Part VIII: Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case
July 22, 2014
Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case
Part VIII
Bernie
Enter The Speculator Bernard Baruch
by
R.E. Prindle
This chapter will attempt to get Bernard Baruch’s involvement in Sapiro’s career a littler clearer. Always circumspect in his two volume auto-biography one gains the impression from Baruch that he is only telling you so much as he wants you to know. That so much is always of a very positive character regarding himself. Although Baruch frequently finds or at least obtains no success in his public career it is always that he was right but the other fellow isn’t quite quick enough to get Baruch’s meaning. Thus when FDR fails to take Barney’s advice it is inexplicable to himself and as he imagines to Roosevelt’s later regret. However everyone consults him with gratitude.
For instance here is an interchange with Thomas Edison, then considered America’s greatest inventive genius:
For many years I carried on a heavy correspondence with men who were in a position to help the farmer. One of these was Thomas A. Edison, whose interest in agriculture must have been as surprising to some people as my own. One day I received a call from Edison’s secretary. Edison was on his way over to see me at my home, he told me. I had never met the “genius of Menlo Park” and could hardly fathom why he should be calling on me. When he arrived he told me that, having heard of my interest in the farm problem, he wanted my views on a plan for credit and marketing which he had drafted at the suggestion of his friend, Henry Ford. I undertook to comment on Edison’s plan, and he accepted my criticism graciously. I felt highly complimented when he wrote: “You are the first man who has had imagination enough to throw off the trammels of the money religion and analyze the proposed scheme like an engineer.”
That is the general tenor of the hundreds of encounters with very prominent men, the majority of whom are Baruch’s friends, over the 800 pages or so of his auto-biography. Edison, who had a reputation as an anti-Semite second only to Ford, seems strangely to have selected not only a Jew to read his plan but a principal in the Lubin-Sapiro Cooperative farming plan. He could have received nothing but a negative reading.
Bernard Baruch was born in 1876 in the former Confederate State of South Carolina. His father, though Jewish, had fought for the slave states and in the aftermath of Reconstruction had been a Klansman. This was a small marvel to the young Bernard before he left home for New York to become notorious as one of the bears of Wall Street. Bears are never thought well of on the Street so that Baruch’s reputation was always on the negative side.
While he never tells us how large his fortune was at any rate he was able to give up Wall Street during the Great War to enter public service, as he says, at the insistence of President Woodrow Wilson himself. That’s the way it was with Barney, all the great men came to him for advice unsolicited.
More than financially secure he was able to dispense considerable largesse, as he says. He entered Wilson’s war administration as the head of the War Industries Board- the WIB. Here he began the collectivization of American industry somewhat like the industrial codes of Roosevelt’s NIRA. Bernard’s reputation was as a speculator on Wall Street and a bear at that so when he was chief of the WIB and demanded all industrialists submit their financial data to him this would have an invaluable asset to him for his speculations. In fact he was accused of the very thing.
One shouldn’t be too surprised then that there was strenuous opposition to his request. None was more strident than that of the automakers of Detroit including the most famous industrialist of all, Henry Ford. As in 1935 when the Supreme Court defused the same type of situation in which Ford was embroiled so the end of WWI defused this one, but Ford had had his first encounter with Baruch and Jewish collectivist methods.
During the War farmers had benefited as much or more so than industry. These were a couple fat years as prices rose and demand exceeded supply. Farmers are not actually businessmen. Wartime orders both made and destroyed companies. The orders were so large that companies had to expand their capacity at great expense. Some like the small arms manufacturers did so at great expense only to fall on hard times when orders ceased in 1918, but the expenses went on causing them great distress much like the farmers.
On the other hand Dupont was heavily criticized when having received a huge order from France they explained to the French that they would have to build a new factory and would only do so if the French paid for it. Thus, when the orders stopped Dupont’s expense stopped and they made the transition to peacetime easily.
The farmers were in the position of the small arms manufacturers. They had bought lots of equipment as farming became more mechanized. When their sales collapsed and expenses went on they were in a desperate situation as banks had no choice but to foreclose. Not being businessmen the farmers were slow at financials.
Agriculture through the twenties was in desperate shape. Ford who had a soft spot for farmers from his youth on the farm took a great interest in the problem working out his own solutions apparently with the help of his great friend and fellow ‘anti-Semite’ Tom Edison.
According to Baruch he also became interested in the farm problem. From the quote about Edison it would appear that he had been for at least a decade or so. This raises the question of whether or how much he knew about David Lubin.
Then, in 1922- Bernard Baruch, My Own Story Vol. II, The Public Years, p. 159:
By 1922, a total and tragic collapse of the tobacco market had brought Kentucky to the “verge of anarchy,” in the words of Judge Robert Bingham, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times and later Ambassador the Court of St. James. At the suggestion of Arthur Krock, the editor-in-chief of the Louisville Times, Bingham asked me to join him in organizing the Kentucky tobacco growers, which I did.
The services of Aaron Sapiro, the foremost expert on the organization and management of cooperatives, were enlisted.
Who are you going to go to when you’ve got a tough problem? Why, Super Bernard Baruch of course. And Bernie, naturally, went to the top expert in the field his fellow Jew, Aaron Sapiro. But, had they known each other before, were they fellow conspirators? Baruch doesn’t say. Now, the reader unconsciously accepts Bernard’s opinion that Sapiro is THE foremost expert. That he was foremost implies that there were several other experts. So Sapiro is not alone in his field. According to Baruch, then, Sapiro was head and shoulders above all the others. Perhaps, but probably not, but what and how does Aaron know about cooperatives? After all, he began as a nickel and dime lawyer in San Francisco.
The Jewish cooperative movement of which Baruch and Sapiro were exemplars had begun back around the turn of the century under the leadership of the Jew David Lubin among Jewish orange growers around Sacramento, California. What was known as the Sapiro Plan was actually the Lubin plan.
Aaron Sapiro
Sapiro began as a shyster lawyer in San Francisco becoming known to Lubin who made him a cooperative ‘expert.’ Lubin who had grand international plans then departed for Europe where he managed to sell his plan to the king of Italy. Taken under the king’s wing, financed by him, Lubin set to work. A question is did Ford know about Lubin? As he mentioned that the Jews had an international plan, and Lubin was behind one, I’m guessing that he did. Unfortunately for Lubin and possibly for Sapiro he was cut down by influenza in 1919. After 1919 then Sapiro was on his own and appears to have begun drifting. His fortunes began declining so he was already on the skids when Baruch brought him into the Kentucky tobacco affair. By 1924 it may have been necessary for him to seek a million by suing Ford.
David Lubin
Ford had his newspaper, the International Dearborn Independent. During 1920-21 Ford had published 91 articles exposing Jewish machinations in the US. The articles were all true, that is, factually correct, but the Jews ever sensitive to criticism denounced Ford as an anti-Semite. Exposes had a long history and the debunking authors coming along on the heels of the muckrakers became prominent in the twenties so in that sense Ford was right in step with the times. Ford wasn’t doing anything that the Jews weren’t doing with the exception that he was doing it to the Jews.
Sapiro having come to his attention, in 1924 he began a series of 20 articles exposing what was the Lubin-Sapiro plan but Ford didn’t know of or at least didn’t mention David Lubin. Ford’s articles did couple Bernard Baruch’s name with Sapiro’s as well as those of fellow Jews Eugene Meyer and Albert Lasker.
In Volume II of his memoirs, The Public Years, Baruch discusses this involvement. 159-162:
It seemed to me that farmers could spare themselves many trials if, instead of trying to create an organization, they could acquire one already established, one with adequate facilities, experienced personnel, and a standing in the marketing field.
In other words, organized as businessmen, which they weren’t.
I approached J. Ogden Armour the meat packing tycoon, in the spring of 1923. I proposed that he sell his Armour grain company, one of the largest grain marketing houses in the country, to several farmer organizations. This idea was not without its implicit irony. Armour was then anathema to farmers, representing all that was evil in the creation and operation of the Chicago meat packing empires, which Upton Sinclair had execrated in his famous book, The Jungle.
So, the farmers have the leading Wall Street bear speculator getting a scourge of the farmers, Armour Packing Co., to sell that what appears to be a very profitable business. At what price?
I suggested a plan which he readily endorsed. Under its terms a farmer organization would purchase the Armour Grain Company. Its duration would be entrusted temporarily to a board comprising the present management, representatives of the farmers, and representatives of the public. When the farmers’ indebtedness to Armour was liquidated, direction would be left entirely to the farmers.
Not clear exactly what Baruch is smoking here. I can see about twenty things that could go very wrong here. First we have sharpers vs. rubes. Very bad start. Then we have ‘entrusted temporarily’. Two bad words there, trust and temporary. And skipping over to the end, direction by farmers. Farmers are farmers busy farming. They aren’t going to direct any of this. They are going to have to trust permanently after having given up their independence. My daddy always said you can’t trust anybody and I found that to be true. I couldn’t even trust daddy.
The farmers weren’t going for any of it and between Baruch and Armour I don’t blame them. Now, we’re getting a little closer to the bone after this carefully worded preface:
Many people who admired the doctrines of competition, more in theory than in practice, professed to see in the cooperative marketing movement a violation of the anti-trust laws at the very least; and, at worst, a dangerous form of collectivism.
Yes, it was a dangerous form of collectivism. The farmers wouldn’t be any better off and they would be bound by the collective of which Baruch and his group would be the beneficiaries. There were other cooperative plans so farmers seeing their plan as a number of violations wasn’t necessarily opposition to cooperatives.
One of the loudest voices in the hostile pack was Henry Ford’s who used his mouthpiece, the Dearborn Independent to unleash a particularly violent an bigoted attack on cooperative marketing, labeling it the handiwork of Jews and Communists, and naming Aaron Sapiro and me as among the alien influences responsible for this un-American idea.
I don’t see how being opposed to an unsound plan makes one evil as Baruch says here. I don’t know how you can be bigoted against the concept of cooperative marketing while I don’t believe Ford was actually opposed to farm coops. I may be wandering but I’m not sure farm coops and Baruch’s use of cooperative marketing are the same thing.
To my knowledge the Sapiro articles from the Independent haven’t been published in book form so I haven’t read them but I am unwilling to accept Baruch’s self-serving characterization of them. After all, what we have here is an us vs. them situation. One can’t expect fair play from Baruch and the rest.
Following the above Baruch gives a long paragraph of character assassination of Ford. Then, as if to vilify Ford further he gives us this diatribe, p. 162:
Beginning with the issue of May 22, 1920, and leading with a front-page editorial captioned “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” the Independent had carried on one of the most violent and sustained anti-Semitic attacks ever seen in this country. Its pages were filled with it for ninety-one consecutive issues. It was an operation as fantastic in its planning as in its execution. E.G. Liebold, a Ford executive, had established a detective agency in New York City to investigated the private lives of Jews and providing fodder for the Independent campaign. Many of the agency’s men had numbers like 121X. It was this bureau that bought a translation of the spurious “Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion,” a notorious and classic anti-Semitic document, which provided the Independent with material for a year and a half.
One day the Independent appeared with a headline and story proclaiming me as the “pro-consul of Judah in America’ and a Jew of Super-Power,” the head and front of a dictatorial conspiracy.
—–
I ignored these assaults, but Sapiro was irate.
The detective agency would have been part of Ford’s Service Department. I can’t fathom why Baruch was irate because the Xs were spying on the private lives of Jews. While I find that, if true, offensive however the fact is that the American Jewish Committee and the ADL keep files on 3,000,000 of what they presume are American anti-Semites of which there is a file on me. Believe me it can be quite an invasion of privacy.
Currently some of my essays are displayed on the ADL site as examples of anti-Semitism which I consider defamation. No one thought to ask me. So, Bernard is being somewhat disingenuous here.
As far as his being a pro-consul, whatever is meant by that, I believe he probably was an officer of the international Jewish government. As far as being a Jew of Super-Power, any reading of his auto-biography would indicate he obviously thought of himself as that.
So here in these quotes from four carefully written pages of Baruch’s we have a principal participants view of what the thought was happening and how he was involved in it. He carefully selects what information to release but it isn’t that difficult to read between the lines.
Tracking down Eugene Meyer and Albert Lasker’s involvement looks to be more difficult however the more one looks into this issue the more Henry Ford is exonerated.
A Review, Pt. II: One World By Wendell Willkie
June 21, 2014
A Review
Pt. II
One World by Wendell Willkie
by
R.E. Prindle
Franklin and Eleanor
The nineteenth century moved like a glacial flow until 1914 with the ice sheet hanging way over the water it broke loose crashing into the sea to reveal a new surface. The changes had been building both racial and ideological but remained unacknowledged for what they were.
On the ideological front nationalism had been under attack. Loyalty to one country began to be replaced by loyalty to an ideology transcending nationality, this was reflected in Communism and/or socialism with the Bolshevik revolution. The Soviet Union became the homeland of socialism or collectivism. Communist ideology shifted their loyalty from their own countries to the ‘socialist homeland’ of the USSR. Thus the so-called Communist national traitors after 1917 were at the same time sociaoists loyal to the socialist homeland of the USSR.
Fascism that arose in reaction to Communism too became an international ideology along with Americanism. Judaism also while being international in scope along with the other ideologies was also racial or national thus straddling all sides of the fence- no mean feat.
Wendell Willkie
Like it or not there was no isolationism nor could there have been. While Fascism and Judaism were restricted by race but still international in reach the bi-polar struggle of the next couple periods would be between Communism and Americanism.
This situation was ill understood as the twenties began. Most people had no realization that the old façade had dropped nearly clean away. As a global political ideology controlled from the USSR the Communists created the Third International to interfere with and manipulate the nations which still retained their political borders thus making the USSR a pariah State.
We thus arrive at the trickiest ideology Judaism. The Jews succeeded in making themselves the thorniest ideology of the lot while as a nation or people they functioned across all borders, ideological or geographic as a unit although they denied it then and may still do so although they have been outed to all except perhaps themselves. They appear to believe their denials are still effective.
If anyone needed to say it, the Negro WEB Dubois did say it when he said race would be the central issue of the twentieth century. He might have added- and thereafter. The battle would begin with the Negro revolt against Reconstruction Jim Crow while the race evangelist Marcus Garvey would begin the struggle for African supremacy in the world as he attempted to unite the Negroes of Africa and those scattered throughout the New World.
While not integrated into consciousness those movements did not go unnoticed. The high time of Western world dominance undoubtedly was the successful Scramble for Africa bringing that continent with two small exceptions under Western or European dominance. If one were to give the high tide a date it would have to be the fabulous Columbian Exposition of Chicago of 1893. It has been downhill from there. By that time what the historian and social critic Lothrop Stoddard called The Rising Tide Of Color Against White Supremacy became noticeable.
In addition to Stoddard’s book a 1916 study by anthropologist Madison Grant titled The Passing Of The Great Race underlined the sea change that was taking place as the West was virtually committing suicide on the battlefields of Europe. Both Stoddard and Grant would be marginalized as inconsequential racists as were writers who detected the true nature of the conflict and spoke up such as Thomas Dixon and Edgar Rice Burroughs to name only two.
At the end of the war to end wars then the stage was set for the conflict between ideologies and races that would improbably come to a head with Willkie’s One World and the United States of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The cessation of hostilities between the Central Powers and the Allies did not end all hostilities. The success of the Bolsheviks in Russia alarmed the US and Europe while Russian loyalists sought to recover Russia fighting the Bolsheviks in a civil war. The White forces- as opposed to the Reds- were aided and abetted by European, American and Japanese troops while British diplomatic spies in Russia sought the destruction of Lenin and the Bolshevik regime. This was much more serious than we have been led to believe. A good account of the near replacement of the Bolsheviks can be found in the British TV series available on DVD- Reilly, Ace Of Spies. A more accurate account can be found in the history, Ace Of Spies: The True Story Of Sidney Reilly by Andrew Cook. You will be amazed.
It is hardly astounding then that the Bolsheviks were fomenting worldwide revolution that included the United States through their Third International or Commintern. It is a folly to think that the revolutionary events of 1919 and 1920 in the US were not just that. At that time the American reaction was prompt and effective as Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer put his foot down hard on the revolutionists while the finishing touches were applied by the new president Warren G. Harding in 1921. Thereafter the Communists worked underground but they never stopped working. Actually they even ran their own candidates for president through the thirties.
The backbone of the Communist Party was of course, the Jews. The majority of Party members in every country of the West was Jewish. They strenuously denied this at the time but in the last decade or so have grudgingly admitted what any interested party knew all along.
It is regrettable that we have to talk about the Jews but no period of Western history from the end of the Taurian Age when the ideology came into existence to the present can be understood without a knowledge of Jewish goals and desires. It’s just a fact that we have to deal with.
In the modern period, that is post-French Revolution the contest between the Jews and the West has been first a demand for autonomy within national States which is to say equality of the Jews separate from the host nation and secondly, having attained that, supremacy within the State. The notion is what the so-called Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion expressed but has been denied.
Benzion Netanyahu And Son Bibi
The Jewish method is always to destabilize the State and cause confusion in the society of the host nation. This was clearly but inadvertently expressed by Benzion Netanyahu in his ’monumental’ History Of The Jews In Spain. The superiority of the Jews is clearly expressed in his metaphor of the Jewish root stock of the olive tree onto which the branch of Christianity is grafted. Thus Judaism is the superior and senior while the West by which the Jews mean Christianity inferior and junior.
While that may accurately depict the Jewish view of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity it ignores the fact that the proto-Jewish root stock had no existence before the beginning of the Arien Age when civilization had already passed the infant stage thereby making Judaism dirivative of the mother culture. But, my intent is historic rather than polemical so suffice it to say I have accurately described the Jewish rationale.
The first wave, other than the small colonial Sephardim from Brazil, of Jews arrived as flotsam from the failed Revolution of ‘48 from Germany. This group was well established by the seventies and eighties when the Jews from the Pale, that is ‘Russian’ Jews, came in their millions until 1914. The German Jews looked down on the Eastern European Jews causing such a division that the German Jews were known as ‘Our Crowd’ in relation to them.
While the Jews claim they had little to do with the Bolshevik Revolution they were inveterate enemies of the ‘Czar’ and were responsible for the 1905 revolution and the break of diplomatic relations between the US and Russia in 1911.
http://www.jrbooksonline.com/Intl_Jew_full_version/ij38.htm
The election of Woodrow Wilson in 1913 gave them their entrée into federal politics and a step toward autonomy. They were then able to actively begin to destabilize American society introducing a new element of confusion.
Now in power in the USSR spreading destabilization and confusion throughout Europe, the establishment of the Comintern allowed penetration of the US as Soviet agents infiltrated the country in some numbers. With their arrival American socialists or Communists who had been discretely working behind the scenes in all areas of American life became more open to the observent aiding at the least in the frustration of government attempts to contain the Communist threat. The attempt was and has been ridiculed as the Red Scare as though the suppression of the Communists was a panic situation over a non-existent threat.
Thus, the incredible revolutionary acts in the US of 1919-1921 have been characterized by Judaeo-Communist historians and commentators as ordinary disturbances having no political significance. If
A. Mitchell Palmer- American Hero
one views the Wall Street bombing and the attempts on the life of dozens of leading anti-Communists as what they were, an attempt to overthrow the government in the post-war disorder and incapacitation of Wilson by his stroke resulting in little effective government until March of 1921 as a failed revolutionary attempt the events make more sense. There was no Red Scare, there was a failed Red revolution no different in character than that of Bolshevik Russia. It was the internationalism so ardently desired by Roosevelt. Isolation was not an option.
This mess then was inherited by the incoming Republican president Warren G. Harding which he promptly solved. The Reds were squelched within a few months of Harding’s inauguration. The Party itself was outlawed. However sympathizers and Reds disguising themselves as humanitarian Liberals had the law reversed.
This was not unusual as circumventing adverse decisions by ‘democratic’ methods seemed easy for the Jews. In 1911 when the Jews demanded that Taft cancel the 1832 commercial treaty between the US and Russia, Taft demurred. Having studied the issue at least as well as our present constitution scholar, Barack Obama, he could find no reason to abrogate the treaty. As the Dearborn Independent article linked above of January 1921 indicates Taft’s decision was nullified by Congress:
Neither did the President know what was behind it all. Look at the names of the men who represented American Jewry in the White House that 15th of February 1911 (Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshal et al.). And then consider that the abrogation of the Russian treaty would throw all the vast business between the United States and Russia into Germany, into the hands of the German Jews. The Frankfurt bankers and their relations in the United States knew what that meant. It meant the German Jews would be the intermediaries of trade between Russia and the United States. The business itself meant money, but the relation meant power over Russia- and Jacob Schiff lived to overthrow Russia. The neutrality of the United States was torn to shreds by a movement organized and financed on American soil for the overthrow of a friendly nation, and the organizers and financiers were Jews! They used their internal power to deflect the policy of the United States to assist their plans.
Remember that the Federal Reserve System founded by the Jew Warburg in 1913 was owned by an international consortium of Jewish banks and were all operating out of Frankfurt, save Rockefellers. The Federal Reserve controls US currency receiving interest on the total number of dollars outstanding.
The complicity between Schiff, Marshall and the Jews with the Bolshevik revolution can plainly be seen. The squelching of the American revolution by Harding can be seen as a blow to Jewish ambitions for supremacy in the US as well as in Russia so FDR’s internationalism was the order of the day while ‘isolation’ never was or could be possible. FDR’s abhorred isolationists merely had a different notion of internationalism than FDR and his Jews.
Having delivered one blow to Jewish pretensions Harding delivered another. Ending unrestricted immigration had been a desideratum of the US for decades but had never succeeded. In 1921 under Harding’s leadership it did. As is well known, before August 1914 the Jews had readied the entire Eastern European Jewry for transfer to the US. After the war it was necessary to reorganize and just as they were ready to begin the transfer Harding shut the door in their faces by limiting immigration to more manageable proportions.
Unlike Wilson’s administration, under Harding and his two Republican successors the Jews would have
The Much Underestimated President Warren G. Harding
no place in DC. That would change with the election of Roosevelt.
As far as internationalism went the beginning of Prohibition in 1920 would change international relations dramatically. This during the so-called isolationism of the Republican interregnum.
Prohibition had been in effect for a year and a quarter when Harding assumed office. Criminals are not always as dull as we’d like to think they are. Long before the passing of the Volstead Act criminal minds perceived the fantastic opportunity the law would offer. They were organized to take advantage of the act the day it came into effect. The law was to alter the very nature of the country, turn it into a criminal State. The people in the best position to organize international shipments of liquor to the US were the international Jews led in this instance by the criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein. Liquor shipments were sent from the British Isles, France et al. while the Bronfmans of Canada made several fortunes transporting booze across Lake Erie to the Mayfield Road Gang and across the Detroit River to the Purple Gang of that city. We’re talking a lot of money and it is filling Jewish pockets.
While this was an unintended consequence of the act it surely was foreseen especially as criminal organizing would not have gone unnoticed. Thus, Harding inherited a unique criminal situation for which there was actually no defense.
Now, I’m carefully searching for words to portray the situation without offending the reader’s sensibilities. We have been conditioned, you and I and all of us, and I mean conditioned like Pavlov’s dogs, to consider the Jews as a much maligned, totally innocent, wrongfully oppressed people. Thus at the cry of ‘anti-Semitism’ we all rush to their defense. Any historian, any interested person who looks into the facts will see that this notion is far from the truth. As Jacob Schiff announced when Taft refused to abrogate the Russian-American treaty: This is war. Any stifling of Jewish wishes was always war, had been war for nearly four thousand years. The war continues.
Internationalism was and is natural to Jews who were dispersed throughout all the nation states of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the US. NO matter where they went they could check into a synagogue or Jewish meeting place and, in Europe at least where Yiddish was their lingua franca, communicate with equal understanding. Thus where the various European nations could communicate only with their fellows it was much more easy for Jews to conduct trans-national commerce. They became commodity experts managing the wheat supply for instance.
The huge national colonies in the US whether you choose to call them ghettoes or not, were actually secure areas where new arrivals could begin to acculturate before melding with the outside society. Thus the entry point for most Jews was through New York City, castle Gardens and then Ellis Island.
The main influx of Eastern European, Jews from the Pale began in 1870. The German Jews had preceded them and became fairly acculturated by 1870 so they were able to manage and exploit these East European exotics who they perceived much as White Americans perceived the Negro.
Still, by the eighties the settlement house acculturation centers were created in these colonies where newcomers were given support and had the, to them, very strange culture explained. The Jews of the Pale were on the order of people stepping from a medieval world into the modern world. They developed a strange concept of themselves in reaction to their hosts. Thus they projected America as a hostile environment replicating their situation in Europe.
There were several settlement houses on the Lower East Side. As the numbers of Jews increased drastically from 1870 to , say, 1900, the by then very large colony on the Lower East Side attracted the attention of wealthy do gooders of the very elitist American stock, such as the future Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor. Now remember this elite would never consider talking to people like you and me. We would be sent to servants quarter but never allowed through the front door. Nevertheless the first group of society women, girls, numbered somewhat over eight. They established he Jr. League. They arrived at the settlement houses and began to minister to the colonists, not as equals but as patrons.
Remember, these immigrants, the majority here for less than ten years were still walking around in a dazed condition speaking little or no English and that with a thick heavy accent when the very elite of the natives arrived to ‘serve’ them. Stop and consider the social distance from the elite to you and I and then consider the distance from the elite to the immigrants. Does your heart bleed for those poor, poor people? The elites’ did.
The arrival of the elite ought to have raised the self-estimation and already inflated Jewish sense of self-importance regardless of their impoverished state. They still considered themselves as Jews the elite of mankind. The elite then meeting the elite. As it should be in Jewish eyes.
As strange as it may seem these society maidens also looked on the Jews as the Chosen People carrying some kind of ancient wisdom far superior to their own. This facilitated their ability to give of themselves while enabling themselves in their own minds to be of service to God’s own people.
Eleanor then introduced Franklin to this colony on the Lower East Side. He too was sucked in. As I said Jews were natural internationalists so that the two altruists inhaled this internationalist approach combined with their giving attitude thus conditioning FDR to have a condescending attitude toward the unfortunate but deserving people of the world when he became president. He became used to distributing largesse that cost him nothing.
As socialites he and Eleanor undoubtedly met many if not most of the prominent acculturated German Jews who undoubtedly wasted no time getting to know these society maidens who could introduce them to their other very important family members.
It was these acculturated Jews who owned the tenements, owned the needle trades and who exploited their fellow Jews with high rents and in sweat shops. The famous Triangle building fire was caused when Jewish owners locked their workers in; no natives were involved in any of this.
There was someone else who became aware of the international nature of Judaism and that someone was Henry Ford. Not of the American elite but one might say of the peasantry he saw the situation somewhat differently than the Roosevelts and the fabulously rich society maidens. While the social set could look down on the Jews benevolently Ford could see through the international mindset of the sect. He could see the aggressive nature, the need for autonomy or even dominance. He was dealing with the Anti-Defamation League eyeball to eyeball. He could see the traditional American culture and mores under assault by the invaders with their creeping collectivism.
Having been taken advantage of by them in the Peace Ship incident and resisting further attempts he decided to counter attack. As this was asymmetric warfare, a war of words so to speak, he bought a newspaper and took it countrywide. This was the famous Dearborn Independent. He began to publish a series of exposes detailing Jewish depredations such as the one linked above concerning then former President Taft.
These exposes were not off the shoulder, or from the hip. Ford spent a small fortune building a library of books concerning the Jews. He set his editor the very capable William J. Cameron to work studying and writing. As can be seen from the Taft article which is representative, Cameron knew what he was doing while wasting no words.
These exposes infuriated the Jews causing them to launch a defamation campaign against Ford. Their rage knew no bounds when Ford gathered and published the exposes in four slim volumes called, appropriately enough, The International Jew. To what could the Jews rationally object? Their whole program was internationalist, they had firmly indoctrinated the future president of the United States in their beliefs.
They were in a dither. This was America where freedom of speech, of which they availed themselves liberally, was sacrosanct, a more that was nearly impregnable to change. While they dithered Ford began a campaign against internationalization of American agriculture by a disciple of one David Lubin named Aaron Sapiro.
Sapiro’s mentor, David Lubin, had taught him how to set up farm cooperatives then retired to Italy from whence he attempted to set up coordinated international cooperatives linked with those not only of the United States but Argentina, Australia and all the great wheat growing areas of the world. He was seeking to corner wheat.
A good explanation of the California or Sapiro plan as it was called was given in the Century Magazine of November 1921 by the famed agitator and propagandist Gustavus Myers. A copy may be purchased from Amazon.com. Go to the Gustavus Myers page. More about Myers further on.
Ford saw through this plan and over a series of twenty articles beginning in 1924 exposed it. As it was a Jewish program he identified it as that and Aaron Sapiro and his associates as Jews.
Cooperatives were not new, cooperatives had been attempted before while Herbert Hoover as President would encourage the cooperative movement. Apparently unable to defend the Lubin plan that Sapiro called the Sapiro plan he thought to attack Ford on an irrelevant issue- anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism had nothing to do with cooperatives while there was no law against anti-Semitism.
Sapiro tried to establish the concept that Ford was defaming a whole people, which was also no crime, that is the Jews, rather than just himself as an individual Jew. This was a great Jewish desideratum which if Sapiro had succeeded would have placed the Jewish people beyond criticism giving them dominance over the American people.
The suit misfired when the trial was deemed a mistrial. It was not resumed. The people who write the histories are pro-Jewish and anti-Ford so that while Ford had been outrageously defamed by them the Jews believed that Ford was entirely discredited amongst his own people. This was not the case.
Ford had done, was doing, great things. He was perhaps the greatest American of the twentieth century and if not of the world certainly among the top three. While his deeds and person are now belittled and disparaged by polemical writers the effect on Ford before 1933 when the Jewish protégé Franklin Roosevelt was elected president was minimal. As significant as their war on Ford was to the Jews it wasn’t that central to the country at large. There was a lot more and a lot more important things to occupy the public’s attention.
The collectivist Judaeo-Communist outlook was still not influential enough to overrule the Americanist individualist approach. In 1924 Coolidge, an individualist if there ever was one, wanted, was eager, to sell the abandoned and deteriorating facilities at Muscle Shoals on the Tennessee River to Ford to develop. Indeed the House of Representatives passed a bill to do so in overwhelming numbers but the vote was scotched by collectivists. In the event nothing was done with the embryo TVA facility until the Roosevelt administration acted on it to create the TVA along collectivist lines. Thus Roosevelt and his collectives were given the credit rather than Coolidge, Hoover, Ford and the American individualist plan.
One can only guess how history might have changed if Ford had been allowed to develop Muscle Shoals and the Tennessee River. Cheap fertilizer might have invigorated agriculture thereby interfering with the Lubin-Sapiro-California plan. In any event the TVA was delayed for ideological reasons, damn the consequences.
Ford remained in good grace through the twenties being especially well thought of by that great individualist Herbert Hoover. Ford was far from shamed. At the grand opening of his incredible Greenfield Village, Disneyland before Disneyland, in 1929 President Herbert Hoover was present for the ribbon cutting. While collectivists disparage the Village it was quite amazing for the time and remains so as it now includes a tour of River Rouge.
In 1933 when Roosevelt was inaugurated America’s past to paraphrase Ford became bunk. In the words of Greil Marcus it became ‘weird old America.’ Roosevelt and his followers of all stripes tried and reasonably succeeded in obliterating the individualistic American past.
As the Jews were at war with the German nationalists in a very different manner than they were against America and indeed against the Russian people they were converting the individualism of the first and second Americas to the European ideology of Fascism. To be opposed to Roosevelt and the New Deal made one a ‘Fascist’, or in Jewish terms an anti-Semite.
Indeed, the Jews became so influential that c. 1940 there was an attempt by the Jews to take credit for the success of the US by pretending that they were the true Americans defending democratic ideals while the older individualistic Americans personified by Charles Lindbergh were Fascists out to destroy democratic America by totalitarian methods. The idea was revived by the contemporary Jewish writer Philip Roth in his novel The Plot Against America in the early years of this century.
Internationalism then was a Jewish concept embraced by Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at the beginning of the twentieth century on the Lower East Side. Under Jewish tutelage FDR would then pursue a One World concept with a United Nations. Wilson’s League Of Nations implies a number of disparate nations cooperating together but wanting to retain separate identities. One World and a United Nations implies the obliteration of borders and nations but nations, that is peoples, would still exist separately. Therefore a situation had to be created that commingled all peoples in the puerile belief that one world, one people, one ideology would be created. Of course, the Jewish idea was that the world would all come together under them and their conception of God with themselves as the Chosen People being the administrators.
But I get ahead of myself. To return to 1933.
Part III Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself follows.
Part VII: Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case
February 20, 2014
Henry Ford And The Aaron Sapiro Case
Part VII
by
R.E. Prindle
Whose Heaven On Earth?
Now let’s examine the apparent expectations of the two men, Henry Ford and Aaron Sapiro in light of their ethnic backgrounds and/or religious outlook, what the famed Jewish psychologist would call group psychology. How were their attitudes and opinions conditioned by their respective ethnic educations?
The leading characteristic of the Jews is that their approach is based on domination, the need to be Top Dog ‘by any means necessary.’ While I am not aware of Ford’s religious beliefs, if any, he reflects a Christian-American point of view, that is to say he considered service the highest virtue. Therefore he violated all established business practices by offering the highest value for the lowest price.
In that light then Ford founded his company and conducted its business on the basis of service, possibly what the Communists mean by ‘social justice.’ In constrast Sapiro exploited the farmers he claimed to represent extorting the highest fee for little value while aggrandized his persona. Ford created benefits for the many in everything he did including more than doubling the wage rate.
The Great Henry Ford
Just as Sapiro’s actions were based on his religion or ethnic collective, Ford’s activities were based on Christian-American ideals. Americanism could be placed on the same religious level as Judaism while Ford was busy developing his own variant of Christian-Americanism. It seems to have been his intent to reform the socio-economic basis of American life as a sort of American religion with himself as its prophet.
The clash between Ford and Sapiro was essentially ‘religious.’ As Miss Woeste points out Ford had his own vision of the farmer’s well fare based on service which clashed with Sapiro’s vision of dominance.
Ford had been a farmer while Sapiro never was.
Now, if one considers the psychological yearnings of the Ford Plan and those of the Sapiro Plan one has something like this: Ford’s Plan was essentially utopian in which he sought to create a heaven on earth for everyone while Sapiro’s Jewish Plan was millennial with the intent of creating a heaven on earth for Jews, they dominating everyone else.
Ford, believing he had the industrial key for bettering conditions for all was busy reforming every institution he came into contact with from industrial conditions to hospital care to electricity generation, not to mention his railroad. He was, like many of his generation, including W.K. Kellogg and his corn flakes and Bernarr Macfadden and his juice bars, interested in finding the miracle food, and he thought he may have found it one time in soy beans. In fact it was nearly a miracle bean. Ford established the bean as a premier American crop which had more than a little to do with aiding the farmer.
Sapiro’s notion can be seen in this photograph where he stands at the head of a group of Canadian farmers symbolically their master.
Sapiro In Alberta
As should be clear the Jewish War Against Ford was long standing before the Independent articles. Jewish animosity toward him began with the five dollar day and added to by the six dollar day and eight hour five day week improvements.
Ford in a religious sense was working miracles that threatened to overturn the Jewish system. If Ford were able to establish his earthly utopia that would obviate the Jewish millennium. It will be remembered that the Jews believed the advent of the millennium was imminent at the time so Ford was construed as a very dangerous threat to the Jewish millennium as well as the Communist Revolution in which the Jews were also heavily involved.
Thus when the Communists attacked Ford plants in the thirties, the Jews through Roosevelt were undermining his authority through legislation finally forcing a union on him in 1942.
Ford was quite right to challenge Sapiro. It would be nice if Ford or Uwayne State published the Ford Sapiro articles for all of us to study. While Miss Woeste laughs at them claiming them full of misrepresentations we are obligated to either take or reject her word for it. Uncharacteristically as a historian she offers no examples.
For instance what was Sapiro’s relationship to Albert Lasker and Bernard Baruch? What publicity was Lasker, as a publicist, giving Sapiro? How was he represented in the press? If he was, what kind of advice was the commodity expert Baruch giving Sapiro?
Are we to believe the articles lie when they say Sapiro was involved with these men? It just doesn’t seem reasonable or if not Miss Woeste might have given examples and refuted them. Her charges don’t have to be insinuated. After all, while not a historian, she is a lawyer.
That UStanford, one of the most prestigious universities in these United States, would imply that they accept Miss Woeste is a credible scholar leads me to ask the question, Why?
Tarzan The Invincible Pt. 9: by Edgar Rice Burroughs
November 1, 2010
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#14, Tarzan The Invincible
by
R.E. Prindle
Part 9: Politics
The Entertainer
The Big Bwana
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
–L.P. Hartley- The Go Between
I would like to take a moment to organize the content and direction of the Tarzan oeuvre within the context of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant.
It is close onto a century now since Edgar Rice Burroughs burst onto the international literary scene. He was not literarily well regarded by the intelligentsia. In the language of the time he wrote adventure novels. They were thought of as sub-literary. In our times after literature has evolved from Burroughs’ time into its various genres that didn’t exist as such back then he would more properly be designated as a fantasy or sci-fi writer.
Even though very great minds wrote ‘adventure’ stories their efforts are usually classified as sub-literary, relegated to the teen section. There has certainly never been a more profound writer than H. Rider Haggard nor is his literary style inferior in any way to the pretensions of literary fiction. Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs all had a great deal to offer. If it is necessary to say so their work has remained popular while most literary heavyweights of the past are unknown and unread in non-specialist circles today.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is not usually accorded the dignity of being ranked with even the above adventure writers. It pains me to say it but I think the literary consensus is that Burroughs is a semi-literate lightweight trash writer with no other value than ‘entertainment’ or a diversion for men and women who haven’t quite grown up yet. I receive sniggers and raised eyebrows whenever I am forced to admit I write what I hope are scholarly essays on Edgar Rice Burroughs. I have to scramble to find any scrap that will give me a little dignity. But that’s not the way I see it myself. The way I see it is that there are two groups of people who do take Burroughs seriously. The small group of which I am a member that sees something of value lying like a huge diamond in the tall grass and a much larger group of Left-Liberals who quite correctly see Burroughs as a threat to everything they wish to believe.
Burroughs’ publishing career has not been well researched or examined. The research I have done leads me to believe that ERB was exploited while his career was sabotaged by McClurg’s from the start. Although MClurg’s seem to have had no intent to promote his work from the beginning they nevertheless tied him up with a contract that went on forever. Compare it with MGM’s contract twenty years later.
Ten years after ERB’s death with the firm of McClurg’s on the edge of bankruptcy ERB, Inc. had to buy out the contract. This is all so contradictory it boggles the mind. Rather than attempting to maximize sales and therefore profits McClurg’s took the opposite approach of minimizing sales while reducing profits both for themselves and ERB to the lowest possible level. If it hadn’t been for the movies Burroughs’ benefits from his efforts would have been minimal, a fraction of what they should have been.
From 1914 to 1919 politics do not seem to have been involved; there is some other reason for McClurg’s behavior. Then from 1919 to 1924 ERB’s relationship to the Liberal Coalition took form. His Under The Red Flag of 1919 let the Reds know where he stood politically. Also in 1919 he was felt out by the American Jewish Committee for his stance on Semitism. He failed this test by taking an insubordinate stance. So from 1919 to 1924 he seems to have been under attack from the Left. He remained defiant through his Marcia Of The Doorstep with its very reasonable criticism of Semitism but then he seems to have been ovewhelmed by economic pressures that were exacerbated by his own poor decisions.
While McClurg’s should have been supportive of their, or what should have been their walking gold mine, they strangely continued to get in his way.
Burroughs wanted his reissues to be sold at a dollar but G&D and McClurg’s adamantly insisted on 50 cents which gave ERB a very small return. Why McClurg’s should have resisted higher prices that would have doubled their own income must remain a mystery. A dollar doesn’t seem unreasonable to me but there seems to have been the intent to restrict Burroughs’ income as far as possible.
By the late twenties the Liberal Coalition was also actively interfering in Burroughs’ career. There seems to have been a blacklist against making Tarzan movies from 1922 to 1928. As Hollywood was controlled by the Coalition it was possible to restrict Burroughs’ income from movies to zero.
The blacklist was broken in 1927 when Joseph Kennedy’s FBO Studios made a Tarzan film. ERB also began searching for another publishing arrangement. Not finding anything satisfactory he took the last ditch recourse of self-publishing. He established the Burroughs imprint. As this act was taken just as the stock market crash took place the move was fraught with dangers.
Now freed from publishing restraints does it seem like a coincidence that the first title under the Burroughs imprint was Tarzan The Invincible? Or, with its success it was followed by Tarzan Triumphant? Perhaps taking vengeance for 1919’s snub of Under The Red Flag, Tarzan The Invincible is a full scale attack on the Communism in general and Uncle Joe Stalin in particular.
Perhaps also responding to 1924’s rejection of Marcia Of The Doorstep the succeeding novel, Tarzan Triumphant parodies the Jewish religion while making some not so subtle comments about big noses and receding chins. Either book would be difficult for the Liberal Coalition to misunderstand.
While Burroughs would publicly proclaim that he undertook self-publication because he was too greedy for high royalties, certainly tongue in cheek, privately he complained that McClurg’s refused to promote his books, turning them over immediately to reissue houses depriving him of his just royalties. I’m sure the industry understood the irony of his first reason while the second is true.
Tarzan The Invincible is both a defense and a counterattack. Burroughs himself said that defensive wars could never be won. One must take the offensive. With Invincible he was doing just that in what was in fact a literary and cultural war.
The power arrayed against him was terrifying. The Reds could prevent the publication of his books through regular channels. I believe they did. ERB publicly said he took up self-publication in the relentless pursuit of the dollar. What else could he say? One doesn’t go around saying people are out to get you. That’s giving your enemies ammunition.
Ask, is it a coincidence that the first novel under the Burroughs imprint is a direct attack on Liberal Communism? A work that almost certainly would not have been published by any mainstream publisher, including McClurg’s. There isn’t a Freudian in the world who believes in coincidence. I sure don’t. Burroughs launched his publishing effort in 1930 the year after the depression began in 1929. The guy was either crazy or knew something other publishers didn’t wish to acknowledge.
When he met his former publisher, Joe Bray, of McClurg’s afer the crash he sneeringly told Bray who was complaining about business that he was doing very well with the Burroughs imprint and he was. In the height of the depression Burroughs’ books turned a profit. That was a profit no publisher seemed to want. McClurg’s certainly never exploited this literary gold mine.
Was it political? Well, Burroughs’ first publishing venture certainly was. And remember that Tarzan The Invicincible must have caused a reaction. The Reds had to say among themselves omething like ‘Don’t worry we’ll get that bastard yet.’ It had to be, nor did his even more sneering Tarzan Triumphant smooth anything over. Think about this for a moment; let it sink in, this is open warfare. There must have been a retaliation. What was it? The Reds did not cease their campaign of vilification during his lifetime nor have they ceased to this very day nor will they cease until either the Reds or Tarzan is triumphant.
I have discussed Richard Slotkin’s Gunfighter Nation several times previously. Slotkin in his book tries to pin responsibility for the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam on Burroughs. He uses nearly seven hundred pages of fine print to try to prove that My Lai was the inevitable result of Burroughs’ writing. The guy’s got a job at a prestigious university too.
While one can discount the hysteria of Liberal academics heavily no one necessarily attacks someone they do not consider a threat. So what Bibliophiles have to ask themselves is whether there is a basis for the Liberal reaction or not?
I think my analyses of Tarzan books so far shows that Burroughs had a much more serious political intent than is commonly thought. Underneath the buck and wing, the old soft shoe of the entertainer is some very serious thought and reflection. Also his means of expression itself is the very antithesis of Liberalism.
Joseph P. Kennedy
Burroughs’ writing does reflect the sea change in world history noted by such academic analysts as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. Whether ERB ever read these thinkers or not there is no conflict between their conclusions and his own. ERB is of the same mindset so on that basis Slotkin is correct. None of the three writers is eiher wrong or evil it’s just that Liberals think any opinion but their own is inherently evil in intent and ought to be censored. I say censor the censors.
Liberalism is a religious reaction to the Scientific Consciousness. Their core constituent, Judaism’s sole purpose is to defeat Science and reimpose the religious yoke of absolute conformity to its religious ideal. As I’ve noted, American Liberalism which evolved from the quasi-Hebrew sect of Puritanism is in complete accord. Combined of fundamentalist Christians, who pursue an Old Testament program not much different from the Liberal agenda and the insurgent Moslem fundamentalists, the challenge to Science and all that Burroughs represented is formidable.
The determined effort to plow the concept of Evolution under is a supreme threat to the whole Scientific Consciousness. Of course, the Liberals talk peace, while as the Old Testament proclaims, peace, peace, everyone talks peace but there is no peace. There is no peace anywhere on earth and there never will be.
Burroughs realized that war was inevitable. He decried the disarmement movement and applauded preparedness. In Triumphant he makes the wry comment that the Chicago underworld gunner, Danny Patrick, and his fellow criminals believed in pareparedness, always having a gun with them.
Burroughs was brought into a world of conflict, nor so far has the world disappointed his expectations. As he says the only good defense is a terrific offense. Defensive wars cannot be won. I believe he has been proven right there too. Whether you’re looking at John Carter, Tarzan or any of his protagonists you will see that they never barricade themselves. They are always on the offensive, nor do they hesitate to kill as part of that offense. My god, Tarzan ripped a man’s head off in Ant Men. His Beyond The Farthest Star posits a world of never-ending war. Prefigures the Cold War in its way. Any concept of ‘peace’ is merely a temporary cessation of hostilities; war by other means. The Liberal, Slotkin, may lament such a reality but being a man of ‘peace’ making endless appeasements and concessions to belligerents can end only in disaster to oneself. There aren’t any Americas left to bail civilization out; that possiblility ended with WWII.
I think it fair to say that in today’s war situation versus the Moslem and Mexican invasions ERB would take the aggressive position of throwing them out. As the Shona state explicitly, and believe me the Mexicans and Moslems are no different from them, if you need to hear it from an African there are those who dominate and those who are dominated, which is another way of saying perpetual conflict. Either Americans will dominate Mexicans and Moslems or they will be subservient to them. Need anyone go further than to look at the condition of both Matabele and European in Shonaland? It is a given that Burroughs would rather dominate as Tarzan does at the end of Invincible. If you’ve got to fight you might as well win.
Let us never forget that Burroughs participated in the opening of the frontier and he saw its closing. He lived through the two most devastating wars in history. One must fight or die was the lesson he learned. Tarzan still lives.
And then we must deal with the persistent charge of racism brought against ERB. One finds it difficult to understand what Liberals mean by the term ‘racism.’ There is nothing more inherent in human nature than pride in one’s own kind. In that sense all peoples are racist. What then? Racism is the natural state of affairs. Certainly Liberal heroes like Robert Mugabe and the Shona are as racist as could possibly be, yet, he and they are Liberal heroes. There must be something else going on.
Liberals themselves are responsible for passing racial laws that would have staggered the imagination of Adolf Hitler. Someone who they say they despise. Whereas Hitler called his laws what they were, Liberals are more adept at disguising their intent, still they appropriately call their laws ‘hate’ laws which is exactly what they are. The unspoken assumption behind them is that ‘White’ males ‘hate’ everyone who is neither White nor male, excluding homosexuals, and that they therefore have to be socially isolated and denied.
The apparent belief is that only White males are capable of ‘hating’ while the rest of the world is a loving brother and sisterhood. Of course such a notion leaves the Moslem attack on the Twin Towers unexplainable as well as the Shona extermination of Black brothers like the Matabele.
Hey fellas, it’s the exception, even multiple exception that proves the rule, isn’t it?
I have no doubt that ERB would have been opposed to such ridiculous racial laws no matter what language was used to disguise them. He does seem to have been aware of the dangers of the evolutionary collision of the human species. ERB was an evolutionist. His novels explore evolutionary possiblities in enormous variety and detail. While much of his speculations and jokes seem ridiculous in the light of current knowledge, at the time of composition most if not all of the speculations would have appeared to be not that far fetched, even possible.
At the least Burroughs was on the side of Science at that time when the controversy really raged, while even today over fifty percent of Americans reject evolution in favor of religious explanations, that’s one hundred fifty years after Darwin, while the Moslem invasion of the world is rapidly spreading the slime of superstition over scientific knowledge. As I understand it, it has progressed so far that I could be put in jail in France, Germany or Austria for blaspheming the prophet and Allah by referring to their atavistic religion as ‘the slime of superstition.’
Within just a very few years since 9/11 an intolerant superstition like Moslemsism has overturned the scientific attitude of the Enlightenment. May Georges Chirac burn in hell forever and a day. If President Obama doesn’t back off, him too. Don’t any of these guys listen to what people are saying about them?
As I have noted, by the second decade of the twentieth century more sensitive minds perceived the sea change in the relationship of the various human species. Among these, in fiction, were Sax Rohmer with his Fu Manchu stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Prominent in non-fiction were Madison Grant with his Passing Of The Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard ‘s Rising Tide Of Color.
At the risk of repeating myself, I flatter myself that at least some Bibliophiles have been reading my stuff for the last few years, let me place a quote from Darwin here that clearly explains what happens when similar species compete for the same territory on the same economic basis. Darwin: On The Origin Of Species, Chap. III, Para. Struggle For Existence- Struggle for life most severe between individuals and varieties of the same species:
As species of the same genus have usually, but by no means invariably, some similarity in habits and constitution and always in structure, the struggle will generally be more severe between species of the same genus, when they come into competition with each other, than between species of distinct genera. We see this in the recent extension over parts of the United States of one species of swallow having caused the decrease of another species. The recent increase of the missal thrush in parts of Scotland has caused the decrease of the song-thrush. How frequently we hear of one species of rat taking the place of another species under the most different climates! In Russia the small Asiatic cockroach has everywhere driven before it itx great congenor. One species of Charlock will supplant another, and so in other cases. We can dimly see why the competition should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature; but probably in no one case could we precisely say why one species has been victorious over another in the great battle of life.
As we are certain that Burroughs read the Origin Of Species we can be sure that he read the above passage. If it struck him as forcibly as it strikes me then we share the same basic outlook on life and the passage shaped his way of looking at the intra-genus conflict between Homo Sapiens species.
As most agree that Homo Sapiens has an African history of 150K to 200K years, most assume, and this is only an assumption, that the First Born of Homo Sapiens were black because the indigenes of Africa today are black. This may or may not be true, we have no way of knowing, but let us assume it is. There are no people in Africa today who can absolutely trace their descent unbroken from the Last Hominid Predecessor or the first specimen of Homo Sapiens. No one knows what the individual looked like or what his mental constitution was compared to the various African races of today.
It therefore follows that over that course of a very long history peoples have been exterminated to make way for others innumerable times. One wave of rats, one wave of cockroaches after another have succeeded for a moment only to be replaced by another in due time. This is how evolution and nature work. Homo Sapiens is not outside either history or nature and it is foolish to act as though it were. One must understand the natural process and adjust one’s actions to it.
To use the Shona example. The Shona are not indigenous to the soil. At one time they must have exterminated and displaced a predecessor people in what they now consider ‘their’ territory. Beginning about 1830 the Ndebele Zulu as an incoming wave of new people began to exterminate and displace them. There is no difference between this Ndebele invasion of Shonaland and the Moslem and Mexican invasion of the United States. Nature is red in tooth and claw. What can one say?
Had the Matabele, to use the Ndebele’s other name, not been interrupted by another wave of incoming people, the Europeans, (color and race have no real bearing on this issue of Nature and evolution) the Zulus, (the Matabele were Zulus) would have completed the process and today the Shona would be at best a memory. But the succeeding wave of Europeans did come crowding after the Matabele. So far Darwin’s thesis is correct. One species of rat drives out another. Had the Europeans behaved normally they would have exterminated their predecessors and driven them before them.
But then evolution throws in a clinker. The Europeans were evolutionarily more advanced than the Blacks. While the fact that the evolution of the human species is continuing is clear from the visual physical evidence, scientific research has proven it beyond any quibble. So, even though those at the turn of the century lacked the evidence to prove their case they were right. The most obvious evolution is taking place in the brain and it is not taking place in all human species. Only one species is evolving while the others are now sterile. Hard thing to accept but it’s true. Thus Europeans had developed consciences that prevented them from doing what Nature commanded them to do. Instead they set themselves up as a parasite class believing they could control the Blacks without special intermixture forever.
As Burroughs would have noted this put them on the defensive and no defense outlasts a good offense as the Shona have proven. Thus the Shona having been given a breathing space reorganized, regained the initiative and won the dominant position. They are now doing the natural thing exterminating or driving out both the Ndebele Zulu and the Europeans. If you won’t fight or can’t, you lose everything.
So, you have the Darwinian struggle for existence presented to you in plain terms in a human context that cannot be misunderstood. No rats or cockroaches as necessary examples. One must be intolerant of other species. One must be a ‘bigot’ as the Shona are or go under.
Now, not having the will and perhaps no longer having the power to do as Nature commands Europeans attempted to retreat, to withdraw within their own territories. As anyone knows they all come out at the first sign of weakness. One would have to be stupid or utopian not to realize that. As a sonsequence Europe and America are being invaded by the other human species in the Darwinian sense. I mean, folks, they call evolution science. Science means knowing. Anyone who does not act on certain knowledge is foolish or, perhaps, too religious.
However in the first two decades of the twentieth century the Liberal ideology was formed by the weakest and lamest members of Western civilization. Not understanding actual differences between the human species, even denying them on religious grounds, they used conscience as a weapon to first emasculate themselves, and I mean this in the literal sense, and then they shamed those who knew better into silence.
Among those silenced were Grant, Stoddard and Burroughs. Although all these men were initially very influential telling Americans the nature of evolution and its consequences their reputations were dismantled. By the beginning of WWII Grant and Stoddard were regarded as mere ‘racist’ cranks.
It is time to debunk the debunkers. The wheel has turned. Bunk is bunk and shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone.
Burroughs who hadn’t left himself quite so open was provoked into acts of defiance so that sanctions could be applied against him as much as had been done to Henry Ford. Ford is another whose reputation should be rehabilitated much as Khruschev rehabilitated the reputations of various Communists after the death of Stalin. The tool preferred by the Liberal Coalition to discredit someone was the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’, a religious charge be it noted.
The most potent weapon in the Liberal religious armament is the term ‘anti-Semite.’ It is used liberally usually combined with Fascist to defame and control an opponent. Oddly enough they couldn ‘t make it stick on Burroughs. Even Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation only hints that ERB might have anti-Semitic tendencies.
I know it is unpleasant to discuss the Semitic issue but I think the time has come to discuss the issue head on especially as Burroughs was and is involved to a much more serious degree than might be apparent at first blush. The problem of Asia, from whence the Semites come, and Europe has roots in prehistory. Indeed it is a tale of two species. This is one of those eternal conflicts that will not be settled until one side annihilates the other much as the Shona are doing in Zimbabwe to their competitors.
In ancient days both the European Greeks and the Mediterranean Egyptians were in a constant conflict with what the Egyptians referred to as ‘vile Asiatics’, the Greeks as ‘barbarians.’ The Asiatics were vile not on the basis of race but because of the differing view of life of the two species. As regards the Egyptians and the Semites one or the other had to be exterminated. If you know anything of Egyptian history you will know that few true Egyptians still survive. The Semites have exterminated the true Egyptians.
Thus the related species of HSII, the Egyptians and HSIII, the Europeans found the Semitic species unassimilable. We are back to Darwin’s competing species of rats and cockroaches. In the religious terms in which the problem is usually stated one says the animosity is racial or in other words, moral; in scientific terms one says that it is genetic or special. In other words, the problem is much deeper than mere surface appearances. It extends to the genetic development of the brain. The Semite cannot understand as any other human species understands and vice versa.
Thus the current problem in the Sudan between Negroes and Semites which is genetic or biological can only be resolved by the extermination or expulsion of the other. The whole course of this new African conflict can be projected historically and scientifically. It may be delayed but it cannot be stopped. Compare it with the Shona in Zimbabwe. There is no question as to what course the conflict will take.
Why Liberals choose to make an issue of Darfur while they ignore the South Sudan and Zimbabwe and South Africa where genocide is also going on is known only to themselves. It is absolutely necessary to analyze the matter in scientific rather than emotional or religious terms. These are not matters of race but species. The mental capabilities of the Negro, the Semite and the European are different and irreconcilable. An unpleasant fact, perhaps, but true.
The conflict between Europe and Asia or the Semites and Indo-Europeans began according to legend with the Semitic abduction of the European woman Io from Argos. The history of the Mediterranean in ancient times was the perpetual warfare between Europeans and Asiatics or Semites. At one time the Semites seemed to be besting Europeans and then turn about. For the long Hellenic and Roman period the Europeans seemed to have won. But, and this is a big but, they failed to exterminate or drive the Semites out. A very bad mistake.
Two things happened. The Jewish Semites began a peaceful infiltration into Europe which came to a head in the long Jewish Wars that lasted from 66 AD to 135 AD. The Jewish Semites were militarily defeated in their homeland but came to spiritually dominate Europeans through the Judaeo-Catholic religion.
None of this struggle went unobserved by the Semitic peoples of the Arabian penenisula. In the seventh century the Arab or Ishamelite, to use the Jewish term, branch of the Semitic peoples led by Moslem ideology which had its base in Jewish ideology overran North Africa, large parts of the Eastern Mediterranean into the steppes of Asia and over the Hindu Kush into India. More or less following the path of Alexander. The Indo-European Persians, now known as Iranians, were Islamized or Semitized which they remain today. They were stultified hence their ridiculous position today.
The southerly Egyptians, the native Copts, are on the verge of extinction or what the modern world fondly describes as genocide. There are few surviving true Egyptians today.
Thus the Hellenic-Roman hegemony was reversed.
The Semitic Arab incursion into Europe which was a continuation of the multi-thousand year conflict between Europeans and Semites was defeated by Charles the Hammer at Tours in the heart of Europe. Over the next nearly thousand years the Moslems were expelled from Western Europe but they advanced in Eastern Europe.
From the expulsion of the Moors from Spain in 1492 the southern Med if not the Med itself was controlled by the Barbary pirates. During that period Europeans supinely submitted to a slave trade that greatly resembled that of sub-Saharan Africa. Even as Negroes were being transported to the Americas countless Europeans were captured on European soil, transported to Africa and enslaved. So, the Africans have no cause to complain of Europeans. Some people whine some people don’t.
No one European State was strong enough or determined enough to clear the seas of the Moslems while they were unable to concert a united attack. The piracy and enslavement continued until France annexed Algeria in 1830. Rightfully so.
In Darwinian terms it is quite clear that the struggle was one of the replacement of one population by another. Thus when France conquered Algeria it behove them to either exterminate or drive out the existing population replacing it with Europeans. They ought to have relentlessly warred on every North African people until North Africa was once again European.
The attempt to coexist was a defensive war that could only end in defeat. The defeat was adjudicated by General De Gaulle in the nineteen sixties. The French stupidly and erroneously thought the war was over, but in reality the momentum shifted once again to the Semites.
As noted by Lothrop Stoddard the Wahabi Moslems went onto the offensive. No longer able to comptete militarily with Europeans they resorted to guerilla warfare, something the West now chooses to call terrorism, combined with an infiltration of Europe using their reproductive capabilities as a weapon. The situation now is a replica of the 3000 BC infiltration of Sumer. Hence the balance of power of the age old war between the Semites of Asia and Europeans has once again shifted toward the Asiatics.
As the Libyan, Moamar Qadaffi gloated in May 2006 there are fifty million Moslems in Europe. Europeans have the option of fighting or submitting. He knows whereof he speaks. As the war will now be conducted on European soil with the certain loss of the entire cultural superstructure of the last two thousand years there seems little chance of any European resistance. Notre Dame will be renamed and become a mosque.
If there is resistance then Burroughs’ prophecy of a flattened Europe turned Black over the centuries is a distinct, nay, certain probability. In addition to their submission to the Wahabi Arabs, Europeans seem incapable of resisting the Black Moselm invasion from sub-Saharan Africa. Thus once Blacks and Moslems have the strength they will undoubtedly follow the ancient plan of killing the men and keeping the women. Need I point to Haiti after the slave rebellion as an example? Within three or four generations both Arabs and Europeans will be absorbed into Black Africa.
Any discussion of the problem is now impossible in Europe as the blackest censorship has been imposed on dissent. Astonishing that the enlightenment could disappear just like that, isn’t it? Anyone who dissents from the Semitic program is liable to imporisonment, heavy fines or both. The term Semite includes both the Jewish and Arab branches.
Once the Moslem are powerful enough to direct the European military it will mean the end of Israel as that State will be completely encircled by Moslem powers with irresistable might and control of all land, sea, air and satellite communications.
With European technological war materiel at their disposal the Moslems will be able to isolate the United States by depriving it of oil or with the huge and growing population in the US sabotage any war effort if threatened. Let’s have a round of applause for the brilliant leadership of Chirac, Blair, Bush and Obama not to mention the morons of the US Senate.
Burroughs foresaw the results of the West’s waffling before the Communists, the Moslems and perhaps the Africans but he was prevented from examining the problems too openly for fear of bringing the Liberal Coalition with its charges of anti-Semitism down on his head. Both he and Henry Ford were having a tough fight for survival. W.R. Hearst.
Burroughs had already called attention to himself by questioning a survey sent him by the American Jewish Committee in 1919. It seems apparent the survey drew his attention to Jewish matters which he had ignored up till that time. This resulted in the character of Bluber in Tarzan And The Golden Lion as well as several characters in 1924’s Marcia Of The Doorstep. As the AJC would have considered these characterizations ‘anti-Semitic’ the publication of the book was prohibited. Censored as it were.
Probably as a result of questioning the AJC survey he was put under surveillance. While a number of movies had been made from his books, in 1921 movie making from his novels ceased reducing his income potential drastically at a very critical time in his finances. For whatever reason there was a hiatus in the production of Tarzan films that lasted until 1928. It is only fair to assume that Tarzan had not lost his box office appeal which is the usual Hollywood cover for blacklisting. One also imagines that Burroughs would have leapt at any movie money. Indeed, in 1922 the Stern Bros. and Louis Jacobs, a trio of Jewish movie makers, tied up the rights to Jungle Tales Of Tarzan and Jewels of Opar for $40,000. This was a very decent sum to spend yet the movie makers made no effort make the movies, they were content to tie up the titles. Whether Burroughs was being disciplined for being ‘anti-Semitic’ or not can’t be determined for certain at this time.
Richard Slotkin
Hollywood was notorious for being a Jewish industry. W.R. Hearst was one of the few goys making movies. D.W. Griffith was being increasingly marginalized. In the interim then, the noted ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the future president John F. Kennedy, formed or bought FBO Studios. The story of this multi-cultural struggle for dominance has never been adequately researched for obvious reasons, but what with the Ford conflict with the Semitic Jewish culture flaring in the foreground it is not unlikely that there was a great deal of maneuvering in the background. It will be noted that when RKO was formed which incorporated FBO Studios the R for Radio came from RCA and KO for Keith Orpheum were retained while FBO was deleted. The R and KO were Jewish concerns while FBO had been a great goyish disrupter.
Nevertheless, as Burroughs was blacklisted by Hollywood which the Hollywood historian Neal Gabler describes as a Jewish empire, it is noteworthy that an ‘anti-Semite’ broke the blacklist making Tarzan movies again. It would have been the equivalent of Dalton Trumbo being allowed to script movies under his own name again in the 1960s.
The blacklist broken, the Stern Bros. and Jacobs then decided in 1928 to exercise their rights to the two Tarzan novels to release Tarzan The Tiger and Tarzan The Mighty. Calling Tarzan a tiger may have been a slam at Burroughs who erroneously introduced tigers into Africa in the magazine version of Tarzan Of The Apes.
The silent era of movies over, MGM produced the first talkie of Tarzan in 1932. Watch the dates.
Now, in both Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant Burroughs takes undisguised hits at Communism, pointing fingers and naming names; in Triumphant he continues his open attack on Communism and covertly ridicules the Jews in his portrayal of Midians with their enormous noses and receding chins. Both attributes are well known caricatures of Jews. Was this a gratuitous insult or was he responding to insults to himself?
If he had been given courage by the presence of Joseph Kennedy and FBO Studios then he might have relaxed his vigilance a little. However his open and blatant attack would not have been unresented by Judaeo-Communists. While Hollywood had always been run by Jews, by 1930 Communists had also made much more serious inroads than is usually admitted. In other words, ERB’s well being in this multi-cultural war zone depended on his sworn enemies. As both a goy and counter-revolutionary ERB was an odd man out. It could not possibly be any other way.
There can be no question that he would have to be gotten for what could only be seen as egregious insults to both Communists and Jews. In fact, the two were nearly one. The question then was how best to get Burroughs short of outright assassination. The blacklist had already been broken by Kennedy but possible a movie could be made to make ERB’s great creation ridiculous. Destroy him in that way, you see.
Thanks to technological marvels like DVDs it is now possible to study old movies at will. I have a sets of most of the films. I have viewed Tarzan Of The Apes a number of times.
Bearing in mind that Burroughs was in a struggle with both Communists and Semites as exemplified in 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible and 1931’s Tarzan Triumphant while being surreptitiously listed as an anti-Semite by the American Jewish Committee, I think it worthwhile to speculate on the intent of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg’s productions.
Having watched the movie a number of times while bearing books Invincible and Triumphant in mind I have come to the conclusion that the movie’s ulterior motive was an attempt to ridicule the Big Bwana into oblivion. We all know that ridicule is a most effective weapon, especially when it can’t be answered. It was undoubtedly thought Tarzan could be destroyed in this manner.
MGM did not negotiate to obtain rights to any particular story but, and this is important, they bought the right to use the characters as they thought fit. Thus as the movie poster picture in Bibliophile David Fury’s book Kings Of The Jungle on p.63 published by McFarland, it is stated that the movie is ‘based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.’ In other words, this is not the Tarzan of Invincible and Triumphant. Oh no, no. This is Tarzan The Defeated, Tarzan The Buffoon.
The vision is no longer Tarzan Of The Apes but Tarzan, The Ape Man. A subtle but important shift in emphasis. Tarzan is no longer a man raised among apes he is a man who is an ape. The fabulous brain of Tarzan which allowed him to master reading and writing with the aid of only a picture book, that allowed him to learn new languages instantly has now been replaced by an inarticulate moron who does five minutes of ‘me Tarzan, you Jane.’
This was free love in the jungle between a hunk and a babe. Apparently it slipped by unnoticed at the time until it was picked up thirty years later by an astute librarian. Tarzan and Jane are no longer married in the movies, Jane just began cohabiting with Tarzan because he was such a handsome hunk. Fortunately she, he, or both were infertile. Thus Tarzan was subtly defamed, his universality removed. His audience constricted by that much.
Having slipped this bit past the censors, as incredible as it may seem, in the next movie, Tarzan And His Mate, not wife but mate, you know, a live in, MGM included the famous nude swimming scene that did not get past the censors.
Both these items would have had the effect of defaming Tarzan and constricting his audience. A certain type of viewer would be offended by these items and refuse to see the movies while another type would gratified by such items and drawn to the movies but lower the quality of the audience moving Tarzan toward porn. Thus by degrees Tarzan movies would gain the reputation as porn flicks. Porn is porn even if it is Tarzan so you aren’t going to let your kids eat popcorn in front of dirty movies nor are legitimate first run theatres going to show them. At least, not then.
Thus MGM was well on their way to making Tarzan porn before the censors forced a change in plan. There was nothing Burroughs could have done about this as he, or rather his office manager signed away all his rights to his character.
The MGM poster then portrays Tarzan as a criminal freak:
Mothered by an ape- He knew only the law of the jungle- to seize what he wanted.
The ‘to seize’ is in attention grabbing italics.
Mothered by an ape is ambiguous and meant to be repulsive. It could mean that Tarzan was fathered by a human on an ape or it could be so obscure as to be meaningless. If you were familiar with the books you could probably guess what was intended but if you weren’t who knows what it could mean to you. Remember the first volume, Tarzan Of The Apes, was no longer in print even in 1930 so the original story couldn’t even be bought. The later volumes don’t recapitulate his birth and raising so there may have been actually few who knew the whole story. We are led to believe that the MGM Tarzan is completely lacking in morality. If he wants something he just steals it. Not the Tarzan I would want to emulate.
The director was W.S. Van Dyke who had just had a major success with his Trader Horn, another African picture. That one had been phenomenally successful and Tarzan is billed as “Another Miracle Picture directed by W.S. Van Dyke, Creator Of “Trader Horn.” Van Dyke was certainly not the creator of Trader Horn as the movie was adapted from the book by Trader horn, there was such a man, thus in a way Tarzan, The Ape Man is subordinated to W.S. Van Dyke and Trader Horn.
What is called ‘the adaptation’ is done by someone called Cyril Hume. As the dialogue was written by Ivor Novello I presume that both the storyline and the alterations to Tarzan’s character can possibly be attributed to Hume.
There is little on Hume on the internet but a New York Times review that was cribbed from All Movie Guide. It says ‘…During the 1920s, Hume proved a worthy rival of Fitzgerald with such lost generation novels as Wife Of The Centaur and Cruel Fellowship.’ An interesting couple of titles in relation to this Tarzan movie. The review then goes on to say ‘…During the 1930s , he was the principal writer of MGM’s “Tarzan ” films, bringing prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect…’ That’s one man’s opinion anyway.
As we all know the attributed movie writer frequently has very little to do with the finished script so we will assume that Hume’s script went through many revisions by many minds with perhaps different agendas than his. One wonders why Ivor Novello, who was a well known playwright of the time was broght in to do dialogue. Apart from the Tarzan yell, with which Novello is given no connection, that seems to be the major portion of the dialogue along with the famous ‘Tarzan-Jane’ sequence, there seems to be little dialog that an amateur couldn’t have written.
The net result is a movie that seriously demeans Tarzan as conceived and portrayed over fifteen novels. In order for their ridicule to be successful MGM did have to produce a movie that someone would go see. They were apparently successful beyond their wildest hopes or fears as the movie was described as a ‘surprise’ hit and an enormous grosser. Now MGM was stuck with the character.
If it was a surprise hit then one can discount the publicity that the movie cost a million dollars to produce. There are no well-known stars in the movie, while much of it is footage left over from Trader Horn which had already been amortized with the rest being shot on lot. If the movie cost MGM a quarter million I would still be astonished.
In their attempt to ridicule Tarzan they were too clever by half. The character of Tarzan may not have that of the books but audiences still found it satisfying, especially the yell.
Those of us who have read the books have always been uneasy with those MGM movies although Johnny Weismuller was perfectly cast in the role of the Ape Man.
So, while the NYT reviewer may believe Cyril Hume brought ‘prestige to these escapist exercises by treating them with dignity and respect’ there are dissenting opinions other than mine.
Another interpretation was that of the first movie Tarzan, Elmo Lincoln, who commented to ERB “the house seemed to think it was a comedy. Why do they portray Tarzan without dignity?…with the right treatment and portrayal, Tarzan could a romantic, thrilling character, and still have the sympathy of his audience…I don’t like to see him treated as a clown…”
Elmo Lincoln and I both see the MGM version in the same light, while I have to question the interpretation of the NYTimes writer. I think Lincoln was right, the movie was a comedic effort meant to defame the persona of ERB’s great creation and thus destroy Edgar Rice Burroughs. After all ERB, Inc.’s publishing arm was dependent on sales of Tarzan’s.
By 1932 the troublesome ERB had learned which side his bread was buttered on so he publicly endorsed the MGM movies, after all this was big money, bigger than any other souces of income combined. It may be said then that just as Henry Ford recanted and apologized for offending the Jewish Cultural entity in the ongoing culture wars so Burroughs bent the knee to Liberal suzerainty.
As ERBzine reports, privately Burroughs had other thoughts:
Daughter Joan Burroughs revealed: “Dad found it hard to reconcile himself to the movie versions of the Tarzan stories and never did understand the movie Tarzan. He wanted Tarzan to speak like an educated Englishman instead of grunting. One time we saw a movie together and after it was over, although the audience seemed enthusiastic, my father remained in his seat and kept shaking his head sadly.”
So Burroughs and Lincoln both resented the screen adaptation based on the Tarzan ERB had created.
There was nothing Burroughs could do about it. His rights had been signed away by his agent Ralph Rothmund. Rothmund must have been aware of the tension between Burroughs, Communists and Jews, yet he essentially gave the courthouse away. He placed Burroughs in the hands of his enemies. He gave Tarzan to MGM stripping Burroughs of his only weapon and asset. Why? Did he contact MGM or did MGM contact him? Why did he negotiate behind Burroughs’ back presenting him with a fait accompli? Why not tell his employer, ‘I’ve got this deal worked out with MGM. Do you want to take it?’
Presented instead with a check, Our Man seduced by vain desires went out and bought five Packard automobiles. Ah, ERB…
Did he repent of this deal? I believe so. Trapped by the contract his only way of retaliation was a futile one through his novels.
Louis B. Mayer
Can it be a coincidence that Tarzan And The Lion Man written over February to May of 1933, published by ERB, Inc. in book form on September 1, 1934 (Septimus Favonius BB#55 p. 34) ridiculed MGM, Irving Thalberg and Trader Horn. The second MGM movie Tarzan And His Mate was released on April 16, 1934. Bear these two dates in mind, the movie was released five months before the book leaving time for a revision of the book text.
Certainly severely wounded by the MGM adaptation of Tarzan Burroughs had been beaten. He had lost the culture war between himself, the Communists and the Jews. Having lost control of his character in the vital field of movies his only recourse was to lampoon MGM in a book which he did in Tarzan And The Lion Man. Strangely his illustrator St. John chose this book to experiment with an unrepresentative cover that was believed to have killed sales. Thus this magnficent achievement was undersold.
Lion Man recounts W.S. Van Dyke’s movie making in Africa, telling it in a ridiculing manner. MGM’s version of Tarzan is portrayed by a character named Stanley Obroski, perhaps a takeoff on Johnny Weismuller, who is a pale imitation of the real Tarzan. Burroughs makes a careful comparison showing what a joke the MGM Tarzan was. In a fit of pique he kills the fake Lion Man off.
One of the more interesting characters is Balza- The Golden Girl. After escaping from the Valley of Diamonds she joins the movie company where she cavorts about in the nude. This scene has baffled me but if one remembers that in Tarzan And His Mate Maureen O’ Sullivan is stripped by Tarzan followed by the nude swimming scene, the novel makes sense. ERB had seen the movie in April of 1934 possibly an earlier studio screening and incorporated the changes in his text for the 9/1/34 release date.
So his retort against MGM while ineffective made for what must rank as one of his very best efforts.
Just as an aside note that while this struggle was going on in Hollywood Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January of 1933; Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States in March of ’33.
One of FDR’s first deeds was to recogtnize the USSR regime of Joseph Stalin. In late 1933 a chubby little ex-draper’s assistant acted as a go-between for Stalin and Roosevelt. Having first visited Stalin, H.G. Wells carried his messages to Roosevelt. Thus under the very eyes of the world some very important communications were passed back and forth. Nineteen thirty-three was also the year the former draper’s assistant wrote his Shape Of Things To Come.
These things can’t be stated with absolute certainty but the character of God– the formerly handsome Englishman in Lion Man, is certainly based on the pompous little H.G. Wells.
Thus while I at first objected to Slotkin’s accusations against ERB, barring the My Lai stuff, I think I am beginning to see ERB’s relation to the cultural wars between Communists, Jews, Liberals and Conservatives. there is more going on here than meets the eye.
But let us look at some of the religous aspects of this interesting situation. The religious war between Semitism and the Astrological Religion as represented by Tarzan Of The Apes.
Weissmuller As Tarzan
Pt. II: H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes
August 22, 2010
H.G. Wells, Sigmund Freud, Edgar Rice Burroughs
And The Development Of Contemporary Sexual Attitudes
by
R.E. Prindle
Edgar Rice Burroughs And His Tiger
To put our three protagonists into perspective: Sigmund Freud The eldest of the three was born in 1856, Wells in 1866 and Burroughs, the youngest in 1875. All three were heavily influenced by Charles Darwin and the various theories of Evolution. While today Darwin is touted as the sole source of evolution he was in fact one of many voices as the theory of evolution developed. Thus all three spent their formative years in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Freud was 44 as the century turned in 1900, Wells 34 and Burroughs 25 each neatly spaced 10 years from his predecessor.
Wells was the first to make the leap into prominence followed by Freud and then Burroughs. All three men were desperate to find fame and fortune. Freud even advtertised he’d sell his soul to do it.
Wells came from close to the bottom of the social ladder. His parents eked out a living as shopkeepers without commercial abilities on the edge of London. Wells’ father was an able cricket player who gained his self-esteem from that sport. The parents split up. His mother went into domestic service. She placed young Wells as a Draper’s assistant- a clerk in a dry goods shop. As one might well believe Wells rebelled at this dead end destiny in life. Possessing a good brain Wells began a series of educational maneuvers that led to his being a student of T.H. Huxley, an apostle of Evolution. A science career seemed to be opening for Wells but he was led away by his sexual needs. He married a cousin with whom he was a boarder in her mother’s house only to discover her Victorian notions of male-female sexual relations differed widely from his. He divorced her taking up with a fellow student. She was an able financial manager so he put her in charge and began chasing skirts. It didn’t seem to bother his wife Catharine who he renamed Jane. After a series of hairy but educational employments Wells began to find success in journalism and writing. With his story The Time Machine he broke into the bigtime giving Jane some real work to do. Quickly following The Time Machine up with his succession of sci-fi novels by 1900 he was assured of a lifetime income.
Bertie Wells
It was well because his work after 1906 while prolific was unlucrative except for 1922’s Outline Of History. There was a winner. The Outline was his second great break setting him up for the rest of his life along with the science fiction. Ah, those Seven Science Fiction Novels. And, of course, his close to amazing collection of short stories. There was another gold mine. Jane raked in the cash and Bertie, for that was how he wished to be called, spent it.
He associated himself with the socialist Fabian Society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with their ‘advanced’ sexual notions. Why the old Hetaerist notion of promiscuity is considered ‘advanced’ is beyond me. At the same time Bertie claimed to be a Feminist. The women’s Matriarchal movement was very active from mid-century on. His Feminism, however, was concerned only with eliminating chastity thereby allowing any man access to any woman at any time, anywhere. Purely Hetaeric, although Wells wouldn’t have understood his ancient roots in that manner.
It was when Wells turned to his sex novels that he put his reputation in jeopardy. After his intial spate of sci-fi his reputation slid, the only bright spot being The Outline Of History. While his later novels, tend toward the tedious and require a certain determination to read through they are almost always redeemed by the social context. I like Wells and don’t mind the stuff too much but I can’t recommend it very strongly. It’s a matter of taste, either you like Wells or you don’t.
Wells major themes are outlined in the last of the Seven Sci-Fi Novels- In The Days Of The Comet- when he shades into the sex novel. In my estimation this is a very fine book as utopian novels go. After Tono-Bungay and When the Sleeper Wakes it may be my favorite. The turn of the century was a hey day of the utopian novel with the dystopian novel being introduced. If you like the genre many fine ones were written: News From Nowhere by William Morris. I came to Morris late in life but if you like the mystical utopian or quasi-utopian novel Morris has a lot to recommend himself including several utopian forays. I’m sure he influenced both Wells and Burroughs; Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is another fine example of the period. They’re all bushwa but fun to read. Utopian novels are usually a projection of the author’s own needs and desires into which all humanity is to conform. Usually by some miracle all humanity becomes reconciled to living in universal harmony with no unseemly disturbances of the temper. Museums and lecture halls flourish while dance halls and crime atrophy. Culture is much more elevated. To the most casual observor such an utopia is impossible without an alteration of the human brain. Only one utopianist I have read has addressed that problem and that one is H.G., our Bertie.
In The Days Of The Comet was published in 1906 at the time that Halley’s Comet was due to make its scheduled seventy-five year fly-by in 1910. It was projected to pass very close to the earth which it did unlike its 1985 appearance when you had to know where to look for it. Indeed, the comet came with trails of glory so bright you could read newsprint by it at night.
Thus Wells uses the comet as his agent to change the physical structure of the human brain. Wells fails to mention any change to the brains of the lesser animals and insects. Perhaps the lion really did lie down with the lamb. Before the comet, or the Big Change as the passing was referred to, people’s brains were as ours are now; after the Change they all resembled that of H.G. I am in sympathy with Wells; I fancy that one morning I will sally forth, flick my finger tips a couple times, say abracadabra and the people of the world will be tranformed into clones of myself. What’s holding me back is that I don’t know which will be the Big Morning and I don’t wish to be seen as an eccentric or worse who failed to take his medicine by repeatedly trying and failing. You know, out there flicking my finger tips into the empty air.
But, Wells had it worked out. The comet came trailing this tail of green gas. As the comet passed the gas enveloped the earth much like a magnetar, I suppose, knocking people out for several hours while the gas did its work. When England came to the world was changed and everyone thought like Wells. Sort of the same thing that was thought would happen when Obama was elected. The Magic Negro would save us all.
Actually the Comet reflected a change in Wells own circumstances. In 1898 when Wells published The War Of The Worlds he was balanced between hope and despair. He was close to financial independence but not quite there. Thus in WOW the tone is between hope and despair. The world is invaded by Martians who destroy everything in their path, themselves being destroyed by a virus taken in through their beastly habit of drinking human blood. One neglected detail is that the projectiles they arrived in trailed some green clouds. The last projectile had a larger one so that perhaps Wells was going to develop the notion but then couldn’t work it in. He did have the Martians project a black gas that killed people though.
By 1906 his success was assured, he was shooting his pistol off around London having several sexual affairs so his outlook was brighter and, hence, that of the planet, so the novel describes the transition from the evil old world to the brave new one In other words, Wells had passed from poverty to affluence.
Sex is the issue here.
Before the Comet Willie, the hero, was courting his childhood sweetheart Nettie from whom he expected to be her sole sexual companion. In the weird old world sex was exclusive. They had committed themselves to each other as children which remained a claim in Willie’s mind.
However Willie is a poor boy with no prospects. Nettie is courted by the rich guy’s son, Verrall with whom she runs off. Willie treks 16 miles to see her only to find she has abandoned her parents’ home in company with Verrall. Well, Willie’s not going to endure such treatment from Nettie or take that from Verrall so he steals some money, buys a revolver and a train ticket to track them down and shoot them dead. You see, in the days before The Big Change that was the way things were done.
In the meantime the Comet is getting closer, C-hour is near, and war breaks out between England and Germany, this is eight years before 1914 so Bertie exhibits his prescience. The details are well handled so we have the increasing color of the green cloud and the flash and boom of the big navel guns as the climax takes place by the seashore. This was really nicely handled.
Willie tracks the couple down to a Bohemian enclave on the East Anglian coast. Nettie and Verrall had gotten married so it seems rather odd that they searched out a Bohemian enclave. So, as the battle rages and the green cloud descends on the earth Willie is chasing the couple down the beach firing his pistol wildly. This is the moment of the Big Change. Everybody gets gassed for a few hours then arise, born again, in a new heaven and a new earth. Utopia!
The same device is used a few decades later in the great movie The Village Of The Damned. A good device. It won’t go stale.
In the new world, new rules and reasonings apply. Nettie no longer has to choose between Willie and Verrall. She can have both…and more.
As Willie comes to he hears groaning. The groaning is coming from a prominent politician who was out bicycling at two in the morning when the green fog descended and fell off his bike as he conked breaking his ankle. Thus Willie makes a connection changing the direction of his life allowing him to become prominent in the establishment of this brave new world. Thus he later meets Nettie and Verrall on equal terms.
Nettie informs Verrall that she wants a menage a trois with Willie to which, in this best of all impossible worlds, Verrall compliantly agrees. Later Willie marries making the arrangment a menage a quatre. Neato! Was this all? No…
In the frame for the story it turns out that the story teller is Willie. In the Frame Wells comes upon this white haired old dude, Willie, writing this memoir. He has pages clipped in fascicles of fifty that Willie allows the editor, H.G., to read.
Finishing the last fascicle the author asks if Nettie had sexual relations with others. The white haired dude replies somethng like this: ‘Oh, heavens, yes. Hundreds. You don’t think a beautiful girl like Nettie wouldn’t attract numerous suitors do you?’
So there you have it. In the brave new world the woman of Wells’ dreams is a mere sex object who spends her life being pawed by, shall we say, all comers. A Hetaerist’s dream. This is Wells’ sexual program. At this point he began to lose readers. Too avant garde; you don’t want to get too far out in front of the pack. In addition to the sexual proselytizing of his novels he carried his didacticism to extremes advancing educational theories for instance. For over a hundred years we’ve been told our educational system is faulty. New systems have succeeded new systems. After over a century of tinkering are people better schooled? No. They’re worse. There’s only one way to learn and that’s the drudgery of study. Not every mind is prepared to do that, somebody’s going to be left behind. Wells’ notions as everyone else’s is what they think they would have liked. No study. Lots of play.
At any rate carrying all these utopian notions Wells passed through the horrific war years to have all his expectations disappointed. Not surprisingly his mind broke and he went into a deep depression. First he tried the God trip and when that failed he embraced the Communist Revolution in Russia. He essentially became an agent of Moscow. As a very prominent writer he was a desirable acquistion for the Revolution. As a major theorist and propagandist he had an entree first to Lenin and then after 1924 when Lenin died, Stalin.
In 1921 he interviewed Lenin and received his instructions. the Soviets had a system of State prostitution. These women were assigned as agents to service writers while spying on them for Moscow. In 1921 he met Moura Budberg for whom he fell. At that time she had been assigned to manage a consular agent, Bruce Lockhart, who along with the agency was in process of being expelled. Wells became intensely jealous of Lockhart because of this connection badmouthing him from then on. In any case Moura Budberg was assigned to Maxim Gorky then living in exile in Italy with whom she stayed until Gorky was enticed back to the USSR at which time she was reassigned to shepherd Wells.
Now Wells became a Soviet literary hatchet man. It was his job to interfere and discredit writers who refused to propagate the Party line. Among these was Edgar Rice Burroughs who had proclaimed his anti-Communism with a tract or study titled Under The Red Flag of 1919. Publishers refused the piece. Wells anti-Burroughs campaign was so discreet that my discovery of it three or four years ago was the first mention of it. I repeat the story here for those who have not read my earlier essays.
In the first place all these writers read each other. Kipling and Haggard for instance read each other as well as writers like Wells and Burroughs and vice versa. They could pass disguised messages in their novels. As Burroughs was the last of these writers to begin writing and that in US pulp magazines in 1912 that may never have reached Europe while his book titles only reached print in 1914 after the Great War began and were only the Tarzan titles until the end of the decade Wells may not have read Burroughs until 1918 or slightly after. Nevertheless Burroughs influence shows in Wells’ 1923 effort Men Like Gods. This book also ridicules Burroughs.
Men Like Gods takes place in a parallel universe. There is some resemblance to the Eloi of The Time Machine. For the first time Wells’ characters are nearly nude. This was the only time he ever did this so he was probably under the influence of Burroughs whose characters never wore clothes or only minimally.
Burroughs apparently picked up the references or had them pointed out to him. In any event in 1926 he wrote The Moon Maid in answer to Wells, The First Men In The Moon. Wells’ book was pretty clumsycompared to that of Burroughs who demonstrated his imaginative superiority by running circles around Wells. The second part of the story was a rewrite of Under The Red Flag that was a direct challenge to the Soviets. By 1926 of course Stalin was directing the USSR.
Wells then countered with an undisguised attack that portrayed Burroughs as insane. This was Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island. Here Wells parodied a pulp magazine story not yet in book form, The Lad And The Lion, and the last third of The Land That Time Forgot. Burroughs returned the fire with Tarzan At The Earth’s Core and Tarzan The Invincible that featured Stalin himself as a character.
Moura Budberg Young
At about this time Moura Budberg was assigned to Wells as a concubine as Gorky had returned to the USSR. This was to cause a falling out between Wells and Stalin while perhaps leading to Stalin’s assassination in 1953.
Burroughs’ entire series of novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man deals with Wells and the Reds. The Communists attacked unrelentingly on several fronts probably robbing Burroughs blind in royalties while trying to squeeze off his sales. His British publishers did just that. Although it appears that they refused or were reluctant to keep his titles in print Alan Hodge and Robert Graves in their history of the twenties and thirties, The Long Weekend, twice refer to Burroughs’ great popularity, once in the twenties and once in the thirties.
In Germany the Communists attacked ERB for his anti-German comments in books written during the war
Moura Budberg Old
years thereby destroying that lucrative market. The Soviets never paid royalties anyway so there was no monetary effect from that market. In the US Burroughs had troubles with his publishers McClurg’s and Grossett & Dunlap who seem quite hostile to in the correspondence in the archives at ULouisville. ERB left McClurg in the late twenties going through two more publishers before winning the battle by publishing under his own imprint. Thus by 1930’s Tarzan The Invincible, note the title, he seemed to have won the battle if not the war.
However sound had come to the movies in 1927-28 which rearranged the playing field. Rather than just being ‘flickers’ they were now more on a par with literature while being even more influential. With sound the movie version of a story took pecedence over the book, heck, it took precedence over history. Thus the movie version took precedence as the canon over the book, the latter became an adjunct that few read in comparison to those who saw and heard the movie. As the movies paid in one lump sum what it might take years to dribble in as royalties authors were willing to give the devil a cut to have their novels produced. Books could be issued in their thousands of titles a year but there were only a couple hundred movies released in a year. The number of producers had been consolidated from many to a few after the shakeout of the twenties, hence combines like Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer, Radio-Keith-Orpheum- RKO- and the combine of Twentieth Century Pictures and William Fox.
MGM was of course top dog by far. There was no vacuum there but the Commies moved in anyway soon taking over de facto control. When Burroughs published his own books, quite profitably, he had slipped the noose but only temporarily. As a strategist he did poorly. In 1931, because Burroughs didn’t ever bother to dread his contracts, MGM finessed his meal ticket, Tarzan, from him thereby making him financially dependent on them. Even though they might have exploited the Tarzan character by making two or three movies a year and zillions of dollars they chose to make only six movies between 1931 and 1940 thereby keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease while depriving him of hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. Remember that at the same time Roosevelt after 1933 drove the income tax rate as high as 90% so there was some difficulty forcing a grin in those trying times.
This is a good story and I covered it in some detail in my ten part review of Tarzan And The Lion Man, expecially parts 6-10 to which I refer you if you’re interested. Wells and Burroughs bickered back and forth although it appears that Burroughs lost heart after Tarzan And The Lion Man. By that time he knew he had been had. He did concede defeat in the issuance of a book version of The Lad And The Lion in 1935; a notice to both Wells and Stalin. The story was a short one so while leaving the old story as a notice to Wells who had mocked him and the story in his Blettsworthy novel, Burroughs interpolated chapters with a story mocking the Communist Revolution in Russia. Then he retired from the field.
However he gives Wells a grand slam in the story of ‘God’ in the middle of Lion Man. That is a great story within the story however I wasn’t clear on its relation to Wells at the time so I will give a modified version here.
Now, Burroughs had a remarkable mind. He was able to carry the story lines of hundreds of books he had read in his head retrieving details whenever they suited his needs. He was always conscious of what he was doing but he wrote pastiches anyway.
The story of Tarzan and God mocks Wells’ The Island Of Dr. Moreau. Burroughs had already used Moreau in his 1913 novel The Monster Men plus he wrote around the theme repeatedly. Moreau itself plays around with the Frankenstein theme which also figures prominently in Burroughs’ literary antecedents.
Remember that Burroughs is able to combine numerous details of other books into one composite figure so that Wells is only one source for the character of ‘God’ in Lion Man. For our purposes one may assume that when Tarzan talks to God (smirk) it is equivalent to Burroughs talking to Wells. Gone is the transcendant confidence of Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant. However the coup of the capture of Tarzan in 1931 when Burroughs signed away his rights to the movie representation of Tarzan to MGM had stripped Burroughs of all defences and he himself was now trapped in a cage at the mercy of MGM, Wells and Stalin. During Tarzan’s movie history dating back to the late teens Burroughs had always complained, making a nuisance of himself because the studios weren’t following his stories closely. Now, he had given MGM the right to create their own stories. ERB was dissatisfied with the representation of Tarzan but the character was so good that even though MGM tried they couldn’t destroy it.
Nevertheless they were in a position to substitute the movie Tarzan for the literary Tarzan in the public mind and they did. For me and many others the discovery that there was a literary Tarzan came long after we had been viewing Tarzan movies. We invariably found the literary Tarzan superior. For now Tarzan/ERB was imprisoned in a cell. The best ERB can do is to come up with a better Moreau story than Wells.
So, ERB creates a mock London, England in the wilds of Africa with a replica of the court of Henry VIII peopled by mutated gorillas. By 1930 when this story was written ERB was probably as well informed about evolution as anyone. He had kept up his reading becoming as knowledgeable concerning genetics as any but researchers. Thus while thirty years earlier Moreau had been clumsily experimenting with vivisection ‘God’ had used the lastest genetic techniques that ERB can devize to convert gorillas into a cross between apes and human beings. The apes of God are human in all but appearance. There are many jokes concealed in this episode, apes of God perhaps being one. Wyndham Lewis used the term apes of God as a synonym for writers so he may be calling Wells as God and writer an ape. ‘God’ himself who has exchanged ape genes with himself is now half ape. See, a joke. Whether Wells recognized his portrait isn’t known.
Tarzan sets about to escape but as there is no escape from his real life situation ERB merely burns God’s castle down disrupting one supposes the USSR. Perhaps gratifying to the imagination but futile for changing his situation. No longer in control of his creation Burroughs creative powers begin to atrophy.
Uncle Joe As FDR Would Say
Thus Stalin triumphed over his literary adversary. Perhaps Stalin despised writers for he set out to humiliate Wells after the defeat of Burroughs. As noted the State prostitute Moura Budberg had formerly serviced Maxim Gorky while after his return Budberg was assigned to Wells. H.G. had fallen hard for Budberg apparently seriously in love with her. Stalin called Wells to Moscow in 1936 when Gorky was on his last legs, about to die. Budberg was also in Moscow but when Wells asked to see her she told him she was called out of town. In a rather malicious ploy Stalin arranged for Wells to see Gorky and Budberg together as, of course, she wasn’t out of town.
Wells was completely destroyed unable to penetrate Stalin’s duplicity, or at least believe it, at the time. However when it finally sank in he had no more means to retaliate than Burroughs so he wrote a book too- The Holy Terror. In that book, the ruffian leader of the revolution, or Stalin in real life, has lost the ability to lead the revolution and has to be discreetly removed. A conspiracy is set afoot. A doctor’s plot in which the leader is artfully removed by medical means. I am unaware of how much influence Wells may have had to incite others to achieve his result. At any rate the War intervened making it inexpedient to dispatch Stalin while Wells died in 1946 before he could reactivate the plan.
It may be coincidence but Stalin discovered a doctor’s plot in the early fifties that he was able to foil. However Khruschev and Beria and others poisoned Stalin at a dinner in 1953 thus removing this singularly successful but troublesome dictator.
The turmoil of the thirties may have derailed Wells sexual program somewhat but sexual matters were still moving in his desired direction. Sexual matters had been loosened a great deal but there were still miles to go.
Sex And The Psyche
In Part III I will deal with the key mover in sexual matters, Sigmund Freud who was the second of the three to reach prominence. Thus Burroughs the third to arrive on the scene and the last to leave will be saved for the last part.
A Review
Themes And Variations
The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs
#14 Tarzan The Invincible
Part V of X
by
R.E. Prindle
First Published On The Ezine, ERBzine
The Man
Six White Men In Search Of An African Empire
If one believes that Burroughs is merely on a rant against Communism in Tarzan The Invincible and Tarzan Triumphant then there is nothing more to say. Still, it is remarkable that ERB specifically names Stalin as a persecutor of Tarzan in both books. As Burroughs says he doesn’t mind fictionizing political and religious realities the question is , is he fictionizing a real life situation where Stalin, or the Communists are giving him a hard time?
Seems really improbable doesn’t it? People are used to thinking of Burroughs as a barely literate fantasy writer better ignored by the literati. But more insignificant men than ERB have been the victims of hate campaigns.
Dr. Harvey Springer- The Cowboy Evangelist
Who now, for instance, remembers Harvey Springer? Harvey Springer? Never heard of him? I don’t wonder. Oddly enough when I was in San Diego in 1957-58 Harvey Springer, who was some kind of evangelicalist, was going to appear at some church out where no sailor ever went. He was kind of a cowboy evangelical from Denver. His most dramatic stunt was placing one of size fourteens, he was a tall rangy man, on one chair and the other on another to harangue the crowd.
I hadn’t heard of him, you know, nor had anyone I knew, but Harvey Springer was reputed to be an arch anti-Semite. Could have been for all I knew, but I’m not going to take anyone’s word for it. The point is the Jews sent all kinds of people into the streets to tell people not to go see Harvey. I don’t how many times they must have heard- Who’s Harvey Springer?- in reply. Rather than say he’s an anti-Semite, of which I had even less knowledge at the time never having heard the term, all that was necessary was to say the two words, church and evangelical to cool my ardor, if I had any, to find where he was speaking and go see him.
In addition the AJC and ADL published books in which they denounced Harvey Springer as a very dangerous anti-Semite. Now, if certain people would go to such extremes to persuade someone not to do something he had no intention of doing what would they do to defame someone with an international reputation? The only one who didn’t realize the extent of ERB’s fame seems to have been ERB himself. He was no self promoter, he thought it best to keep his head down.
In that sense, judging from the unpublished Under The Red Flag and the published Moon Maid, Invincible and Triumphant Burroughs was actually a leading anti-Communist voice. I mean, people read this stuff. They read it in America , they read it in England, they read it in numerous translations and they read it in the Soviet Union. Here’s the kicker, Stalin read it. Not only that, Stalin was a movie buff. And he requested Tarzan films (reported in a recent UK Telegraph story and the book of Simon Sebag Montefiori: Stalin: The Court Of The Red Tsar.)
History is not a mystery, it’s just schoolyard bullies bigger than life.
We also know that Stalin ordered his scientists in the 1920s to attempt to cross an ape and a human to create a super warrior. It’s clear to me that Stalin had read Beasts Of Tarzan. The Man of Steel may have had a difficult time distinguishing between fact and fiction as many another. Besides, remember eugenics was a hot topic of conversation in Red circles then as it is today. Not knowing what we know now about genetics crossing an ape and human may not have seemed that far fetched. It doesn’t to a lot of people now. Heck, the Old Testament enjoins one to destroy the results of an animal-human union so the ancient Hebrews thought it was not only possible but a regular occurrence.
There is very clear evidence that the Reds were conducting a campaign of vilification against Burroughs. I’ve mentioned it before but the clearst evidence is H.G. Wells’ novel Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island.
Bertie Wells
May we take a moment to look more closely at Wells? Don’t think I’m antagonistic toward Wells. I dearly love Wells just as I do Burroughs. I have a complete collection of Burroughs while I’m looking for the odd volume of the more obscure Wells. I’m not boasting, I’m just saying this in the way of credentials. I’ve read all of Burroughs more than once and I’ve read all the Wells’ titles I have, many of them more than once. In point of fact I love all the literature from say, Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines to 1930 and perhaps an odd year or so beyond. I love. I mean, I love it. I love Edgar Wallace who, if you can believe it, is claimed to have sold one out of four books sold in England during this period. If you don’t know him he was one of the co-writers of the movie King Kong and then he died. All this stuff of this period is wonderful. Robert Hitchens, P.C. Wren.
So, you know, it’s like this: H.G. Wells was a Soviet literary hatchet man.
The man had a wonderful career. You know his most famous novels, The War Of The Worlds, First Men In The Moon, The Island Of Dr. Moreau, In The Days Of The Comet. If you like Wells, and I do, those are the tip of the iceberg. A few of his short stories and he wrote many are as good as short stories get.
He was always a socialist and perhaps a terrorist conspiritor, but he was a child of the nineteenth century until his mind broke at the end of the Great War. At that time he lost faith, in god, transferring his faith to the Revolution, becoming a Soviet dupe. His literary career may be divided into two halves, pre-God- The Invisible King and post-God. That was one of his books.
He was not taken seriously as a fiction writer after the war. During the twenties and thirties he turned out an unending stream of novels that were ignored. It’s not difficult to see why, but I find them a little more tolerable. I like Wells. His reputation and career were saved by his 1922 effort An Outline Of History. It was a massive volume and it sold massively for twenty years or more while being hugely influential in literature. Put him on easy street for the rest of his long life. As much as any artist who is skilled at spending money can be on Easy Street.
As a novelist however, he was pretty much a has been. While none of his post-1920 novels take off he hits the spot with me.
From 1920 on his soul belonged to the Revolution, which is to say the Socialist homeland, which is to say the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics. That means he was more loyal to Russia than he was to England. In short, a traitor in intent if not in deed. While no Liberal ever deals in realities hence are in constant denial, The Man of Steel, Josef Stalin, was his boss. Wells naturally would have denied this.
The Soviets had a pretty comprehensive system which once again is denied. There were a number of State prostitutes who were assigned to the various important Red writers to service them as mistresses, while reporting back to the Kremlin. This is, of course, denied by the Liberals. I don’t understand living a life that has to be denied, where everything you do has to be represented as something else, but such duplicity is apparently congenial to the Liberal mind. They must seek it.
Moura Budberg
Wells was assigned a woman named Moura Budberg. She must have known how to turn on the charm as she was able to make a number of men she was assigned to sincerely love her, including the British diplomat Bruce Lockhart, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells. She wasn’t that good looking either. All of these people led double, triple or quadruple lives. They must have been really able to compartmentalize their minds. Freud didn’t touch that type.
After Wells’ visit to Lenin in 1921 he was signed on. He began his career as literary hatchet man. In his writing he portrayed recognizable people, sometimes under their real names, in negative or positive lights. As a skilled writer, whether you like his later stuff or not, he was more than competent to do this. It appears that he first targeted Burroughs in his 1923 novel Men Like Gods. Among his science fiction novels this one should rank more highly than it does. Burroughs’ 1926 Moon Maid reads like a reply to Wells. Especially the first part of the trilogy where Burroughs dances imaginative rings around the First Men In The Moon. From there Wells took up the challenge with Mr. Blettsworthy On Rampole Island of 1928 which unmistakably is a parody of Burroughs in which he portrays Burroughs as insane, but not a bad analysis.
Burroughs responded possibly with At The Earth’s Core but definitely with Tarzan The Invincible. At the same time one interprets Stalin’s interest in crossing apes with humans as being derived from Beasts Of Tarzan and other Tarzan novels there may have been more direct Soviet interest in ERB. One notes that Tarzan The Invincible was the first title published under the Burroughs imprint. I think it highly probable that his publishing was being interfered with by the Reds in addition to whatever other grievances against his publishers Burroughs may have had.
One may say that Burroughs was too insignificant for Stalin to bother with, yet according to Simon Sebag Montefiori Stalin put out a contract on John Wayne because he was such an ardent anti-Communist. Khruschev is said to have told Wayne that he concelled the contract after Stalin’s death. Edgar Rice Burroughs was at least as significant in 1930 as Wayne in the 1940s and 50s.
At any rate in 1930 Burroughs has Stalin and the Reds invading his dream world of Opar to steal his gold, i.e. put him out of the publishing business. Invincible and Triumphant, notice the titles, both deal with Stalin and the Soviets then the topic disappears from the oeuvre. Was Burroughs given incentive to counter-attack the Reds? I think there is enough evidence to warrant the opinion while time will tell even more. Research is just beginning.
It is signficant that Burroughs introduces the story in his own voice, not a framing device. He may be simply talking to the reader or he may be addressing Wells and, dare I say say it, The Man Of Steel himself. Perhaps a subtitle could be ‘The Big Bwana Meets The Man Of Steel.’ Now, it should also be remembered that this is the fourteenth novel of the series. the first title had been written eighteen years earlier. At that time the surprise of the character had knocked the socks off the reading public. In 1930 Tarzan was in danger of becoming old hat. Burroughs had to think up new and interesting devices to keep his readers coming back. As with most series of this type the readership was limited. Maximum sales could be predicted so that success meant not falling below a certain level of interest or letting interest diminish below unsupportable levels. As his own publisher Burroughs was now taking all the risks financial as well as literary. He had to turn out a successful book.
I think he did a superb job. Since the series continued to flourish his readers must have thought so too. I do wish ERB, Inc. would release some sales figures though.
For the premiss of his story Burroughs postulates that Stalin and the Soviets wish to instigate a new world war which will allow them to pick up the pieces establishing a complete European dictatorship. Not at all farfetched. Burroughs postulates that Mussolini and his Fascists are aiming at a European hegemony. This is 1930 so Hitler and the Nazis are not on anyone’s radar as a threat to world peace except for a few fringe elements. At the time Hitler and the NSDAP were in hand to hand combat with the Communists for control of Germany. They would not assume power until three years hence.
The Reds then wish to create an incident that would cause the Italians to attack France. The indirect approach is usually more effective than the direct approach so they wish to create an incident in Africa where French colonial troops appear to invade Italian Somaliland.
At that instant expendable confederates in Italy would reveal a bogus French plan to Mussolini. It is assumed that Italy would then declare war on France and the holocaust would begin. As we all know Italy did not declare war on France in 1930 so the plan must have misfired somewhere along the way. Tarzan was the reason. Burroughs gives these little known details that would have been lost to…well… if not history, remembrance. So, uh, really ERB is providing a valuable service here.
There may be two sides to every story, but usually one is on one side or the other. We don’t have to be reminded ERB is not on the side of the Reds. In fact, ERB is exposing their plans and weaknesses. He displays a fairly profound understanding of the goals and workings of the Communists. He is read up on the subject, He has studied. He is not shooting from the hip. He knows whereof he speaks. If not an authority on the subject he is pretty darn close.
ERB has his eyes on how ‘American’ manufacturers are relating to Moscow. He has Zora Drinov analyze the situation this way, p. 12
“But what do the puny resources of this single American (Wayne Colt) mean to us?” demanded Zora. “A mere nothing compared to what America is already pouring into Soviet Russia. What is his treason compared with the treason of those others who are already doing more to hasten the day of world communism than the Third Internationale itself- it is nothing, not a drop in the bucket.’
“What do you mean Zora?” asked Miguel.
“I mean the bankers, and manufacturers, and engineers of America, who are selling their own country and the world to us in the hope of adding more gold to their already bursting coffers. One of their most pious and lauded citizens is building great factories for us in Russia, where we may turn out tractors and tanks; their manufacturers are vying with each other to furnish us with engines for countless thousands of airplanes; their engineers are selling us their brains and their skill to build a grreat modern manufacturing city, in which ammunitions and engines of war may be produced. These are the traitors, these are the men who are hastening the day when Moscow shall dictate the policies of our world.”
“…their government is a capitalistic government that is so opposed to our beliefs that it has never recognized our government; yet in their greed, these swine are selling out their own kind and their own country for a few more rotten dollars.”
Sound anything like the US and China today? That was a mouthful. The first thing FDR did upon taking the reins of government was to recognize Soviet Russia. Tell you anything about FDR? That was a mouthful that should have eraned ERB the hatred of the Liberal Coalition.
You can see why they wanted to stop his mouth. Passages such as this are probably the reason Richard Slotkin and his crowd, John Taliaferro, group ERB with Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. A charge of racism is usually a cover for a multitude of offences that have nothing to do with race. One is merely opposing the Liberal program. If they were to say- the fellow opposes the Liberal program they would get no rise- they might even have to explain the Liberal program- so the charge of racism is used as a red herring. One should always suspect such an accusation and disregard it.
Liberals however, never answer such charges. They merely deny them. In 1953-54 they were even denying themselves as Communists or taking the Fifth, which is the euivalent of saying, yes I am, but I’m not going to admit it.
The Revolution was only twelve years old in 1930. The CPUSA had been briefly outlawed in the early twenties but ‘disinterested parties’ believing in the time honored notion of ‘free speech’ had the ban lifted. Over in Russia their free speech loving comrades were filling cattle cars with dissenters destined for the Gulag or else they were murdered outright. Today, of course, these freedom loving people are throwing dissenters in prison on the basis of trumped up laws. The Program is moving right along isn’t it?
Even William Z. Foster denied he was a Communist as he was running for President on the Communist ticket. Today a tenured Law 
Professor at Harvard actually denies that AIPAC, which is a registered lobby group, exists. They ought to throw such people into cells next to David Irving. Denial of themselves is what Liberalism is all about. You couldn’t find anyone to admit to being a Communist. They all denied it. The hypocrisy of Liberals throwing men as decent or moreso than themselves into jail for denying the holocaust is mind boggling. Well, it would be, if you didn’t already know what’s going on.
So ERB would have been roundly denounced as a paranoid delusive for the above passage.
Henry Ford- Philanthropist
Men like Armand Hammer, Bernard Baruch, essentially the whole Jewish government in exile here in the US were working furiously to make the Revolution a global reality. They really had no idea of Hitler’s intentions at the time, yet they attempted assassination while through the German Communist Party they were waging street warfare against the National Socialists. The word National is what they objected to not so much the man Hitler. Burroughs mentions the Third International. The Comintern- short for Communist International as it was known- was essentially a beta model for what is now multi-culturalism. It was the Jewish cultural vision of the world. Thus industrialists like Armand Hammer and Bernard Baruch using their Jewish identity as a shield from criticism, any criticism would be characterized as anti-Semitism, were directing huge sums of money into the development of Soviet Russia.
In addition a well-meaning industrialist, Henry Ford, who would later be denounced as a Nazi, was doing the
Armand Hammer
same thing. The mention of tractor factories refers to Henry Ford- the Jewish bete noir- who was trying to relieve the Communist induced famine by selling or even giving tractors to the Russians to increase food production. He was also building the factories for them. I mean, you know, gratis; altruism run rampant. The great industrial city probably refers to Stalingrad.
Even Burroughs biographers Porges and Taliaferro disparage Burroughs for his rational stance against Communism. Burroughs doesn’t stop his analysis with the multi-cultural contradiction within American society, p. 35:
“The general plan, of course, is no secret to any of us here,” said Zora, “and I shall betray no confidence in explaining it to you. It is part of a larger plan to embroil the capitalistic powers in wars and revolutions to such an extent that they will be helpless to unite against us.”
“Our emissaries have been laboring a long time toward the culmination of the revolution in India that will distract the attention and armed forces of Great Britain. We are not succeeding so well in Mexico as we had planned, but there is still hope, while our prospects in the Philippines are very bright. The conditions in China you well know. She is absolutely helpless, and we have hope that with our assistance she will eventually constitute a real menace to Japan. Italy is a very dangerous enemy, and it is largely for the purpose of embroiling her in war with France that we are here.”
Once again you will note that there is no reference to a threat from Germany. No one could have seen it but the Communists who were opposed not merely to Hitler but any Volkish attempt to govern. The Volkish movement was inherently anti-Communist. To be anti-Communist was equivalent to being anti-Semitic, so that Hitler was automatically an enemy to be destroyed. When he and the Nazis assumed power in 1933 an automatic boycott of Germany and things German was instituted by the Jews. One might say that WWII began in January of 1933 at the instance of the Jews. The obvious conclusion is that if Hitler’s actions against the Jews were not self-defense, they were acts of war in which the first offensives had been begun by the Jews. Needless to say any such opinion is and will be denied. Any such discussion of such matters will be ridiculed and suppressed. But there you have it. At any rate ERB was not one of those far-sighted individuals who foresaw the rise of Hitler. Italy turned out to be a not so dangerous enemy.
In his story Italy was merely to be a dupe of the Soviets.
In order to present his analysis ERB had to be especially well informed. What he read or where isn’t clear as there is nothing in the existing library that even deals with the Communists per se. ERB does have a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf but that could only have been obtained after 1940 when the war was in progress.
As the story opens then, the Reds are assembling their forces for the march on Italian Somaliland.
Things aren’t to be quite so simple as the leader of the expedition, Peter Sveri, develops delusions of grandeur hoping to establish his own Empire in Africa with himself as Emperor. On the one hand Communism breaks down on the rocks of the interests of the various cultures, while in seeking to establish himself in Africa Zveri is infringing on the domain of its current Emperor, Tarzan.
Tarzan handily frustrates Zveri’s designs, while at the same time beating Stalin and the Reds, hence the title Tarzan The Invincible. One imagines though that there may be something more behind it. Originally titled Tarzan, Guardian Of Africa the change of title indicates something deeper.
In order to finance his operations Zveri intends to loot the fabled treasure vaults of Opar of which, one assumes, he has read about in The Return Of Tarzan, Jewels Of Opar and Tarzan And The Golden Lion. This makes him somewhat a fan of the amanuensis of the Big Bwana.
This is the fourth and last of Burroughs’ Opar stories. In section six let’s review Opar and its significance to this story.
A Review
Part II
The Myth Of The Twentiety Century
by
Alfred Rosenberg
Rosenberg, Alfred, The Myth Of The Twentieth Century, Noontide Press, 1982.
It should be borne in mind that The Myth is subtitled: An evaluation of the spiritual-intellectual confrontations of our age. The book then is an attempt to objectively analyze the political situation in those terms. While himself a Nazi this is not a Nazi tract while at the same time it is inevitable that Rosenberg ananlyze the situation from a Nordic or Aryan viewpoint. If Nazi and Aryan are synonomous in your mind you should disassociate the terms.
When Rosenberg says the conflict is one of differing values between Asiatics and Europeans it is necessary to know what he means as his basis of interpretation is accurate. The conflict between Asia, which is to say the Middle East, began fifty-five hundred years ago on the plains of Mesopotamia, todays Iraq; and has slowly spread outward until today the Asiatics, or specifically, Semites, stand on the verge of worldwide victory. Even though the Semites themselves are divided between Jews and Arabs, which is why the Jews support Arab Semites outside the Middle East, the Jewish segment is confident that they will be able to manage the Arab Moslems in the triumph.
The major conflict then in Rosenberg’s mind was the prime conflict between Semitic values and Aryan values. He considered the Roman Catholic Church as auxiliaries. The Church may be said to be a third Semitic religion.
The situation as Rosenberg perceived it, and he was a very perceptive man, was that the German people were surrounded on three sides by Semitic forces alien to Aryan ideals.
He saw a Roman Catholic Semitic Church centered to the South of Germany that had also infiltrated and alienated a large part of his German people.
To the East he saw the Semitized Soviet Empire looming as a threat. He had no doubt, and sincerely believed that Communism was a Jewish political system managed according to Semitic ideology.
Just as the behemoth to the East was controlled by Jews so with the ascension of Franklin D. Roosevelt was the behemoth of the West, the United States of America. Of course, denial is the order of the day but denials are ridiculous in the face of facts.
Just as Jews had managed the hyper inflation of German currency in 1923 so Jews had maneuvered the West into the Great Depression through their control and literal ownership of the Federal Reserve Banking System of the US.
Through the manipulation of credit and currency in the years leading up to the Great Crash of 1929 the Fed, which is to say the Jews, created the speculative stock market bubble. At the same time they created the unsound practice of holding companies of holding companies. Thus shares with no substance behind them collapsed entirely losing all value. Between such failures as these and extended credit for margin speculation the stage was set, as in Germany, for the complete collapse of the US economic system. This was no different than the real estate and credit bubble of today.
While many many volumes on the crash have been written over the decades none of them would deal with the problem as it actually was for fear of being denounced as anti-Semites.
You may be sure that Rosenberg, Hitler and the Nazi think tank understood the situation completely. The question is how the Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht interrelates with his banking counterparts of the West.
That the situation was created that ‘discredited’ the capitalist system, allowing a Judeo-Communist like FDR to assume the the reins of power you may be assured. Roosevelt was a disciple of Woodrow Wilson. Just as the Jews flooded into Washington in 1913 managing Wilson’s presidency so in 1933 they returned to power with FDR. You can see how urgent it was for Roosevelt to stay in office for as many terms as he lived.
The situation of today is a replica of 1929-33 with the hope of putting Barry obama into the role of FDR. Rosenberg and the Nazis predicted this scenario in the 1930s. They also predicted the dissolution of the United States over racial problems. This is bound to and must happen.
In addition to the USSR and the USA the Jews were running France and directing England so that Rosenberg believed the Germans to be beleagured, which they were.
The history of the entire period has been written by Liberals, Communists and Jews, hence you have been conditioned to see the issues soley from their point of view.
If you were to view the times from a slightly different perspective a quite different picture would appear before your eyes as if by magic.
It is true that the Nazis took a direct and brutal route to obtain their objectives. They have been thoroughly castigated for this however they merely did what had already been done during and after the Great War in Russia and Hungary and what the Liberal/Jewish/Negro/Communist coalition is in process of doing today as regards the White species. So in light of current deeds what makes the Nazis so evil?
While we were all astonished in the fifties as the insanity of the Nazi attempt became real to us we should no less condemn the Liberal/Jewish/Negro/Communist coalition for their plan to exterminate the entire White species of a billion plus people. This means you.
I am sure that Rosenberg and Hitler are sitting up in Heaven looking down upon us with wry bemusement.
So, this is the way in which Rosenberg perceived the racial aspect of the spiritual and intellectual confrontation of early twentieth century Europe.
Rosenberg calls it the struggle for freedom rather than submission to a false god, which is to say Semitic intellectual belief systems. He rightly says that the confrontation is between Asia and Europe going back fifty-five hundred years. The Fascist States, that is to say Germany, Italy and Spain placed themselves in battle with the entire semiticized world. The Semites themselves without military might did as the ancient Semite Cadmus did in ancient Boeotia of Greece when he incited the indigenous peoples into a ruinous civil war that allowed his Semitic invaders to take control.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Part III will follow in another post.
The High Brow And The Low Brow
The Mucker And Marcia Of The Doorstep
Part V
Marcia Explicated
by
R.E. Prindle
The contrast between The Mucker and Marcia Of The Doorstep can be seen as a response to two different challenges united by Burroughs’ personal psychological development.
He took the whole of 1924 to write this story so it may have been a real struggle. Unlike his other novels he doesn’t record a beginning and ending date in Porges so we have no accurate idea of how long it took him. It is possible that he had taken so much time, felt the need for money so intensely, that he rushed the ending through to try to sell the story. One the other hand he usually scamps his endings.
An indication that Emma may have been an influence in the planning and organization of the story is that it concerns matters that were very familiar to her. Just as she was a voice student as a girl, so Marcia. As Emma had to give up the studies so does Marcia.
The milieu of the stage would have been more familiar to Emma, although having gotten involved with the movies ERB might also have familiarized himself with the stage somewhat. I would have to opt for more involvement from Emma though. (For further thoughts on this read Part VI)
Unlike the other novels which feel as though they were written from the top of the head, Marcia has indications of more careful plotting. If that is true I don’t think ERB would have been capable of it so that would argue for more involvement by Emma once again. This is also a fairly complex plot that differs from ERB’s usual style.
Unless I’m mistaken the novel, even though unpublished, landed him in hot water with the AJC and ADL. I’m sure the reason would have been a mystery to ERB. If you’ve read Part II, Section II what I have to say will be clear, if you haven’t read the Parts I recommend it.
According to the Religious Consciousness there is no freedom of speech concerning the specific religion. The Religion will control who is speaking, what is said and how expression is to be allowed. ERB was not a member of the Jewish religion and as he was speaking unacceptably he was perforce an anti-Semite as the religion he was discussing was Judaism. Had he been discussing Liberalism he would have been pathologized as a crazy bigot. As Judaism was part of the diversity composing the Coaliton, Liberals would have considered him a bigot anyway. Bigot is the Liberal equivalent of anti-Semite.
The character in question is the shyster Jewish lawyer, Max Heimer. Max is an expecially well drawn character from the viewpoint of the Scientific Consciousness, which is to say, Max is accurately drawn. Whether from life or not is not yet known.
Max is the protagonist of the story. That anything happens at all is because of him. He is not an admirable character but on the other hand he is neither truly malicious or evil. The only thing that matters to Max, and would especially offend the sensibilities of the AJC and ADL, is the bucks. Max would probably stoop to outright thieving but he is a blackmailer, a swindler and a cheat. While what he does is criminal it is done in such a way as to escape detection. Even if you know he’s guilty the chances are you could never get a conviction.
But, he’s not really a bad guy at heart and by his lights he’s darn near a philathropist.
Max is always on the qui vive. One has the impression that he never lets an opportunity pass. Thus, one night he came across a drunken gentleman on the street, John Hancock Chase II. Chase II for some reason was totally incapacitated. Heimer took him home sensing an opportunity.
Max had been living with a woman, out of wedlock, named Mame Myerz. Although Mame wasn’t at home Max conceived the notion to tell the married Chase II that he had had sexual relations with Mame which he did nine months later when he showed up to tell Chase II he was a proud papa. Max would keep this a secret for a fee. Unable to sustain the blackmail Chase II shoots himself ruining a perfectly good source of income for Max. This is no skin off Max’s nose as he blithely goes about his and other people’s business for the next sixteen years.
That fine old gentleman, John Hancock Chase I bears the loss of his son stoically.
As it happened Della Maxwell bore her child and left it on the Sackett’s doorstep on 4/10/06.
If Max is finely drawn, no less can be said about Marcus Aurelius Sackett and his wife Clara, the long suffering wife of the air headed Mark, who is especially finely depicted. Just a few deft strokes but she is always in the background worrying over her man. Either I’m projecting from knowledge or ERB is able to portray a large loving woman who accepts the foibles of her husband, tolerating him and perhaps even loving him for them.
Both she and Mark are overjoyed at the child left on their step. They are no less overjoyed when Della shows up next day to move in with them. Della Maxwell is a well chosen name. Max-bad, Max-well.
Mark Sackett is ably portrayed as an actor of the old school who while he fumes at the modern trash of the stage is nevertheless the kind of trooper who doesn’t leave his fellows in the lurch. At this time in New York City he is working for Abe Finkel. Abe is obviously another Jew modeled on the producers Klaw and Erlanger. This is at the time of the development of movies from 1905 to 1914 or so.
In 1919 ERB moved to Hollywood where he would have been privy to all the stories of the origins of the studio owners who with few exception were Jewish. Most were from New York while Carl Laemmle was from Chicago via Wisconsin. They all had risen from mundane occupations to real wealth. Samuel Goldwyn had been a glove salesman. Harry Cohn had been a street car conductor, Louis Mayer had had a string of jobs worthy of ERB himself so it will be historically accurate for both Max and Abe to turn up in Hollywood as studio owners.
ERB was very good at weaving real life stories into his writing. There are probably real life models for many of these characters and their stories may be based on true stories as they say in Hollywood. For instance, Marcia’s first boyfriend Dick Steele goes to Hollywood as a stunt pilot where he meets his death, some mgiht say committed suicide, in a spectacular airplane stunt. As it turns out ERB didn’t make this story up from scratch but merely, fictionalized an actual event that occurred on a movie lot in 1920. William K. Klingaman tells the story ERB used in his popular history ‘1919’ of 1987.
Lieutenant Ormer Locklear moved to Hollywood in February 1920, where he originated many of the airplane stunts used in the movies. (He was the first aviator charged with reckless driving in the air, when he looped the loop over a public park in Los Angeles in April.) In the summer of 1920 he was working on a film called, “The Skywayman”; the last stunt was supposed to be a shot of a pilot plunging to his death with the plane in flames. Just before he ascended to film the sequence on the evening of August 3, Locklear turned to friends and said: ‘I have a hunch that I should not fly tonight.’ Spectators on the ground watched and marveled at the stuntman’s skill. Then they suddenly saw the plane only two hundred feet from the ground, struggling to right itself. It crashed in flames. Locklear died instantly, the farewell letter to his mother that he always carried with when he flew was found undamaged.
As ERB had no experience with the theatre and as his stage stuff seems fairly authentic and knowledgeable he may have borrowed stories like the Locklear tale and adapted them for his uses or else Emma had a fund of stories which she supplied for the novel. At an rate these first 125 pages are full of charming detail about the theatre.
Now safe in LA ERB even takes a loving poke at hometown Chicago. Della Maxwell explaining her breaking of an engagement in Chicago says on p. 30:
“I couldn’t stand (Chicago) any longer, Uncle Mark…It’s a hick town, filled with coal dust, wind and tank town talent. And slow, say, if I’d smoked a cigarette on the street I’d a been pinched for sure.”
Max Heimer keeps the story moving along when he visits the Sackett household as the legal representative of some unpaid actors. While there he notices the sixteen year old Marcia. Learning that she is sixteen his mind clicks back to 1906 when his and Mame’s plan fizzled when Chase II committed suicide. Ever on the qui vive he learns that Marcia was left on the Sackett’s doorstep on 4/10/06 which conincidence he can put to use.
Ever shameless and brazen, they call it chutzpah, he contacts Chase I to advise him that he has found Chase II’s illegitimate daughter. He’s picked the wrong man because the Senator, that fine old example of early American manhood, refuses to have anything to do with him however he has his Jew, that fine old examplar of the race, Judge Isaac ‘Ike’ Berlanger contact Heimer for him. If his son’s daughter is out there the fine old gentleman feels obligated to take care of her.
Probably already in deep for selecting a chosen person for a villain ERB begins here to really compound his error in the confrontation between ‘Ike’ Berlanger and the wily Max Heimer. Woodrow Wilson during his first administration appointed the first Jew to be a justice of the Supreme Court. This was Louis D. Brandeis of Louisville, Kentucky. Just as the Liberal Coalition propaganda machine remorselessly pilloried its victims so it equally exalted its favorites. Brandeis has been depected as a wise old saint for so long no one questions it. FDR in his administration referred to Brandeis as our ‘Isaiah’ whatever that might mean.
ERB doesn’t usually go far to find his models so I’m suggesting that Louis D. Brandeis was the model for Judge Berlanger. Alright. ERB probably thinks he’s going to get away with portraying ‘a Jew of the type; of Heimer by presenting a ‘fair and balanced’ picture of a ‘Jew of the type’ of Brandeis/Berlanger. Doesn’t work that way as Charles Dickens, who was accused of being an anti-Semite, found to his dismay when he balanced a Jew of probity against the villainous Jew, Fagin, of Oliver Twist.
One should always bear in mind that the very worst of a Chosen People is better than the best of the rest. Thus all heroes must be from the Chosen while the villains must be from the rest. So it is that all the villains currently have Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic names while all the heroes are of the Liberal Coalition.
Thus ERB was very ill advised to meddle in these proto-Politically Correct matters. Even though the entertainment industry of the twenties had been thoroughly Judaized he should have made Heimer an Anglo-Teuton while he was on track by making Berlanger an element of the Coalition.
The exchange between Berlanger and Heimer very likely sealed ERB’s fate for the next several years while he confessed his error in his portrait of the wise old Jew in The Moon Maid in attempt to do his penance. I can’t recall any more references to Jews in the corpus after this period. If you know of any, let me know.
The result of the conference between the two Chosen ones is that Senator Chase I is to settle twenty thousand on the Sacketts while providing Marcia with an income of a thousand a month.
Here ERB goes into some interesting ruminations on the effect of coming into money when you’ve never had any. Probably by 1924 he was wishing he had his finances to do over although he does say of Mark Sackett that he would never learn the value of money.
The intention of Heimer was to receive the twenty thousand from Chase, keep fifteen for himself and give five to the Sacketts. Berlanger is ahead of him giving the twenty directly to the Sacketts. Don’t rule out Max yet though; he’s one canny Scot.
Watching Mark come into money provides some amusing moments and an insight of how it had been with ERB. Mark goes out and buys a car which allows ERB to work in his accident with the taxi in Chicago. Charming passage though.
The old ham Sackett decides to use the money to bring back the glories of the stage; he wants to organize a touring Shakespearean company. There is some really nice wordplay as he attempts to inform Max of his plans. Max on the gui vive. He had not been denied that twenty thousand he had only been forestalled. He appoints himself the tour’s business manager so not only will he embezzle the tour’s profits but the original capital. But I get ahead of myself.
Bear in mind that all along Della Maxwell is aware of what a shyster Max is as she knows for a fact that Chase II wasn’t close to being the father of Marcia and she is also absolutely certain that Mame Myerz isn’t the mother. She keeps trying to warn Mark of what a shyster Max is without giving herself away to Mark.
As far as Max and the Sacketts go in the first 125 pages of the book, that covers it. The first third is of very nice quality, notwithstanding the ‘Politically Incorrect’ aspects. If ERB could have sustained this level of concentration throughout the book he would have had a truly excellent story.
Marcia is the other story line which has to be followed. When this precocious girl comes into her money, and twelve thousand dollars a year was nothing to sneeze at in 1922, her life changes also. Prior to the advent of her wealth she had been virtually betrothed to young Dick Steele. Marcia is troublesome as a character becasue ERB portrays her with such incredible maturity for a young girl. She’s barely legal, completely inexperienced but handles herself so well.
Dick with quick prescience realizes that this is the end of the line for his hopes but he’s going to hang on as best he can. He immediately quits school and gets a job in an airplane plant to make lots of money fast because he knows he’s going to need it. This employment leads to his job as a stunt pilot.
Marcia had been taking voice lessons for some time where she had met a wealthy young socialite named Patsy Kellar. When Patsy learns that Marcia is worth twelve thousand a year she invites her to join her circle. Marcia snaps into place like a memory stick in a digital camera. Personally I think ERB is pushing his luck here. The only thing that makes Marcia’s ability to fit in plausible is that she comes from a family of actors who may have aped the manners of the well-to-do. Indeed, ERB has speeches coming out of Sackett’s mouth that prove his ability to use the King’s English just in case anyone thought ERB was an illiterate, fantasy writer. ERB shows ’em how to in this one.
The Ashtons to whose circle Patsy belongs are about to take a cruise into the South Seas in their yacht, the Lady X. They think this sixteen year old flower of youth would be a delightful addition to their party. Which, in fact, she turns out to be.
Patsy takes her on a buying trip for clothes during which Marcia finds out how little a thousand dollars is. This also allows ERB to build some female interest a la Zane Grey to appeal to the lady readers of the Saturday Evening Post. So, the crew splits for Hawaii via San Francisco.
Now, when Chase II chose to exit rather than face the music he had a little son, Chase III. J.H. Chase III is now a twenty some odd Lieutenant in the US Navy and is stationed in- ready? Hawaii. Does he know Patsy Kellar and the Ashtons? Darn right. Old buddies. Welcome aboard. Chase III could have used his leave to go back to NYC to visit Grandpa but he opts for those soft South Sea breezes instead. Who can fault him except Grandpa and Grandpa doesn’t. Alright. So now he’s on board the Lady X with Marcia. All sixteen lovely years of her. Now begins the action of the middle part of the book.
ERB begins to fall back into his old ways although he has two stories to keep going. In the story of the Sacketts everyone considers Mark’s dream of bringing quality theatre to the heartland of America the height of foolishness but, I’ll be darned, the Heartland flocks to Mark’s performances to lap up the Bard. A little touch of culture really finishes off the man, you know. The tour is a huge success playing to SRO houses everywhere. The fly in the ointment is Max. The guy just can’t keep his hands off the money. He embezzles everything except for pocket cash of 300.00 for the Sacketts.
Stranded in San Francisco again, Max got the loot while the Sacketts got the hotel bill. The question is where did ERB get the story?
I had the haunting feeling the story was familiar. ERB didn’t have any theatre experience, nor did Emma, so he must have gotten the story, or combination of stories, really, from somewhere.
By 1924 he had been in LA for four years so he’d plenty of time to pick up theatre lore. The story of the tour sounds very close to the tour that brought Charlie Chaplin West. Chaplin wasn’t doing Shakespeare on that tour, that tour may have been another one ERB heard of. As I recall the Chaplin tour went bust in Salt Lake City also with Chaplin hoofing it to Hollywood.
In Salt Lake Max tells Mark that the jig is up, the show has gone bust, financially that is. Mark is incredulous as he has been playing to sold out houses but Max tells him there is no money and that is a fact difficult to argue about. Mark accepts the fact and, indeed, even if he knew Max had embezzled the money whatever records Max kept he said he had sent back to New York while as Mark was broke he couldn’t afford to sue anyway.
Now, let’s look to see if we can relate this to ERB’s life. ERB had had his best year ever after the move to LA in 1921 in which he earned approximately one hundred thousand dollars which might equate to the twenty thousand Mark received. While Mark lost his money in this improbable Shakespeare tour, or rather it was embezzled, ERB lost his on his pig farm. Who knows what was going on there? ERB had his income from 1919, 1921 and 1922 which must have amounted to from 200,000 to 250,000. Multiply that by fifty or so for inflation and that is a tremedous expenditure. It seems improbable that anyone could spend that much on a pig farm. Perhaps ERB thought someone had embezzled from him. Probably could use some investigation if for no other reason than to clear it up.
OK. Why Salt Lake City? If ERB is following Chaplin’s story then Salt Lake City would logically follow. However Salt Lake is one of ERB’s critical geographical locations. His interest in the Mormons hasn’t been properly examined although Dale Broadhurst made a stab in that direction. ERB made a special visit to Salt Lake in 1898 just after he purchased his stationery store. That was his first visit. Then in 1904 he and Emma resided there for several months during a very crucial period in his life, even a terrifying, desperate, excoriating one.
One that had him at his wit’s end shaking in his boots. While it is difficult to accurately pinpoint when his attitude toward Emma turned sour the several months in Salt Lake as a railroad shack may have been it.
Thus the tour breaking up in Salt Lake City may represent the beginning of the breaking up his marriage in 1904. The city certainly held a lot of memories for him.
Mark and Clara are left high and dry in SF. While Clara is out Mark turns on the gas and sticks his head in the oven. I’ve read that exact story before too but I can’t remember where. Or, perhaps, it is standard theatre fare.
From the Land of Fogs Mark and Clara wend their way down the coast to the Land of Smogs, the mecca of all actors. Mark is still too proud to work in the movies…but, we’ll leave the Sacketts in Hollywood while we follow out the story line of Marcia. This one is pure Burroughs.
While ERB has written Emma and himself into the story as Mark and Clara Sackett, Chase III and Marcia also represent his Anima and Animus. This central section is essentially a retelling of The Mucker ten years after. ERB no longer feels like the low brow scuzzy Billy Byrne, who was nevertheless ‘all man’, but is attempting the high brow Chase III. ERB has changed back from the Pauper to the Prince. His Anima presents a different problem. He didn’t feel up to Barbara Harding so he married her off to Byrne in Out There Somewhere. In Bridge And The Kid he scaled down from a New York socialite to the daughter of a big man in a small town. Gail Prim was apparently too much for the beat up hommy he was so now he scales down even further to a girl who is an orphan left on a doorstep to be brought up by strangers. Thus the role of Harding and Byrne are reversed. The Animus, Chase III, now has social standing while the Anima, Marcia does not. However everybody loves her and she is acceptable wherever she goes. There is some competition for her between the foppish socialite Banks Von Spiddle, the humorous name is a giveaway, and the military officer Chase III while the latter wins as might be expected given ERB’s prejudices. This very likely reflects the competition between ERB and Frank Martin that ERB won and is a recurring theme in his writing from his unpublished first story, Minidoka, and this one.
Just as there was a shipwreck in The Mucker so there is one here. Here ERB produces a new variation in that there are two life boats in one of which the best people were to go while in the other the muckers. In the turmoil of the storm and sinking Chase III and Marcia are separated from the first boat ending up with the muckers including the terrible Bledgo who obviously represents John the Bully as the storm represents the encounter on the street corner.
After the usual interval of several days adrift on the sea the crew spots the inevitable desert island. Going ashore the better people separate themselves from the worst of the muckers forming two parties which sends Bledgo searching for Chase III and Marcia. As the Animus represents the spermatic side of the body while the Anima represents the ovate Bledgo is really searching for the two aspects of Burroughs’ personality- the one he wishes to kill and the other to rape.
As the rest of Chase’s party realize that Bledgo only wants Chase III and Marcia they urge the pair to flee which they do. Bledgo doesn’t give up the search but pursues the pair up the mountain. There is a fight during which Chase III brings the butt of his revolver down on the forehead of Bledgo, reminiscent of ERB’s bashing in Toronto. The pair then continue their flight up the mountain.
In this sequence Burroughs takes vengeance on John the Bully by defending himself and his Anima as he felt he should have on the streetcorner while retaliating the horrific blow to the head he received in Toronto on his ancient enemy.
Thus as Chase III and Marcia continue up the mountain in a torrential downpour ERB’s Anima and Animus are reunited. He is a whole person again.
Reaching the top of the ridge they discover the best people singing, playing on the beach on the sunny side of the mountain. Thus ERB rejoins the people he was supposed to be among but was separated from by his encounter with John. How well this squares with real life is uncertain. It may just be wishful thinking especially as ERB is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
Incest and cannibalism are two recurring themes in ERB. The latter was a concern on the boat, the former now rears its ugly head. Chase III and Marcia reach the Philippines where they are to be married the next day however Marcia opens the mail waiting for her which includes a letter from Judge Berlanger. The letter advises her that Jack Chase is her half brother. Horrified and chagrined Marcia steals away in the night to take ship for San Francisco. SF and disaster again. It always happens that way for ERB in Baghdad By The Bay. Wonder why.
Aboard ship an entertainment is organized for which Marcia agrees to sing and act in a skit. She’s emaciated but that can’t mask her loveliness. Also aboard is a famous Hollywood producter. Needless to say Marcia is ‘discovered.’ A movie contract awaits her in Hollywood.
As I pointed out earlier there was a hiatus in the production of movies from Burroughs’ books from about the time he wrote Girl From Hollywood until 1927. Part was probably due to ERB’s writing on Jews in this novel but part was also due to his very negative portrayal of Hollywood in ‘Girl’. Thus just as he portrays a venerable Jew in The Moon Maid to atone for his portrayal of Heimer et al., here in this novel he lauds Hollywood as the home of the most wonderful people in the world. He reverses his portrayal of the director Wilson Crumb in the character of the kindly upright director Otto Appel, who also sounds Jewish.
ERB has now told two thirds of his story and is at page 295 of 351. He’s got a lot of story to go that he crams into the remaining fifty of so pages. Honestly, he needs at least two hundred to flesh out his story properly. Perhaps he had been at work on the story for most of 1924 during which he had generated no new income and wished to get the story off to the Saturday Evening P{ost for that fifty thousand dollar paycheck plus book rights. The amazing thing is that ERB doesn’t seem to have received advances from his publishers at any time. Also at this time things were getting strained between McClurg’s and himself. It won’t be too long before he breaks with them. We need more information on this aspect of his career.
So, Jack and Marcia are separated again while Jack has no idea where she may be. In the interval between their leaving and returning the world as they knew it had broken apart. No one was where they had been except Grandpa. Chase III runs into Pilkins, one of the sailors in SF. Pilkins had taken the same ship back with Marcia so he advises Chase III that she has gone to LA to be in the movies where Chase III follows.
I can’t think of a positive reference to SF in ERB’s writing. Either he just didn’t like the city or something happened there. If so, it would be good to know what.
At this time we have a whole crew in LA: The Sacketts, Marcia, Dick Steele, Banks Von Spiddle, Chase III, Max Heimer and Abe Finkel with Ike Berlanger to follow. This may be the alternative version of how the West was won.
I wish ERB had put more effort into this ending. Fleshed out this would be a pretty good story of the exodus of the entertainment industry from New York to Hollywood. This would be good first hand history of Hollywood at least, of which ERB was actually a fairly significant figure. I get kind of excited trying to piece together how it may have been.
ERB at one time had been allowed on the lots so we may assume that his production scenes were authentic as well as his depiction of Poverty Row. the latter was real where the more impoverished companies had their quarters. Mack Sennet had his quarters on Poverty Row. Sennet’s autobiography is well worth reading. Poverty Row is where F&H Studios set up business. Yes, after embezzling that thirty thousand dollars from Mark Sackett Max Heimer ran into his old acquaintance Abe Finkel. The two combined to form F&H. They are the one’s who give Dick Steele his start as a stunt pilot.
Max is about town where he runs into Mark Sackett frequently. Max is not a bad guy, in the same circumstances many another who had injured a man would hate him contriving to injure him further. Not Max. Once he’s got the money he’s a congenial fellow. He presses small loans on Mark who after all is only receiving his own again. Max, who undoubtedly has developed some pull, gives Mark leads to jobs that if Mark had taken them would probably have led to decent prosperity if not more. As Mark is too proud to accept movie roles he doesn’t follow up but Max does his best by him.
As I pointed out in Part III, Sam Goldwyn had revived the Potash and Permutter stories of Montague Glass filming the Broadway play in 1923 which was a great success. In 1924 he filmed In Hollywood With Potash and Perlmutter that was an equal success while probably charming ERB so much that he based the F&H Studios of Finkel and Heimer on the movie.
Here ERB compounded his error of the first part of the book by making the two Jews humorous and despicable. The inference is that because of their cheapness they were responsible for Dick Steele’s death.
Remember Mame Myerz? No sooner does Max make a few dollars than he takes up with a gorgeous starlet. Mame gets wind of this back in the Big Apple where she goes berserk. She immediately tramps into Judge Berlanger’s office attempting to sell him the true story of Marcia. The old Judge doesn’t give in that easy so Mame spills the beans that she isn’t Marcia’s mother and she wasn’t anywhere near Chase II.
Thus the way is cleared for Marcia and Chase III to marry; no danger of incest. Max hears of this putting the screws to Mame to retract her statement which she does. Now there’s enough doubt in Marcia’s mind that the marriage is off once again.
In Max’s last scene, I kinda hated to see the little guy go, Judge Berlanger, also now in LA confronts Max with the theft of Mark’s money. Chutzpah deserts the wily little attorney. Unable to brave it out with Berlanger Max accepts defeat turning his assets over to Mark. He was forbidden LA and New York in which places he hasn’t been seen to this day. By stories end I kind of liked Max Heimer although it would be best to go the other way if you saw him coming.
Marcia was lost track of after the Philippines. She has lost track of everyone else. She becomes a star but as she had taken another name no one knows where she is. They don’t go to her movies, apparently. Mark and Clara’s fortunes continue to decline becasue of his bullheadedness until finally their landlady turns them out into the street. This was probably how ERB and Emma felt when they had to leave Tarzana after only four years.
ERB’s situation must have created a lot of gossip. After all a famous author comes to town buys a huge estate, c;mon 540 acres? and within two years is in financial difficulties and after four a virtual bankrupt forced from the estate. Tongues must have wagged. I’d sure like to know what they were saying. Just exactly how ERB’s Hollywood contemporaries thought of him.
In the meantime, completely destitute, Mark accepts movie work. He is sitting on a lounge on the set when the star, Marian Sands, walks on the set. She sees Mark who recognizes her as Marcia and the family is reunited again.
Chase III arrives in LA in search of Marcia. He apparently never goes to the movies so he doesn’t make a connection between Marian Sands and Marcia Sackett. He enters a career of dissipation turning to drink and gambling. Too proud to contact granddad he runs through his money.
He has some amusing encounters with oilmen which probably reflect ERB’s own as he floundered around trying to find ways to make money fast. There’s a lot to be done here in researching ERB’s business doings in LA. Later in the decade he will get involved in the Apache airplane engine and airport development so it seems unlikely that he wasn’t trying to be a business success in the early and mid-twenties. Dearholt showed up a couple years later with movie schemes that ERB bought into so what was he doing in the business sense?
Chase III who has been hanging around the studios looking for Marcia rather than studying theatre marquees gets into the movies finally locating his loved one. Some direct borrowing from Merton Of The Movies here. Moving very rapidly and sketchily ERB throws in a couple suicide attempts as the couple get together. Resemblance between Edith Wharton and Scot Fitzgerald here.
Together again there is still no hope of marriage because of possible incest, even though Marcia will never love another or marry.
OK. Della Maxwell. Remember her? She’s back in Chicago in the hospital dying a slow death. Well, you know, she is Marcia’s mother. On her death bed, I mean, the pen falls from her fingers as she signs the letter to Marcia, she makes a clean breast of it telling the story, sending the bigamist marriage license, birth certificate, everything so there will be no doubt that Marcia is semi-legit and not related to Chase III.
We’re almost there do you think? Not by a long shot and there’s only ten pages left. The mail train with Della’s package is held up somewhere in Arizona. The bandits disappearing over the border with the swag that contains Della’s letter and little metal box.
Wow? What next? OK, ERB’s got a twist or two still hidden up his sleeve. Banks Von Spiddle- yes, he’s out there, too- has a ranch down in Mexico that the Revolutionaries of 1914 failed to expropriate. A guy with a name like Banks Von Spiddle ought to get lucky once in a while I should think.
He and his vaqueros go out coyote hunting. They have a good day, getting a full bag. The last coyote tries to hole up in a small cave where Von Spiddle blasts the life out of him. While he’s drawing the coyote from the cave he notices a decayed leather mail pouch kind of thing. What do you suppose that might have been? Yeh, right. Della’s letter and little metal box intact. Von Spiddle can be small or he can be big. He chooses to be big giving the info to Chase III and Marcia so they can be married and live happily for however long marriages last in Hollywood.
Thus ERB manages to compress a marathon into a hundred yard dash in the last fifty pages.
Over all a good enough story. Neither Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post nor anyone else wanted it so ERB lost a year with no income, or income from new work anyway. If he was living on edge at the beginning of the year he was still on the edge at the end. Whew!
How did he get out of that financial bind?
Part VI and End is the next post.
Exhuming Bob Part IX: Chronicles Vol I: Pensees 2
April 26, 2008
Exhuming Bob
Part IX
Chronicles Vol. I:
Pensees 2
by
R.E. Prindle
I rather admire Bob’s method of integrating his life into history. He makes himself part of the unfolding plan of historical development. As some very ancient fellow once said: The unexamined life is not worth living. Having posted the rather narrow parameters of his story- that of his signing by Lou Levy and his subsequent redemption of the contract- he fits in most of his intellectual development to the time of the redemption of the contract.
He does this in an interesting way. In Chaper 2, The Lost Land, an interesting title in itself, gives the feel of prehistory, he begins by describing how like some insect he burrowed into the nest of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel where he lived in parasitic comfort.
The path to Ray and Chloe’s door is interesting. First he met Dave Van Ronk, through Van Ronk he met Paul Clayton and through Clayton Gooch and Kiel. Bob is going to suck off Van Ronk and Clayton to a very large extent also. Bob describes his hosts as quite eccentric, one might almost say, weird. As a foreign body in the cocoon he even studies them dispassionately, clinically, one might say. As one species of another.
As with the other people he attached himself to they had a terrific record collection and what appears to be a large very eclectic library. While Bob appreciates the library one feels that he believes the selection of books as odd and weird his hosts. The library apparently formed the basis of his adult education as he thumbed the books. This is really the first step in how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan the songwriter. Remember he has only a year or so before his career is fairly launched and he no longer has any use for people like Ray and Chloe. Both appear to have been queintessential Bohemians- or Bohos in brief.
In this environment Bob provides us with this biographical sketch. P. 28
I was born in the spring (5/24) of 1941. The Second World War was alreadey raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it. The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors. If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning. It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D. Everybody born around my time was a part of both. Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt- towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble. Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Ghengis Khans, Charlemagnes and Naopleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner. Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with- rude barbarians stampeding cross the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.
I don’t necessarily agree with the interpretation but one might ask what its intellectual background is. As bob was writing at the age of 53 of a period he didn’t remember and probably hadn’t formulated his opinions by 1959 he is projecting subsequently obtained knowledge back on his birth as falsified Persistence of Memory. I admire that. One has to have order in one’s life.
Actually if one has read more than somewhat in certain areas the intellectual foundations are more than apparent. Bob was born Jewish and for four years after his Bar Mitzvah- turning 13- he attended a Zionist summer camp for a month or month and a half in those summers.
There was a synagogue in Hibbing but it isn’t clear that Bob regularly attended services or was very observant. As an illustration of what being Jewish means let me cite an ad for the new cable channel called Shalom. This is the first all Jewish channel. In the ad or blurb a man is discussing his Jewish education. He says that they tell you that you will attend a goi school where you will learn to be an educated man. And then you will also attend this other school where you will learn what it means to be a Jew. The man says that he already knows what it means to be a Jew- You suffer. You suffer.
Thus at Camp Herzl- the Zionist Camp- Bob spent four summers learning to suffer as a Jew. Bob didn’t mention Camp Herzl in his book.
Now, Jewish teaching is that only Jews can rule a just world. Only Jews are cultured and learned, all others are like ignorant bulls in a china shop- mere barbarians. The last phrase In the quote from Bob is that the goi leaders were- rude barbarians stampeding across the earth and hammering out thier own ideas of geography. This is the exact opposite of how Jews imagine that they would be managing things.
the notion is that only Jews are capable of creating a just sane society. This notion hasn’t proven out well in post-WWI Russia, Hungary, and Central Europe or today’s Palestine but facts don’t disturb the notions of ideologues. We know that Bob is an Israeli citizen and it appears he follows the Party line. Can’t help himself, really, that was the way he was educated on the Jewish side.
Then, on pages 27 and 28 bob finds it important to mention Adolf Eichmann. Now, Bob only has 300 pages to work with here so we may assume he has selected only very key items to discuss. One could easily write 300 pages without mentioning Eichmann. I’ve written close to 3000 pages of autobiographical fiction and I don’t believe Eichmann has come up once. Nevertheless Bob writing of the time at the age of 53 has this to say:
(Ray worked) also an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor. Once I asked him what it was like. “You ever heard of Auschwitz?” Sure I had, who hadn’t? It was one of the Nazi death camps in Europe and Adolf Eichmann, the chief Nazi Gestapo organizer who’d managed this, had been put on trial recently, in Jerusalem….His trial was a big deal. On the witness stand Eichmann declared he was merely following orders, but his prosecutors had no problem proving that he had carried out his mission with monstrous zeal and relish. Eichmann had been convicted and his fate was now being decided on….The State of Israel claimed the right to act as heir and executor of all who perished in the final solution. the trial reminds the whole world of what led to the formation of the Israeli State.
Spoken like a true Israeli patriot. There is no need to defend Eichamnn, the disposal of the conquered belongs to the conqueror without the legal hocus pocus of a trial. Did anyone believe that the Nuremburg Trial wouldn’t find the defendants guilty? Why the charade? There was no exonerting evidence that was going to be considered. The Israeli State was not even in existence during the Second Wrold War so by what right does the State of Israel act. None. Their own will. Be honest, they wanted to kill this guy, that’s all. They weren’t even one of the conquerors. They had nothing to do with the defeat of the Axis.
So what does the trial of Eichmann mean? The Israelis violated all international law by abducting an Argentine citizen without authority or extradition. If Eichmann was a thug the Israelis were no less so. Did they feel they had an overriding grievance? Bully for them. If they’re interested I’ll send a list of mine which I feel no less passionately.
And then the State of Israel has appointed itself to act as heir and executor of all who perished. That’s a convenient right to assign oneself. I, The Jury as Mickey Spillane said. What a convenient right. It doesn’t square with justice but then who among them are objecting. The Jews were self-righteously against capital punishment in all the other barbaric countries of the world. But…they would make an exception in Eichmann’s case. As time would show they would make a lot of exceptions. Assassination became there mode of operations.
As I say there is no need to defend Eichmann, if you want to kill him, kill him. No one will object, but to set aside all the rules, all the laws that separate civilization from barbarism seems a bit extreme. It does make one question one’s sincerity.
The trial does fit within the time frame of the novel though, so Bravo! Bob.
After that little moriaistic lesson for us all Bob brings us up to date on some of his musical influences, which were all excellent and then acquaints us with the foundation of his literary and intellectual education as provided by Ray and Chloe.
He says he did little reading as a kid. He also says he was not much of a student. One gathers then that the talk of the biographers about Bob being on the honor roll was a figment of Mother Beatttie’s imagination. She was apparently telling them of the Bob she wished Bob had been instead of the Bob that was. Primarily his own reading considted of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Luke Short and H.G. Wells.
Good influences all. Luke Short was also my favorite Western writer, him and Ernest Haycox. Of course I remember not a shred. The choice of H.G. Wells is probably represented by Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G. Wells. His reading or Wells probably consisted of The War Of The Worlds, The Island Of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man. The other four didn’t get read very often but I have come to really appreciate The Food Of The Gods and In The Days Of The Comet. I’m a big Wells fancier myself having read about 90% of a very large corpus, some of it two or three times. At Bob’s age however I was only familiar with the volume Seven Science Fiction Novels Of H.G. Wells.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is my forte as my essays on I, Dynamo and ERBzine will attest. So both Bob’s and my own influences closely mesh. It is of interest to note that having read Tarzan Bob married a Black woman and installed her in Tarzana. Burroughs of course founded Tarzana naming it after Tarzan. Cute.
Bob goes on to discuss items he read in Ray’s library. Ray was a pretty interesting reader. Bob really fell through the rabbit hole when he moved in with Ray and Chloe.
I don’t feel the need to run through what he read, the reader can check it out himself if he wishes, but Ray provided Bob with a nagnificent foundation in a very short time. I am impressed that Bob found Honore de Balzac a great writer. Damn, that Bob does have an unerring nose for the best in both records and literature. Balzac is one of my favorites too although I’ve only read about twenty volumes of the immense corpus Balzac called the Human Comedy. If you want to read a really stunning story, a novelette, get The Girl With The Golden Eyes and have your life changed. Too bad Bob got confused by being forced to try to combine a liberal education with a Jewish one. I’ve got a Jewish one too, acquired late however, but I scrapped it as useless.
I, Dynamo 