Larry Zuckerman

Here's another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

My protagonist, Rollie Birch, returns from Over There in 1919 and scandalizes the town that reveres him as a war hero by choosing to raise his infant daughter by himself. So I looked for a parenting book from those years to see what advice the experts were dishing out.

The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses, appeared in multiple editions before, during, and after the war, the most popular guide of its time. The author, L. Emmett Holt, MD, offered rigorous instructions for pasteurizing raw milk—the only kind available—at 155˚ F. for thirty minutes, in which case you had to use it within twenty-four hours, or boiled one hour, in which case the milk would keep two or three weeks.

Either way, the stuff must have tasted mighty appetizing. Such were the days before flash heating, but you had no choice; back then, so many babies died from milk containing pathogens.

As for hands-on childcare, Holt counseled feeding on a strict schedule and deplored the instinct to pick up a fussing infant; no healthy baby, he averred, would cry for more than twenty minutes. (Rollie's daughter ignores this rule.) Further, the doctor warned against playing with children younger than six months, which would make them nervous and irritable, and disliked the notion of playing with infants at all.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he cautioned against kissing infants, even on the cheek or forehead, for fear of transmitting diphtheria, tuberculosis, syphilis, and other diseases.

Rollie reads this and laughs.

Here's another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In late February 1919, the Seattle Times reported that someone had run an advertisement attacking a West Seattle High School history teacher for being a "Hun" and "un-American." The first charge almost certainly stemmed from ignorance concerning his name; he was Swiss, not German. As for his "Americanism," he had declined to salute the flag, a refusal he ascribed to the ceremony itself, and which he'd later recanted.

However, he was also an avowed conscientious objector; his enemies said he "fed ideas" to his classes.

A blind poll among his ninety or so students showed a twenty-to-one margin of support. Nevertheless, the school board fired him, saying that they couldn't have a conscientious objector as a teacher; what if everyone had been a conscientious objector when the nation declared war?

The newspaper reports leave much unsaid, as they always do. But you sense that the teacher's real crime was encouraging his students to think critically, which the vast majority appreciated.

What's more, according to the Selective Service Act of 1917 and its revisions, he'd most likely done nothing wrong. If he'd passed his thirtieth birthday, he wouldn't have had to register for the draft until mid-September 1918, and not at all if he'd reached the age of forty-five. Further, failing to register would have attracted attention and left him open to punishment, yet the newspaper reports said nothing about this. Finally, the act did allow for conscientious objection, though only on religious grounds.

Consequently, I'm guessing this teacher's viewpoint was entirely theoretical, maybe spoken of in class to spark discussion. With nothing else to hang him for, his enemies fixed on it, and the school board went along.

So much for academic freedom and the war to make the world safe for democracy.

Building on my previous post about the Seattle parade and propaganda efforts, here's more historical background for my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

Many recruiting posters in Britain and the United States appealed to men by addressing the masculine imperative to protect women. But the one shown here pulls out all the stops.

"Destroy This Mad Brute" posits a savage gorilla wearing a spiked helmet that says, "Militarism," wielding a club labeled "Kultur" (frequently translated as "civilization"), and abducting a fair-haired woman. She, for once, isn't wearing white, and you can't see her face, a concealment perhaps intended to spare her; or conversely underline her humiliation; or leave the viewer free to imagine her as a loved one. Further, the invader advances menacingly, having already torched American shores to cinders. The single word "Enlist" sends the message.

For starters, I find it sad and utterly misguided how humans can cast other primates as savage, when we're the ones to machine-gun and bomb each other; but gorillas, essentially peaceable, shy creatures, have long suffered a bad rap (witness King Kong). The German Army had abandoned the admittedly ludicrous (and impractical) spiked helmet by 1916, but for some reason, it became an emblem of brutality, and American propagandists loved it.

As for "militarism," responsible for the invasion and destruction of neutral Belgium, that's the lone scrap of truth. But, as I noted in a previous post, legal and moral arguments lack visceral appeal. Ridiculous as it sounds today, the suggestion that the German Army raped its way across Europe and would somehow cross the Atlantic to repeat the crime found its adherents.

The story of this poster didn't end there. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Hitler's chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels, rolled out this same illustration, with different text, to inoculate the German public against foreign charges of atrocities.

More to come.

Building on last week's post about the Seattle parade, here's more historical background for my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In the parade, the white horses, white flower petals, and young women in white dresses all played to symbolism of feminine purity. Why?

Not for the first time in history, but in a context particular to the First World War, belligerents sought to persuade their able-bodied male citizens that they must fight to save womanhood. The idea pervaded recruitment propaganda in Britain and the United States, likely because neither country had been invaded, and so had no self-evident reason to defend itself.

When Congress declared war in April 1917, American recruiters had to rouse a nation comfortably at peace. To do so, they evoked wartime events that had not budged neutrality one inch when they happened but were now recast to prompt every man to do his duty or risk being called less than a man. A key reference point was the German invasion of Belgium in 1914.

While the invasion was taking place, the press failed to convey its true horror and went for the sensational. Though the invaders executed thousands of Belgian civilians, committing arson and pillage, alleged rapes and mutilations of nuns, women, and young girls were what made headlines. Even as American newspapers exploited these lurid stories for the shock value, most reserved judgment, doubting that the disciplined German Army could have permitted such outrages.

Then, in May 1915, a German submarine sank the liner Lusitania, killing almost 1200 people, including 128 Americans. In what amounted to a publicist's perfect storm, a week later, the British government published an official account of the Belgian invasion atrocities, mentioning the firing squads, burning, and looting but playing up accusations of rapes and mutilation, which rested on hearsay evidence from unsworn witnesses.

That lapse went largely unnoticed, and the report electrified American opinion. If the Germans could sink the Lusitania, mightn't they have committed sexual atrocities in Belgium? Isolationists could argue that was still none of America's business, but the perceived outrages wouldn't go away. For instance, The New York Tribune, a pro-Allied paper, printed a drawing of a widowed Belgium comforting a weeping Miss Columbia. The caption suggests attitudes common to the time: "At Least They Only Drown Your Women."

Come 1917, then, American recruiters had no trouble tapping into beliefs about German atrocities and, tacitly or explicitly, using them to goad to action any man who called himself a man. The poster above, promoted by the Hollywood film industry, employs blatant sexual imagery, with a half-clad Miss Columbia--in white, of course.

But the propagandists were just getting started.

Here's a nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

To soak up the historical background, I read several months' worth of the Seattle Times from 1919 and learned about a parade in late April welcoming home some four hundred soldiers from Over There.

But it wasn't just a parade. It was as though a phalanx of hopes, attitudes, prejudices, expectations, and flat-out misconceptions marched through Seattle that day, not just men from the 361st Infantry Regiment, 91st ("Wild West") Division. And the pride, earnestness, gratitude, awkwardness, and ignorance on display provide a stew of conflict in which my protagonists, a man and a woman, have to swim.

The parade organizers mixed solemnity with "stunts," a word typically applied then to party games or entertainments. The soldiers, supposedly the stars of the show, made up the rear. Next came white horses drawing a large gold star, to commemorate the fallen. Farther up, young women in white rode the running boards of cars and strewed white flower petals along the route.

Ahead of them walked Elk Lodge brothers dressed in feather headdresses and war paint, while leading the column were police officers wearing chaps who fired off blanks from their pistols. Cowboys and Indians; a Wild West "stunt."

I tried beginning my novel with this scene and wound up cutting it. But my male protagonist is a soldier who thinks the hoopla insults his dead friends and wonders what country he's come home to. That newspaper article was a gold mine.

According to Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, James I came to England from Scotland "with a closed mind, and a weakness for lecturing," his pet subjects including the evils of witchcraft and tobacco, and abstract political theory. Having been raised under strict, Spartan discipline, with no frills or luxuries, his accession to the throne gave him the idea that he was rich.

Sort of; he had Parliament to deal with, because they had a different opinion, having taken it into their collective heads that His Majesty did not rule as an absolute monarch, chosen by God. How dare they--but they controlled the pursestrings.

The king's behavior appalled them. "James was much addicted to favourites," Churchill writes, "and his attention to handsome young men resulted in a noticeable loss of respect for the monarchy." One of them, Robert Carr, received an earldom in Somerset and "was implicated in a murder by poison. . . ."

Indeed. If you want an account of that rather astonishing sequence of events, I suggest you look no further than The Poison Bed, which I review on my other blog, Novelhistorian.

Source: Winston S. Churchill, The History of the English Speaking Peoples, ed. Henry Steele Commager (1965), pp. 160-61.

Andrew Carnegie's business genius centered mostly around a mania for correct accounting. How startling it is to read today that when he began to dominate the steel industry in the 1880s, nobody else had ever thought of calculating the expense of production. Company books were examined at year end, and only then would a manufacturer know what profits and losses amounted to, or where expenditures had gone. By contrast, Carnegie became famous — or infamous — by fighting to save pennies on the ton, constantly requiring detailed audits, figuring that the profits would take care of themselves. He was right.

Carnegie was careful to cultivate his image as a philanthropist, but it has to be said, he followed through. "The man who dies rich, dies disgraced," he was known to remark. As such, he endowed libraries, schools, hospitals, and, later, the famous concert hall and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, among other worthy causes.

Nevertheless, he also earned that money by cutting his employees' wages —25 percent, in the case of the workers at his Homestead Steel plant in 1892, sparking one of the bloodiest strikes in American history. Around that time, four-fifths of the country's families earned $500 a year or less, and more than one hundred Americans had incomes of $1 million or more, prompting William Dean Howells to decide that our nation was becoming a plutocracy. The question is worth asking again today.

Recently, I reviewed a novel with a fascinating premise, that Carnegie became a philanthropist partly because of a thwarted love. Interesting, no?

Source: H. W. Brands, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (1995), pp. 60, 64-65, 96.

As I said in discussing Julie Orringer's biographical novel about Varian Fry, that unusual historical figure has long been a hero of mine. There's an exhibit about him at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., because he saved several thousand Jewish refugees from southern France in 1940 and 1941. They weren't just any refugees, however, for they included such artists and intellectuals as Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Franz Werfel ,and André Breton, as well as a sprinkling of Nobelists whose names have faded into history. Fry originally thought that when he landed in Marseille with $3,000 strapped to his legs, he could save two hundred people during the month's vacation due him. But the dapper, Harvard-educated literary scholar and journalist quickly realized that he needed much more time and more money.

How he managed while learning on the job, faced with hostility from the Vichy government to paid informers working for them to Gestapo agents to the American consulate to the U.S. State Department, is the stuff of legend. One colleague attributed his success in part to wit, a formal sort of playfulness, a poker face, and elegant dress — striped dark suit with bow tie.

Source: Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (2010), pp. 72-77.

Recently I reviewed a very fine novel about the courtship of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd, which set me to thinking about his famous witticisms. My favorite is the one in which, responding to a politician who called him two-faced, Lincoln supposedly replied, "If I had a face different from this one, don't you think I'd use it?"

But, according to one of his many biographers, the late David Herbert Donald, his humor often misfired. For instance, in 1856, he spent so much time traveling the Illinois judicial circuit as an itinerant judge, by the time he returned to Springfield, the cottage that Mary and he occupied had become "a handsome two-story Greek revival house, tastefully painted chocolate brown, with dark green shutters." Feigning shock, he asked a neighbor whether he knew where Lincoln lived, because his house used to be right there. Consequently, the story went around that Mary had renovated the house without his consent, absolutely untrue; but privately, he had complained about the cost. As a result, she learned to conceal from her husband how much money she spent. Honest Abe sometimes made his spouse and himself suffer for his habit of being indirect.

Source: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (1995), p. 197.

In looking for a photo to accompany my review of Jerome Charyn's biographical novel about Theodore Roosevelt, I ran across a fascinating one, dated April 1865. Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession heads down Broadway in New York City, and in the background, you can see two small figures leaning from a second-story window. You can't possibly tell who they are, but it's known that the young onlookers are six-year-old Theodore and his brother Elliott.

How? Since the photo comes via the New York Times and the New-York Historical Society, you have to guess that the mansion portrayed in the photo, which belongs to the Roosevelt family, was easily identifiable, and perhaps family archives or reminiscences or plain logic reveal which Roosevelts are leaning out.

I like this photograph not only for its dramatic irony — the late, martyred president viewed by a young boy who'll eventually occupy the same office — but because even as a boy, TR read widely and had many interests. I have to think that with his sense of history, he thought back on that moment often, especially once he reached the White House.

By the way, TR later had another, more tangible connection to Lincoln, for his first secretary of state, inherited from McKinley, was John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary.