially visible – that you can’t take it in all at once.

Pablo Picasso’s 1937 iconic mural “Guernica” might teach us how to interpret this image more closely, and why it is important to do so. Like Kelly’s photograph, “Guernica” conveys a moment of terror through a jumble of forms and fragments that seem to make no sense.

In April 1937, a different sort of “Unite the Right” moment took place in fascist Europe during the destruction of Guernica. At the request of General Franco, the leader of nationalist insurgents in the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian warplanes bombarded the Basque town in northern Spain. Terror rained from the sky: Hundreds of civilians were killed, while military targets were left unscathed.

Days later, as May Day protesters filled the streets of Paris, Pablo Picasso began what would become an anti-war masterpiece.

Pablo Picasso, ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Reina Sofia

There are uncanny echoes of Picasso’s “Guernica” in Kelly’s photograph. Picasso used the Cubist techniques of fragmentation and collage to create a visual cry of anguish at the destruction wrought by men at the controls of war machines.

To make sense of the painting, you must do the work of reassembling what has been rendered apart. Yet you will never make sense of such destruction. You cannot merely glance at this massive painting or take it in all at once; you must stand and look and witness. There is nothing beautiful about it. It refuses to console. However, in the painting’s abstraction – its matte shades of gray, its distorted figures that stand in for the wounded and the dead – there is a kind of mercy toward its viewers and these victims.

If there is any mercy of abstraction in Kelly’s photograph, it is that of time. The image captures the moment in medias res – when the bodies of the men near its center still evoke the beauty of the human form in its wholeness.

Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress

Yet we know the victims are not whole; that is why it hurts to look. The contorted positions of the man in red and white sneakers and the man somersaulting above him make sense only in the realm of sports photography. But this is not a game.

Elsewhere the photograph captures only fragments: arms and hands, legs and feet, heads and faces. Empty shoes on the ground. Sunglasses. A cellphone in midair.

You will never make sense of this image because it makes no sense. (Or, rather, it makes as much sense as racism itself.) Yet to look away risks turning away from the truths it tells. A heavy aspect of our national tragedy is that we seem to lack a president – such as Abraham Lincoln – whose heart might break to see such carnage.

As he kept reworking “Guernica,” Picasso painted over a raised fist he had initially drawn near the center of the canvas. Then – as now – the raised fist is a symbol of solidarity against fascism. It makes an eerie reappearance on two posters in the top third of Kelly’s photograph.

“Guernica” includes small lines resembling newsprint. The Charlottesville photojournalist’s image is also crowded with text; some of it implicates the driver, while other words are a call to action.

Clear as day, there’s the incriminating license plate. No one can deny that this car drove into this crowd, as the colluding European fascists did when they claimed that Guernica had been bombed by Spanish Republican forces.

Then there’s the collage of protest signs and street signs that the neo-Nazi at the wheel didn’t heed: Peace/Black Lives Matter. Solidarity. STOP. LOVE. BLACK LIVES. STOP.

Kelly’s photograph redirects these injunctions to the viewer, who’s left to wonder whether this is what our democracy – or the state of our union – looks like.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Aug. 17, 2017.

Jennifer Wenzel, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives - Not for Women Only: Luce's 'The Women' a Triumph of Style, Substance

This article appeared in The Metro Herald (Alexandria, Virginia) on February 19, 1999:

Not for Women Only: Luce's The Women a Triumph of Style, Substance

Rick Sincere

Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Dr. Laura would approve. The popular radio moralist (heard locally on WMAL-AM) nags her callers and listeners frequently about the evil nature of gossip. To gossip, she says, is morally wrong, both intrinsically and because it inevitably hurts someone, if not the object of the gossip, then the one who spreads it.

And The Women, Clare Boothe Luce's classic 1930s play now at the Arena Stage, is nothing if not a moral tale of the evil consequences of gossip, especially that practiced by catty (and witty) women of leisure in the upper crusts of society. To get to the moral of her story, however, Luce delivers a funny, bitchy, cynical script that, under Kyle Donnelly's direction, is as relevant today as it was when first produced on Broadway back in 1936.

What's more, Luce (wife of Time magazine founder Henry Luce, and later Ambassador to Italy and U.S. Representative from Connecticut) does not limit herself to the society matrons (and mistresses) that so titillated Depression-era New York audiences. Like Shakespeare, she sometimes turns to the lower classes -- in this case, the servants -- to comment on the action in a clownish but insightful manner. This offers a perspective that allows us to see the protagonists not just as victims (or vixens) but also as fools who fail to recognize their own imperfections.

Arena's production of The Women has its share of great performances -- Nancy Robinette is positively manic as the Countess de Lage, Stacey Leigh Ivey is seductive as Crystal Allan, Sarah Marshall is Gertrude Steinish as the professional writer, Miss Blake, and Ellen Karas is steadfast as Mrs. Stephen Haines, the evening's primary divorcée.

Still, the real stars of The Women are the sets and costumes. Thomas Lynch's set design is sleek, convertible, and practicable. At the same time, Paul Tazewell's costumes are breathtaking. Moreover, the two designers have worked for convergence -- no costume seems out of place vis-à-vis the set decoration, and no aspect of the set overshadows the costumes. And, like the play itself, which builds through several scenes to a climax and denouement at a rooftop party, the final scene's evening gowns are absolutely fabulous. (Karas' red gown is worth the price of admission by itself.)

On leaving the theatre on opening night, my companion and I discussed the possibility of a musical adaptation of The Women. Only later did I find out that such a thing exists -- a 1956 musical film called The Opposite Sex, starring June Allyson, Joan Collins, Agnes Morehead, Ann Sheridan, Charlotte Greenwood, and Ann Miller, and including men in the cast. The movie obviously did not have much of an impact -- the composer, Nicholas Brodszky, apparently wrote nothing else of consequence -- but might make a fun video to rent. Nonetheless, if your only choice is to rent The Opposite Sex or the original film with Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, Marjorie Main, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, and Hedda Hopper, go with the 1939 non-musical. Or, even better, wander over to the Arena Stage and see it live.

The Women continues through February 21 at the Arena Stage, 1101 Sixth Street, S.W., in Washington. Performances are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sunday evenings at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings at 8:00 p.m., with selected Saturday matinees at 2:30 p.m. and selected Sunday matinees at 2:00 p.m. Ticket prices range from $24 to $45. For ticket information, call the box office at 202-488-3300.

Guest Post: How an Axe Murderer Helped Make Weed Illegal

by Laura Smith

Tampa police arrived at the Licata residence one afternoon in October 1933. Neighbors in the tightly-knit immigrant community were concerned. No one had come in or out of the Italian-American family’s home all day, which was strange, considering the school-aged children, and that the father, Mike, ran two bustling barber shops.

When the police opened the door, they found carnage. Twenty-one year-old Victor Licata had murdered his family with an axe the night before – his parents, one of his brothers, and his younger sister were all dead and another younger brother would be soon. Victor was discovered in the bathroom, curled in a chair, murmuring incomprehensibly. His family was trying to dismember him, he said, and replace his arms with wooden ones.

According to Larry Slomans’s book, Reefer Madness, shortly after the murders, Licata was evaluated by psychiatrists and determined to be suffering from “dementia praecox,” (now known as schizophrenia). The doctors speculated that his condition was congenital. Two cousins and a great uncle had been committed to asylums, his brother also suffered from “dementia praecox,” and his parents were first cousins. The police had been trying to have him committed for over a year, but stopped when his parents said they would care for him at home.

The case would have slipped largely unnoticed into grisly small-town lore if it were not for one detail. According to the local newspaper, at the time that he committed the murders, Victor Licata had been “addicted to smoking marihuana cigarettes for more than six months.”

Driven By Racism
Four years later when Harry Anslinger heard about the Licata case, he knew it was the break he had been waiting for. Anslinger had recently been appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (the precursor to the DEA) after making his name as a temperance hardliner during prohibition. But as Johann Hari explains in his book, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, after prohibition ended, bureaus like Anslinger’s were threatened by obsolescence.

Anslinger’s office was focused on narcotics like cocaine and heroin, but these drugs were only used by a small minority. In order to ensure a robust future for his bureau, “he needed more,” Hari writes. Marijuana was used more widely.

Anslinger consulted 30 doctors about the drug’s connection to violence. All except one told him there was none, so he bucked the other 29 and trumpeted the findings of that one doctor. Anslinger warned in a congressional hearing, “Some people will fly into a delirious rage, and they are temporarily irresponsible and may commit violent crimes.”

His anti-marijuana push was driven by racism. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he was quoted as saying, and “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”

Beginning in 1939, immediately following her performance of “Strange Fruit,” Anslinger began ruthlessly targeting Billie Holiday who was rumored to have a heroin addiction. Those closest to her believed Anslinger’s campaign created an enormous strain, contributing to her early death. During this time, anti-drug crusaders switched from calling it “cannabis” to “marihuana” or “marijuana,” hoping the Spanish word would capitalize on anti-Mexican sentiment.

Linking Violence to Cannabis
At hearings in 1937 on a bill to prohibit marijuana, Anslinger was asked for “horror stories” proving the marijuana-violence connection. Two weeks later, a letter from the chief inspector at the Florida Board of Health arrived telling the story of Victor Licata. The inspector also sent along a picture, presumably the young man’s mugshot, which had been circulated widely in the Florida dailies. In the photograph, Licata is crazed violence incarnate, his wild-eyed stare entirely unnerving. This would be the face of Anslinger’s marijuana crackdown.

Victor Licata, driven “mad” by reefer.

Anslinger began giving speeches and writing articles on the dangers of marijuana, harping on the Licata case. “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he said. In his most famous article, “Marijuana – Assassin of Youth” published in the American magazine, Licata is transformed from a congenitally mentally ill person into “a sane and rather quiet young man” whose reefer-toking had turned him into an axe-wielding murderer – not his schizophrenia.

Anslinger succeeded in turning marijuana into a national issue. By 1938, the film Reefer Madness had been purchased by a new director and was being circulated more widely, warning of the “frightful toll of a new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America … The Real Public Enemy Number One!”

In the 1930s, The New York Times ran dozens of articles about police crackdowns on “marijuana rings,” whereas in 1926, the paper ran an article titled, “Marijuana Smoking Is Reported Safe.”

The Marijuana Tax Act, legislation that Anslinger drafted himself, was passed in 1937, effectively making the sale and possession of marijuana illegal across the country. In 1950, Victor Licata hanged himself with a bed sheet. Meanwhile, Anslinger’s bureau flourished.

According to Hari, “within thirty years, he succeeded in turning this crumbling department with these disheartened men into the headquarters for a global war that would continue for decades.” In the coming years, hundreds of thousands of men and women – disproportionately people of color – would spend huge portions of their lives behind bars.

Reprinted from Timeline.

Laura Smith is a staff writer @timeline and a freelance journalist based in Oakland, California. Her nonfiction book, The Art of Vanishing, about the disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett will be out from Viking in 2018.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Ella Fitzgerald's flirtation with reefer songs

Adam Gustafson, Pennsylvania State University

“The First Lady of Song” Ella Fitzgerald would have turned 100 on April 25: institutions from the Library of Congress to the Grammy Museum will be honoring her amazing contributions to the jazz canon.

It will be interesting to see if any tributes mention Fitzgerald’s “Wacky Dust,” her song about cocaine.

Nick Lehr/The Conversation via Wikimedia Commons

In the 1930s – just as Fitzgerald was getting her start – jazz was under fire for its purported ties to drug culture. The 1936 anti-drug film “Reefer Madness” featured party scenes of young people listening to jazz and ragtime while smoking marijuana. A year later, Harry Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, published “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” which pinned the use of drugs on a culture of unscrupulous partying – with big band jazz as its soundtrack.

In this climate, an ascendant singer named Ella Fitzgerald sought to take the opposite tack and cultivated a reputation as the “girl next door.” Fitzgerald walked the fine line between being understood as a jazz artist and an entertainer. Two recordings from the beginning of her career signal this tension. “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” and “Wacky Dust” were both released in 1938. One tune would go on to become a signature hit. The other would be largely forgotten, a side note to an otherwise squeaky-clean career.

A dressed-up nursery rhyme?

By 1938, Fitzgerald had established herself as the primary vocalist for Chick Webb’s orchestra at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. Under Webb, Fitzgerald began recording for Decca Records and in May 1938, Decca released Fitzgerald’s first major hit, “A-Tisket, a-Tasket.”

It was a song that perfectly encapsulates Fitzgerald’s girl-next-door image. It opens with Webb leading the orchestra through a stock series of simple chord changes. When Fitzgerald enters, listeners are treated to a reworked nursery rhyme that asks little of them other than to sit back and enjoy. There is no moral value, no hint of the singer’s inner life and no mention of drug use.

Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘A-Tisket, a-Tasket.’

In fact, “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” is barely jazz. As with Goodman and so many other bandleaders in the late 1930s, Webb and Fitzgerald seem more interested in creating a pop tune that fit the 78 RPM format than in staying true to their genre. Yet it became so popular that she and Webb recorded a follow-up track, “I Found My Yellow Basket,” that same year.

But then – just a few months after “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” – Webb and Fitzgerald recorded “Wacky Dust,” a song about the allure and dangers of cocaine use.

Ella’s reefer song

How Fitzgerald moved from a nursery rhyme to a song about cocaine says more about jazz culture than it does Fitzgerald’s own tastes. And while songs about drugs were common in jazz, “Wacky Dust” put Fitzgerald in the awkward position of recording a song that ran contrary to the image that she was trying to cultivate.

Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Wacky Dust.’

The release of “Wacky Dust” coincided with a massive shift in cultural opinion taking place in the U.S. about the use of drugs like cocaine and marijuana. Once a relatively uncontroversial social issue, drug use in the 1930s increasingly came to be seen as a societal ill that was especially (and incorrectly) tied to African-Americans and jazz musicians. Even sympathetic artists couldn’t help but buy into the stereotype. George Gershwin’s operatic adaptation of DuBose Heyward’s novel “Porgy,” for example, was revolutionary for its diverse cast, but the story, written and adapted by two men of European descent, reinforced the popular perception of prevalent drug use among African-Americans.

Jazz artists in the early 1930s didn’t do much to help this view. Just as big band jazz was coming to dominate the music scene, two of the era’s biggest names released songs with direct references to drug use.

In 1933, Cab Calloway’s “Reefer Man” was used in the film “International House.” A year later, Benny Goodman released “Texas Tea Party,” a reference to both marijuana and to the trombonist on the recording, Jack Teagarden. These were not subtle works, and most jazz artists of the era produced what have since become known as “reefer songs.” Even Louis Armstrong – who, like Fitzgerald, cultivated a rather benign image – was arrested for smoking marijuana and recorded several tunes that allude to drug use.

So when “Wacky Dust” was released, the idea of one of the great New York City house bands recording a jazz tune about drugs wasn’t all that surprising. (Fitzgerald and Webb had experimented with a similar subject a couple of years earlier with the release of “When I Get Low I Get High.”)

Like “A-Tisket, a-Tasket,” Wacky Dust opens with Webb’s orchestra. Fitzgerald doesn’t enter until nearly one-third of the way through the song. The first verse aligns cocaine with jazz and describes how easy it is for musicians to access the drug. The second verse and bridge section describe its wonders, but the final verse takes a turn, with Fitzgerald warning that the drug can’t be trusted and might kill you.

While “A-Tisket, a-Tasket” went on to become one of Fitzgerald’s signature pieces, “Wacky Dust” has faded into relative obscurity outside of specialty albums that feature songs about drug culture. And this makes sense. Fitzgerald was extremely careful about her image, and “Wacky Dust” didn’t fit. In fact, after “Wacky Dust,” Fitzgerald moved entirely away from songs that alluded to drugs.

By the 1950s, she had embarked on a recording career that displayed an unrivaled musicianship and joy for singing. Nonetheless, one has to wonder what her career would have looked like had “Wacky Dust” been the hit of 1938, rather than “A-Tisket, a-Tasket.”

Adam Gustafson, Instructor in Music, Pennsylvania State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: How the Nazis co-opted Christmas

by Joe Perry, Georgia State University

In 1921, in a Munich beer hall, newly appointed Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler gave a Christmas speech to an excited crowd.

According to undercover police observers, 4,000 supporters cheered when Hitler condemned “the cowardly Jews for breaking the world-liberator on the cross” and swore “not to rest until the Jews…lay shattered on the ground.” Later, the crowd sang holiday carols and nationalist hymns around a Christmas tree. Working-class attendees received charitable gifts.

For Germans in the 1920s and 1930s, this combination of familiar holiday observance, nationalist propaganda and anti-Semitism was hardly unusual. As the Nazi party grew in size and scope – and eventually took power in 1933 – committed propagandists worked to further “Nazify” Christmas. Redefining familiar traditions and designing new symbols and rituals, they hoped to channel the main tenets of National Socialism through the popular holiday.

Given state control of public life, it’s not surprising that Nazi officials were successful in promoting and propagating their version of Christmas through repeated radio broadcasts and news articles.

But under any totalitarian regime, there can be a wide disparity between public and private life, between the rituals of the city square and those of the home. In my research, I was interested in how Nazi symbols and rituals penetrated private, family festivities – away from the gaze of party leaders.

While some Germans did resist the heavy-handed, politicized appropriation of Germany’s favorite holiday, many actually embraced a Nazified holiday that evoked the family’s place in the “racial state,” free of Jews and other outsiders.

Redefining Christmas

One of the most striking features of private celebration in the Nazi period was the redefinition of Christmas as a neo-pagan, Nordic celebration. Rather on focus on the holiday’s religious origins, the Nazi version celebrated the supposed heritage of the Aryan race, the label Nazis gave to “racially acceptable” members of the German racial state.

According to Nazi intellectuals, cherished holiday traditions drew on winter solstice rituals practiced by “Germanic” tribes before the arrival of Christianity. Lighting candles on the Christmas tree, for example, recalled pagan desires for the “return of light” after the shortest day of the year.

Scholars have called attention to the manipulative function of these and other invented traditions. But that’s no reason to assume they were unpopular. Since the 1860s, German historians, theologians and popular writers had argued that German holiday observances were holdovers from pre-Christian pagan rituals and popular folk superstitions.

So because these ideas and traditions had a lengthy history, Nazi propagandists were able to easily cast Christmas as a celebration of pagan German nationalism. A vast state apparatus (centered in the Nazi Ministry for Propaganda and Enlightenment) ensured that a Nazified holiday dominated public space and celebration in the Third Reich.

But two aspects of the Nazi version of Christmas were relatively new.

A Christmas-themed stamp emphasizes light

First, because Nazi ideologues saw organized religion as an enemy of the totalitarian state, propagandists sought to deemphasize – or eliminate altogether – the Christian aspects of the holiday. Official celebrations might mention a supreme being, but they more prominently featured solstice and “light” rituals that supposedly captured the holiday’s pagan origins.

Second, as Hitler’s 1921 speech suggests, Nazi celebration evoked racial purity and anti-Semitism. Before the Nazis took power in 1933, ugly and open attacks on German Jews typified holiday propaganda.

Blatant anti-Semitism more or less disappeared after 1933, as the regime sought to stabilize its control over a population tired of political strife, though Nazi celebrations still excluded those deemed “unfit” by the regime. Countless media images of invariably blond-haired, blue-eyed German families gathered around the Christmas tree helped normalize ideologies of racial purity.

Open anti-Semitism nonetheless cropped up at Christmastime. Many would boycott Jewish-owned department stores. And the front cover of a 1935 mail order Christmas catalog, which pictured a fair-haired mother wrapping Christmas presents, included a sticker assuring customers that “the department store has been taken over by an Aryan!”

It’s a small, almost banal example. But it speaks volumes. In Nazi Germany, even shopping for a gift could naturalize anti-Semitism and reinforce the “social death” of Jews in the Third Reich.

The message was clear: only “Aryans” could participate in the celebration.

Taking the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas

According to National Socialist theorists, women – particularly mothers – were crucial for strengthening the bonds between private life and the “new spirit” of the German racial state.

Everyday acts of celebration – wrapping presents, decorating the home, cooking “German” holiday foods and organizing family celebrations – were linked to a cult of sentimental “Nordic” nationalism.

Christmas tree bulbs featuring the swastika were only one of a number of ways that Christmas became Nazified.
Author provided

Propagandists proclaimed that as “priestess” and “protector of house and hearth,” the German mother could use Christmas to “bring the spirit of the German home back to life.” The holiday issues of women’s magazines, Nazified Christmas books and Nazi carols tinged conventional family customs with the ideology of the regime.

This sort of ideological manipulation took everyday forms. Mothers and children were encouraged to make homemade decorations shaped like “Odin’s Sun Wheel” and bake holiday cookies shaped like a loop (a fertility symbol). The ritual of lighting candles on the Christmas tree was said to create an atmosphere of “pagan demon magic” that would subsume the Star of Bethlehem and the birth of Jesus in feelings of “Germanness.”

Family singing epitomized the porous boundaries between private and official forms of celebration.

Sheet music for the popular carol Exalted Night of the Clear Stars

Propagandists tirelessly promoted numerous Nazified Christmas songs, which replaced Christian themes with the regime’s racial ideologies. Exalted Night of the Clear Stars, the most famous Nazi carol, was reprinted in Nazi songbooks, broadcast in radio programs, performed at countless public celebrations – and sung at home.

Indeed, Exalted Night became so familiar that it could still be sung in the 1950s as part of an ordinary family holiday (and, apparently, as part of some public performances today!).

While the song’s melody mimics a traditional carol, the lyrics deny the Christian origins of the holiday. Verses of stars, light and an eternal mother suggest a world redeemed through faith in National Socialism – not Jesus.

Conflict or consensus among the German public?

We’ll never know exactly how many German families sang Exalted Night or baked Christmas cookies shaped like a Germanic sun wheel. But we do have some records of the popular response to the Nazi holiday, mostly from official sources.

For example, the “activity reports” of the National Socialist Women’s League (NSF) show that the redefinition of Christmas created some disagreement among members. NSF files note that tensions flared when propagandists pressed too hard to sideline religious observance, leading to “much doubt and discontent.”

Religious traditions often clashed with ideological goals: was it acceptable for “convinced National Socialists” to celebrate Christmas with Christian carols and nativity plays? How could Nazi believers observe a Nazi holiday when stores mostly sold conventional holiday goods and rarely stocked Nazi Christmas books?

Meanwhile, German clergymen openly resisted Nazi attempts to take Christ out of Christmas. In Düsseldorf, clergymen used Christmas to encourage women to join their respective women’s clubs. Catholic clergy threatened to excommunicate women who joined the NSF. Elsewhere, women of faith boycotted NSF Christmas parties and charity drives.

Still, such dissent never really challenged the main tenets of the Nazi holiday.

Reports on public opinion compiled by the Nazi secret police often commented on the popularity of Nazi Christmas festivities. Well into the Second World War, when looming defeat increasingly discredited the Nazi holiday, the secret police reported that complaints about official policies dissolved in an overall “Christmas mood.”

Despite conflicts over Christianity, many Germans accepted the Nazification of Christmas. The return to colorful and enjoyable pagan “Germanic” traditions promised to revitalize family celebration. Not least, observing a Nazified holiday symbolized racial purity and national belonging. “Aryans” could celebrate German Christmas. Jews could not.

The Nazification of family celebration thus revealed the paradoxical and contested terrain of private life in the Third Reich. The apparently banal, everyday decision to sing a particular Christmas carol, or bake a holiday cookie, became either an act of political dissent or an expression of support for national socialism.



Joe Perry, Associate Professor of History, Georgia State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Mr. Smoot, Meet Mr. Hawley

The Washington Post reports that the threat of trade protectionism is rising again as governments -- even industrial democracies -- retrench in the face of shrinking GDPs.

Egged on by fremescence around the globe, decisions aimed at reducing international trade will have, as they did in the 1930s, counterproductive results. The damage done by policies that restrict or deter trade among businesses and consumers across national boundaries will prolong the current recession.

Annys Shin wrote in the business section of Friday's Post:

In the latest WTO report, Director-General Pascal Lamy said that in just the past two months there has been "significant slippage" among the world's industrialized and developing nations toward protectionism. The report includes a lengthy list of examples.

"The danger today is of an incremental build-up of restrictions that could slowly strangle international trade and undercut the effectiveness of policies to boost aggregate demand and restore sustained growth globally," Lamy said.

A growing number of countries have raised tariffs, imposed import restrictions or reinstated subsidies. They have also been quick to defend home industries by filing complaints with the WTO over dumping -- the practice of flooding another country with goods at below-market prices. The WTO report also portrayed bailouts as potentially bad for trade because propping up operations of uncompetitive or insolvent firms "denies market share to more efficient producers including foreign suppliers."

A news release from the World Trade Organization that was supposed to be issued on March 25 but was prematurely published by a Dutch media outlet on March 23, addressed the issue of how economic decline follows protectionist trade measures:

“For the last 30 years trade has been an ever increasing part of economic activity, with trade growth often outpacing gains in output. Production for many products is sourced around the world so there is a multiplier effect — as demand falls sharply overall, trade will fall even further. The depleted pool of funds available for trade finance has contributed to the significant decline in trade flows, in particular in developing countries,” said Director-General Pascal Lamy.

“As a consequence, many thousands of trade related jobs are being lost. Governments must avoid making this bad situation worse by reverting to protectionist measures which in reality protect no nation and threaten the loss of more jobs. We are carefully monitoring trade policy developments. The use of protectionist measures is on the rise. The risk is increasing of such measures choking off trade as an engine of recovery. We must be vigilant because we know that restricting imports only leads your trade partner to follow suit and hit your exports. Trade can be a potent tool in lifting the world from these economic doldrums. In London G20 leaders will have a unique opportunity to unite in moving from pledges to action and refrain from any further protectionist measure which will render global recovery efforts less effective,” Mr. Lamy said.

Fortunately, some are fighting back against this incipient trend. In an online petition being circulated by the International Policy Network, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and its Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace and Prosperity, concerned citizens are speaking out and calling attention to the economic facts.

The petition says, in part:

... the fact that protectionism destroys wealth is not its worst consequence. Protectionism destroys peace. That is justification enough for all people of good will, all friends of civilization, to speak out loudly and forcefully against economic nationalism, an ideology of conflict, based on ignorance and carried into practice by protectionism.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Montesquieu observed that “Peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who differ with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.”

Trade’s most valuable product is peace. Trade promotes peace, in part, by uniting different peoples in a common culture of commerce – a daily process of learning others’ languages, social norms, laws, expectations, wants, and talents.

The petition looks to the lessons of history:

Perhaps the most tragic example of what happens when that insight is ignored is World War II.

International trade collapsed by 70 percent between 1929 and 1932, in no small part because of America’s 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff and the retaliatory tariffs of other nations. Economist Martin Wolf notes that “this collapse in trade was a huge spur to the search for autarky and Lebensraum, most of all for Germany and Japan.”

The most ghastly and deadly wars in human history soon followed.

By reducing war, trade saves lives.

Trade saves lives also by increasing prosperity and extending it to more and more people. The evidence that freer trade promotes prosperity is simply overwhelming. Prosperity enables ordinary men and women to lead longer and healthier lives.

There is more there to read and support, expressed more eloquently and completely than I can do. To sign the petition, go here: http://tinyurl.com/c5vb2l. Do it now.

Peace and prosperity depend on the ability of free people to trade among themselves without interference.

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Fascinating Rhythm

On this day seventy years ago, George Gershwin died at the age of 38.

I was alerted to this sad anniversary by today's entry in Joe Stollenwerk's 2006 book, Today in History: Musicals, which notes:

In addition to some thirty Broadway shows, Gershwin helped create an American sound in classical music with his "Rhapsody in Blue" and "An American in Paris." He also dabbled a bit in films, but held Hollywood in contempt, as evidenced by his parody of movie songwriting, "Blah Blah Blah." After his death, his music would be repurposed, recycled, and at times regurgitated into numerous movie and Broadway musicals.

Gershwin was part of a unique era in American songwriting, the era of Tin Pan Alley. In an interview on the NPR quiz show, "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me" originally broadcast in April and repeated last weekend, Linda Ronstadt -- who was perhaps the first rock singer to record an album of standards with her collaboration with Nelson Riddle, What's New, in 1983 -- said this in explaining her transition:

I didn't like playing in arenas because they didn't seem to me to be very appropriate places for music. People go out and buy beers and mill around and light a joint and get a hot dog. It just didn't seem like it was a place that was set up for an evening of magical reality....

Everybody had to have more smoke and more lights. You can't play music in those big places, so you have to do something. It has to be a big, bold gesture because there's so much reverb in there. Things are echoing around and echoing around. You get there and the guitar solo from the band that was playing the week before is still ringing around, and no one can hear you....

I like to play for the smallest audience possible, it's just hard to get paid... I wanted a theatre that was the way the Greeks designed theatres, so that you focus your attention on the stage.... For entertainers, after we got into those big coliseums, we didn't go and see each others' music anymore. In the old days, when I used to play at the Troubadour, which is a little folk club that held 300 people in Hollywood, we all went and saw each other. I saw every single night and every show of Jackson Browne and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Elton John and Carole King -- whoever was through there, singing, so we could be influenced by each other....

I still do concerts, I sing with the orchestra. I have all these great Nelson Riddle charts. I have a stack of them; it's really fabulous. That was my gift to myself in 1980. I decided I wanted grown-up music. I didn't want to be on stage singing "It's So Easy," which is a perfectly reasonable song when you're young and kinda out to get it, but when you get to be 60 you're kinda not out to get it, you kind of stay home at night, and I wanted a song for that.

So I vowed to mail myself this present into the future. I called up Nelson Riddle and said, "would you do some of these arrangements for me?" I didn't know if he had ever heard of me, and it turned out he hadn't....

We had a fabulous time. I had so much fun with him. The little secret is, why all of us rocker-geezer types are coming around to standards eventually -- although I did it as a younger woman -- those songs are beautifully written and they beg to be interpreted and reinterpreted and reinterpreted. Each person gets to make them his or her own, because they are enormously flexible and they're enormously sturdy in their musical construction. They're just really little jewels of artistic expression....

I just feel I had in my little way I may have rescued some of those songs from spending the rest of their lives riding up and down in an elevator.

Like Ronstadt and her contemporaries at the Troubadour, Gershwin was able to rub shoulders other great talents in his formative and productive years. In a recent book review, Jonathan Yardley quotes Fred Astaire, in the liner notes of an album of standards that he recorded in 1952:

"It was my good fortune that Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, and others, supplied the music for these various films and stage shows. . . . Yes indeed, that was a fine lot of material to fall into one's lap."

While each of these men was talented in his own right and in his own unique way, they all learned from each other, both directly and by listening to each other's works in performance. Broadway buzzed in the 1920s and '30s, and they built what has been called, on more than one occasion, "the great American songbook."

Quoting from author Wilfrid Sheed's new book on the men and their era, The House That George Built, Yardley writes:

A good case can be made that this music, combined with its symbiotic partner, jazz, was the great American cultural achievement of the 20th century, a body of work, as Sheed says, "about the whole country, concerning which [these songs] provide maybe the most trustworthy record we have." It is music that reflects America as vividly and truly as anything the country has created, yet the irony is that it was largely produced by members of two groups of outsiders, Jews and blacks. "The standards have actually been referred to as a Jewish response to black music," Sheed writes, "but this definition is a loaded compliment that neither party has rushed to claim." He continues:

"Music is not produced by whole groups, but by one genius at a time, and it may be significant that the two families that gave us Irving Berlin and George Gershwin both fled Russia on the same great wave of czarist pogroms, only to find American black people not only singing about a similar experience, but using the Hebrew Bible as their text."

Had George Gershwin only written "Rhapsody in Blue" or "Concerto in F" or -- especially -- Porgy and Bess -- he would still be remembered as a genius today. (Not so with Of Thee I Sing, a critical and popular success that became the first musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Seventy-five years later, that work is creaky and dated. It does not stand the test of time -- which may say something about Pulitzer judges.)

Novelist John O'Hara said: "George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don't have to believe it if I don't want to."

Neither do we.