The Most Notorious Publisher In American History

by Stephen J. Gertz

He stood at the crossroads of Modernism and censorship, twentieth century literature, copyright law, and cultural history. He introduced America to James Joyce's Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, Alfred Jarry's The Garden of Priapus, etc. He also published Loose Shoulder Straps by "Alain Dubois" aka poet, litterateur, and author of The Rhyming Dictionary, Clement Wood; Padlocks and Girdles of Chastity by Alcide Bonneau (1928); Sacred Prostitution and Marriage By Capture (1932); Lady Chatterley's Husbands (1931, written by Antony Gudaitis, aka Tony Gud);  and the famed homoerotic novel, A Scarlet Pansy (1932 deluxe issue, by "Robert Scully," almost surely poet Robert McAlmon, with a 1933 trade edition). He edited and published Two Worlds, a hardbound literary quarterly whose contributing editors were Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford. He was a master of mail-order book sales. The list of imprints he established is as long as a leg. He was Jean Valjean to New York Society For the Supression of Vice leader John S. Sumner's Javert. He spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions. He gave his name to a  key Supreme Court 1st Amendment decision. Samuel Roth's personal and professional activities - they were one and the same - ultimately allowed Americans to read whatever they wanted to; his sacrifice at the Court in 1957 made it safe for U.S. citizens to buy legal American copies of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1958 and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1959 without Mrs. Grundy at their door with SWAT team and incinerator.

Roth, at right, in his Poetry Book Shop, Greenwich Village 1920.

"Samuel Roth…was a man of considerable culture. Some of the material he sold was trash; some of it was unquestionably literature" (Charles Rembar). He believed that "reading is itself is a great good, any kind of reading is better than no reading and some people will read only rather low material, which I am willing to supply" (Samuel Roth, as paraphrased by his attorney, Charles Rembar, in his The End of Obscenity).

Sam Roth (1893-1974), if he is remembered at all, is infamous for his literary piracies. After he serially published twelve excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses without authorization in Two Worlds, Sylvia Beach, who had published the first edition of Ulysses in Paris, at Joyce's behest organized an international protest in 1927 against Roth with 167 internationally respected intellectuals and artists signing the document, including Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Albert Einstein. He was immediately vilified. This incident has deeply scarred Roth's legacy. Jay A. Gertzman, with evidence not available to earlier scholars, makes a strong case for reappraising Samuel Roth's guilt, both legal and ethical, in a new and definitive biography.

Issue 1, No. 1, December, 1925.

Gertzman, who in his Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940 (1999), exposed the edgy world of the clandestine, East Coast-U.S. publication of sexually-themed literature, has now, after at least fifteen years of research, published this long-awaited biography of Roth, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist, the first deeply researched, full-length investigation of the man and his milieu.

Samuel Roth.

Grade C-Z moviemakers were once consigned to Gower Gulch, a low-rent, run-down section of Hollywood near the major studios but a light year distant from their  superior quality; it was also known as Poverty Row. Brazen upstarts, outsiders, and finaglers with ambition but little money and desperate to distribute their product through a system dominated by the big studios vied for the eyeballs of movie-goers. New York publishers short on cash but long on brash found themselves in similar circumstances. Being proudly Jewish and thus not well-connected to or well-perceived by book publishing's elitist, gentile power-centers didn't help. Having a constitutional attraction to literature, modern and classical, fiction  and non-fiction that defied contemporary moral standards was certainly a disadvantage. A strong anti-authoritarian streak and determination to publish and accept the consequences (but not without a fight) in concert with a fundamental aversion to censorship in a free society only made matters worse. Being a blatant huckster came with the territory; publishing was a Darwinian business. Easily victimized, you did what you had to do to survive. Roth, a downtown publisher with uptown aspirations, was all of these things, and a writer, too, a brilliant Columbia graduate with artistic pretensions and a voice for self-pity. Born in Galacia, he was raised on New York's Lower East Side, where chutzpah was sliced thick and Roth's portion super-sized.

Roth's mug shot, 1930, upon beginning his two-month prison
sentence for selling copies of Joyce's Ulysses in Philadelphia.

An outsider to begin with, the Ulysses controversy made him an outcast, a  pariah for his sin as "desecrater of literary expression." Gertzman carefully mounts a strong case that Roth was not the philistine he has been made out to be. 

• Roth did not "pirate" Ulysses. Because of a clause in contemporary U.S. copyright law written to protect the domestic printing trade, books that were not printed on an American-based press were not granted copyright protection. Ulysses was, within the U.S., in the public domain. Blame Congress.

• There is evidence that Joyce and Roth's mutual friend, Ezra Pound, acting as Joyce's literary agent, gave Roth the go-ahead, and that arrangements for payment had been made.

• Joyce's outrage was disingenuous. While sincerely trying to protect his image as avant-garde genius he was also a shrewd businessman not without keen commercial instincts. The furor of his friends and supporters was exaggerated. Edited excerpts of Ulysses had been previously published and no one complained about it. A managed protest could only increase awareness and build demand for the book's ultimate legal publication in full in the United States (Random House, 1934). Genius aesthete versus greedy capitalist barbarian always makes a good story.

• Joyce's concern that sales of the Beach edition of the book would be hurt by Roth's excerpts to a broad audience (Roth wanted his publications bought by the average man on the street; his overriding goal was to popularize literature of all kinds and get it to the hinterlands) was groundless and something of a canard. With its limited press run and price the Beach edition was never meant or expected to attract a broad readership beyond wealthy collectors.

Gertzman goes on in depth and what we take away is that there is plenty of blame to spread amongst the actors in this bit of literary theater. Roth was not a boogey-man. He was, to a large degree, the perfect scapegoat.

Sketch, undoubtedly by Mahlon Blaine, for an advertisement.

Are you aware that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a memoir concerning his incestuous relationship with his sister, Elisabeth? In 1951 Roth published My Sister and I (NY: Boar's Head) based upon a manuscript in Nietzsche's hand that fell into Roth's possession in 1924. Its first edition went through fourteen printings. He initially advertised its publication in 1924 but ran out of money (Roth never got rich publishing anything, much less Ulysses, and was always in a financial bind of some sort). After a raid on Roth's offices by John S. Sumner in 1929 the manuscript was thought lost. It resurfaced during a 1940s inventory. Real or apocryphal Nietzsche? Gertzman presents the critical arguments, strong on both sides. The jury remains out.

Roth was a big cat who, when wounded, roared and attacked, a Lion of Judah. He was a "steadfast Jew and Zionist...who became so distressed by what he felt was lack of support from his co-religionists that he, after claiming to be instructed by Jesus in a vision, wrote Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All Frontiers of Civilization, a vicious 325-page anti-Semitic tract that was used by Nazis for propaganda and is kept in print by right-wing white-supremacist groups today" (Michael Bronski).

NY: Golden Hind Press, 1934.

• • •

Thrill of the Trade Department:  around ten years ago I had Roth's personal copy of another publisher's piracy of A Scarlet Pansy (NY: Nesor [Rosen, backwards], 1937) pass through my hands. Within, Roth made penciled revisions, cuts, and expurgations for his planned reissue (NY: Royal, 1940). The book also possessed subsequent annotations by sexual folklorist and bibliographer Gershon Legman, who worked for Roth during the 1930s, recording what Roth was up to with this book, from Legman's library, acquired directly from his widow, Judith. I felt as if I was sitting next to Roth as he worked on the book. Thanks, GL.

• • •

Roth lost his 1957 appeal to the Supreme Court to vacate his 1956 conviction for obscenity; he went to jail. But he won the war. The Court's Constitutional test in Roth v. United States - that for a work to be judged obscene its "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" of the "average person, applying contemporary community standards" without any redeeming social value whatsoever opened the door to soft-porn. Soon, "redeeming social value" could be found in anything no matter how hard-core, particularly if publishers hired medical professionals or literary critics (real or otherwise) to write prefaces explaining why Doing It With Dad and Brother Dan While Mom Sings Hawaiian War Chant presents an intimate family interpersonal dynamic with deep psychological insight into the human condition and a penetrating sociological view of the exotic byways of love in an All-American metropolis, thus saving it from  Vice Squad condemnation.

Scholars and citizens with an interest in modern literature and the struggle for frank expression and publication of  candid material in a free society will be captivated by Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist. I believe every library should own a copy; it's a must-acquire. For those fascinated by the shadow world of clandestine publishing and modern lit. in the U.S. it's a must-read.

But it's not a free read; you have to pay for it and that's how it should be. Yet at $74.95 it may be a bit too un-free. Issued by University Press of Florida it's a case study of what has gone so wrong with university press and books-on-books publishing. While the volume is very attractive its production quality is not what you'd expect from a book costing $75. And the $75 cost is likely connected to its print run, which, given the current state of the market (dismal), cannot have been more than 500 copies.

I can't help but think that if Roth were alive and the publisher, the book would have been issued as a fine trade paperback for $25 in an initial print-run of 2,000 copies and distributed via mail order and through every newsstand location in the country with accompanying hard-sell suggestive and sensational hoopla and ballyhoo using every free marketing tool available to spread the word that this is a sizzler, a book the major publishers found too hot to handle, an important book on American literary and publishing history about the man who died so that Ulysses, Casanova Jr.'s Tales, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Pageant of Lust, and The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags (Roth's best-selling exposé of President Herbert Hoover, 1931) could live, and made it possible for the huddled masses to not only breathe but read free.

__________

GERTZMAN, Jay A. Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xxviii, 387, [1] pp. Illustrations throughout. Illustrated boards. $74.95. Release: 4/23/2013.

UPDATE: 
A PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT ($30 total) HAS BEEN EXTENDED THROUGH JUNE: Order online at http://www.upf.com/ book.asp?id=GERTZ001
This link will appear as: University Press of Florida: Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist
Click on “add cloth to cart”
Click on “apply code” (just above the “check out” button) and enter code: PP113
Follow ordering instructions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface

Chapter One: 1893-1916: From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University.

Chapter Two: 1917-1925: Prelude to an International Protest: A Rising, Pugnacious Man of Letters.

Chapter Three: 1925-27: “Damn his impertinence. Bloody Crook”: Roth Publishes Joyce.

Chapter Four: 1928-34: Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and Its Bankruptcy.

Chapter Five : 1934: Jews Must Live. “We Meet Our Destiny on the Road We Take To Avoid It”

Chapter Six 1934-39: A Stretch in the Federal Penitentiary.

Chapter Seven: 1940-1949: Roth Breaks Parole, Uncovers a Nazi Plot, Gives “Dame Post Office” Fits, and Tells His Own Story in Mail Order Advertising Copy.

Chapter Eight: 1949-1952: Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Celine, and Nietzsche.

Chapter Nine: 1952-57: The Windsors, Winchell, Kefauver: Back to Lewisburg.

Chapter Ten: 1958-74: “It Had Been a Long Time since Someone Like You Had Appeared In the World”: Roth Fulfills his Mission.

Appendix: Samuel Roth’s Imprints and Business Names.

Bibliography.

__

Other books by Jay A. Gertzman:

A Descriptive Bibliography of Lady Chatterley's Lover. With Essays Toward a Publishing History of the Novel.

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940. 
__________

Full Disclosure: Mr. Gertzman and I are friends, and he kindly acknowledges me in the book as a source, however modest my contribution - and it was, indeed, very modest.

__________

Image of My Sister and I advertisement courtesy of Mr. Gertzman's website, with our thanks.
__________
__________

Beware Of Jewish Doctors, 1937 Edition

by Stephen J. Gertz

The American Medical Association and the editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association come under attack in this thinly-veiled anti-Semitic rant in the form of a allegorical farce in dialogue published in 1937.

The characters who converse include Dr. Gil T. Conscience ("A little too honest to be a successful doctor"), Dr. Buryem Atta Profit ("In partnership with Mr. Undertaker"), Dr. Cuttem Upp ("A versatile surgeon cutting for money"), Dr. Smarty ("Talks too much and tells secrets of the American Meddlers Association"),  Dr. Skinnem Alive ("His scruples never interfere with his money-making"), Dr. Pop Off (" A free-thinker - resigned from the American Meddlers Association"), Dr. Getsum Moore ("A very frugal person with his eye on the money"), the Milo Brothers ("Owners of a great money-making hospital," i.e. the Mayo Clinic), and the Hebrew harbinger of all ill-health and medical hooey, Dr. Morey Fishback Kike ("A notorious quack and leader of the American Meddlers Association").

Dr. Kike is the thinly-veiled Dr. Morris Fishbein (1889-1976), editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association 1924-1950, founding Editor of Medical World News (1961), fierce crusader against medical quackery, and strong proponent of regulating medical devices, too many of which were useless yet heavily promoted cures for cancer and all manner of medical woe. For this, he was excoriated by fringe medicos, snake-oil charlatans, and desperate citizens willing to believe anything that promised them relief, no matter how hocus-pocus, unproven, and medical-sounding the malarkey. Evidenced-based medicine was the enemy, and the AMA a corrupt, hook-nosed medical-political machine that needed to be crushed if the profession was to remain open to new, promising therapies no matter how broken the promise, how gimcrack the gizmo.

There is, of course, no anti-Semitism intended in this scurrilous little pamphlet. It's only a coincidence that Dr. Kike is circumcised, has a Jewish-sounding name, and invites low ethnic epithet. To make sure readers understand her pure intent, Ms. Rogers, a naturopath, offers the following disingenuous defense in the Preface:

"Because the villain in this story happens to be a Jew, I do not wish to leave the impression that there is anything wrong with the Jewish people - their honesty, their integrity, or their methods of doing business. I am only using the term American Meddlers Association, because I have heard this term used in an amusing and interesting manner. As far as I know, there is no such association. Because the villain on this story happens to be a Jew whom I have heard called Dr. Morey Fishback Kike, does not mean that there is such a person."

In sum, it's the rich, money-grubbing Jewish doctors of the AMA who are putting the nation at risk, not good guys like Royal Rife, the microscoptician and electrical engineer who dreamed up a high-frequency emission machine that safely zapped cancer to death. Only it didn't. So the AMA banned it, thus insuring that they would be associated by some with the destruction of an innocent genius who got in its way and the snuffing-out of a medical entrepreneur whose only crime was innovation, not peddling false hope to the desperate. Think Laetrile.

Despite its defamatory nature, American  Meddlers Association was so highly regarded that during the 41st Congress of the American Naturopath Association one of the featured speakers ceded to Esther Rogers his time to address the assembly.

Full disclosure: I was, as a child, one of Dr. Fishbein's star medical students. His Handy Home Medical Advisor (1957) was my bible when seeking an innocuous yet serious-enough childhood ailment whose symptoms I could reasonably fake and get out of school for a day, a week, a month, and, in one case, four months - a miracle of modern medical science:

Based upon careful study of his description I successfully feigned infectious mononucleosis as a ten year old fourth-grader, so successfully that when tested by my pediatrician I actually had infectious mononucleosis. Dr. Fishbein was a genius, and I suspect that I was not the only kid who got through childhood by earning a Ph.D in Pre-Pubescent, Pubescent, and Adolescent Medical Truancy and Malingering while under his tutelage. He was a medical meddler only in the eyes of my parents. To me, he was Doc Marvel, The Man Who Made School Stop.

__________

ROGERS, Esther. American Meddlers Association... Ethical -- Ultra-ethical! Kansass City, MO: Esther Rogers, 1937. First edition. Octavo. 32 pp. Original yellow-orange wrappers.

__________

Image courtesy of Garrett Scott, the Bibliophagist, currently offering this item, with our thanks.

__________

__________

Rare Holocaust Books & Art Come To Auction

by Stephen J. Gertz

The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland. London: Hutchinson, [1943].
Octavo (216 x 140mm). 16 pp, printed in red and black.

Estimate: £500-£800 ($785-$1256)

A rare cache of nine books, including a very early official report of the Holocaust addressed,  in 1943, to the impotent League of Nations, exposing the extermination of Jews in Poland by the Nazi occupiers, is being offered today, March 21, 2012, at Christie's Fine Printed Books sale.

The report was based upon the brave work of Jan Karski-Kozielski, a Polish Government emissary in occupied Poland, who bribed his way into a German concentration camp and witnessed the mass extermination of Jews. The report was written in 1942 and printed in 1943 on behalf of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs "In the hope that the civilised world will draw the appropriate conclusion, the Polish Government desire to bring to the notice of the public, by means of the present White Paper, these renewed German efforts at mass extermination, with the employment of fresh horrifying methods."

HASS, Leo (1901-1983). 12 puvodnich litografii z nemeckych
koncentracnich taboru.
[12 Original Lithographs from the German Concentration Camps.]
Prague: Svaz Osvobozenych Politickych Venzu, 1947.
Oblong 2° (343 x 480mm). 12 lithographs.
Original printed paper wrappers.

Estimate: £2000-£3000 ($3140-$4710).

A fine copy of Leo Hass' 12 puvodnih litografii z nemeckych koncentracnich taboru, a collection of images illustrating life in Auschwitz, is part of the cache. It is signed by Czech poet, essayist, translator, and resistance fighter, Frantisek Halas.

Leo Haas was an important Czech-Jewish graphic designer and book illustrator of who survived Terezin, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen where he was classified as a political prisoner. This is an extremely rare volume, with only four copies recorded by OCLC.

MATOUSEK, Ota (1890-1977).
Krezby Z Koncentraku: 61 Puvodnich Litografii.
[Drawings from a Concentration Camp: 61 Original Lithographs.]
Prague: Sdruzeni Jihoceskych Vytvarniku, 1946.
Quarto (307 x 208mm). 61 lithographs.
Original linen-backed boards.

Estimate: £2000-£3000 ($3140-$4710)

A fine first edition, limited to 200 copies signed by the artist, of Ota Matousek's Krezby Z Koncentraku: 61 Puvodnich Litografii (Drawings from the Concentration Camp), features sixty-one lithographs of everyday life at Flossenburg concentration camp.

Matousek was widely exhibited in Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Flossenburg. After liberation a set of images depicting everyday life in the camp was exhibited in Prague. Only two copies are recorded by OCLC.

STIBOR, Bohumil. Soubor Drevorytu Z Koncentracniho Tabora.
[N.p.]: by the author, 1946.
Oblong octavo (300 x 210mm). 10 woodcuts.
Original paper wrappers by Emil Spongl.
Provenance: Bohumil Stibor (inscription dated 1946).

Estimate:  £1000-£1500 ($1570-$2355).

Soubor Drevorytu Z Koncentracniho Tabora, a collection of ten woodcuts privately printed by artist Bohumil Stibor and bound at the Emil Spongl bindery in the town of Pelhrimov, Bohemia in March, 1946, will also fall under the hammer. A fine copy inscribed by Stibor, the book is quite rare, with only two copies recorded in Worldcat and none in Copac.

TUMA, Mirko. Ghetto Nasich Dnu. [Ghetto of Our Days].
Prague: Salivar, 1946. Octavo (257 x 180mm). 12 plates.
Original printed wrappers.

Estimate: £500-£800 ($785-$1256.

An excellent copy of Mirko Tuma's Ghetto Nasich Dnu (Ghetto of Our Days), his personal account of daily life in Terezin concentration camp, with illustrations by Leo Haas, his friend and fellow captive, is another rare literary and artistic spark to emerge from the Holocaust's flame.

During his three and a half years in the Czech ghetto, better known by the German name Theresienstadt, Mirko Tuma wrote numerous poems, translated Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and adapted Calderon's The Judge of Zalamea. After the war he emigrated to the U.S.

From: Ghetto Nasich Dnu.
Illustration by Leo Hass.

Material of this nature, of this quality, in this condition rarely comes into the marketplace in multiple lots within one auction sale. This is an unusual opportunity to "never forget" with unforgettable books.

__________

Images courtesy of Christie's, with our thanks.
__________
__________

Vile Rarities From the Archives of the American Right-Wing

by Stephen J. Gertz

WARNING: This post contains highly disturbing images containing commensurate text. 

Once upon a time (for this truly seems like a fairy tale), the Right and Left wings in the United States had homes in both the main political parties. While the Republican Party teemed with rabid, ugly, and bigoted anti-Communists, the Democratic Party was host to rabid, ugly, bigoted segregationists. And then there were the Right-Wingers who'd flown so far to the Right that they flew out of the mainstream and into fringe parties of particular nastiness.

The campaign brochure above heralds the contentious 1930 Alabama elections, in which a number of Ku Klux Klan-funded Democrats broke away from the party to run as Independents. The Independents lost, and the event marked a pivotal moment in the consolidation of old-line Democratic power in the state, which would go unchallenged until the Civil Rights conflicts of the Sixties.

This illustrated brochure, produced by  main-line Democrats, was intended to show that, despite rejection of KKK backing, the Party remained staunch in its support of the principle of White Supremacy. Page one provides brief text and lists members of the Party’s Executive Committee and Honorary Vice Chairmen (among whom was future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black). The remaining three pages reproduce ten captioned political caricatures lampooning the campaign tactics of the apostate Democrats and the Republicans. An unusual item; not located in OCLC.

The Democratic Party Is Calling You! [Birmingham]: Democratic State Campaign Committee, [1930]. Quarto (28cm). Single sheet, folded to four newsprint pages. 

Marilyn R. Allen's Caucasian quo vadis, White Man! What of the Night? (1959) is an anti-integration tract by the author best-known for her 1949 inspirational, spiritually uplifting  opus, Alien Races and Mongrelization: “...since the Warren Court’s communistic race-mixing decision was admittedly NOT based in and on the Constitution (nor on precedent), but on alien socialistic doctrine and Organized Minority pressure, it is therefore null and void.” Not located in OCLC.

ALLEN, Marilyn R. White Man! What of the Night? Salt Lake City: By the author, [1959]. Gate-fold leaflet, 15cm x 14cm. Single sheet folded to six newsprint pages.

It wouldn't be a party without the American Nazi Party spiking the punch with their  brand of poison. Here, the National Socialist White People’s Party,  successor to George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, descries Special Rights for Black Savages. Insert homosexual, feminist, Jewish, etc. for the full Party platform. This recruiting broadside for the NSWPP states its headquarters address as 2507 North Franklin Road, Arlington, VA, where the group moved following the assassination of Rockwell.

Special Rights For Black Savages? Arlington, VA: National Socialist White People’s Party, N.d. [post- 1968]. Broadside, 11” x 8.5”, printed recto only on newsprint. 

 

This broadside from the good ol' folks of the Fighting American Nationalists simulates a typical “Wanted” poster, depicting an African-American in caricature; the subject here is identified as “Levi Coon.” Alias “Jigaboo, Baboon, Ape....he has been known to be led by communist Jews in a conspiracy to destroy America and the White race. He is believed to be armed with a razor, a gas bomb, a Star of David, and a bottle of Sweet Lucy wine.” The Manischevitz winery was surely relieved by their exclusion from this arsenal imagined by the malignantly asinine.

This is one of the more horrific pieces of racist propaganda you'll ever encounter. The “Fighting American Nationalists” was a  hate group reputedly established by George Lincoln Rockwell in the mid-1960s as a front for the American Nazi Party.

WHITE, C. Wanted Dead Or Alive. Hendersonville, NC: Fighting American Nationalists, 1975. Broadside, 11” x 8-1/2” (ca. 28 x 22cm). Printed recto-only on a single sheet of standard xerographic paper.

If the recto headline above doesn't get you right here, the verso headline will: “Scientists Say Negro Still In Ape Stage - Races Positively Not Equal.”

Edward R. Fields' scurrilous junk science screed was issued by The Thunderbolt, the official organ of the National States Rights Party, a neo-Nazi group active in the mid-1960s. This organ desperately needs a transplant; it is diseased, a thunderbolt that Zeus rejected and speared into the garbage can, only to be retrieved by ignorant, bottom-feeding mortals and thrust into the soul of America.

Here, the standard pseudo-scientific tropes are proffered regarding Negro inferiority (reduced brain size; prognathous jaw; prehensile toes, etc). It concludes: “As the black genes of the Negro are more powerful than white genes - the Negro has thereby destroyed every white civilization that he has come in contact with or has left that civilization stagnant and rotting and dependent upon the last drop of white blood from outside to keep it going. Mongrelization of the Races Would Destroy White Christian Civilization.” It also includes a brief discourse on the “Two-toed Vadoma Tribe,” whose members can “run like the wind, scale trees.” Not located in OCLC (this screed, not the Vadoma tribe, which lives in the western region of Zimbabwe and whose members, indeed, have a congenital foot disfigurement).

There's a silver lining to this toxic cloud.  Black-Americans can take cold comfort in knowing that, by its own statement, the National States Rights Party believed that Negroes were biologically superior to Whites, with super-duper DNA that overwhelms all others. Curiously, the National States Right Party appears to have accepted evolution and Darwin's The Descent of Man. At the time, however, anti-science had yet to be added to the far-Right's anti-everything list.

Given the caliber of white people addressed here Black-Americans would surely prefer to be related to apes. I'm white and proud to be descended from apes; they have more dignity. I'll take King Kong over King Cotton's DNA anytime.

FIELDS, Edward R. The Negro Is Related to Apes -- Not White People. Marietta, GA: The Thunderbolt, Inc., N.d. [ca 1964-5]. Quarto broadside (36cm), printed in black ink on both sides of a standard ledger-sized sheet. With four illustrations.

The National States Rights Party's Most Important Program  planned for the deportation of American Blacks to the African continent, noting that “...African nations could receive the entire Negro population of the United States within twenty years, without disproportionate strain on any one nation...” Also includes a draft “Back To Africa Law,” calling for stripping all Negroes of American citizenship; cash bonuses for those volunteering to emigrate; and forcible deportation of those unwilling to volunteer. The National States Rights Party was a neo-Nazi group founded in 1958 and active through the early Seventies. Theirs  was a very short-sighted scheme. Who'd they think was going to perform all the low-class menial labor that poor white trash felt was beneath them?  C'mon, people! Geesh!

SMITH, Drew L. How To Ship Negroes Back To Africa. Marietta, GA: National States Rights Party, N.d. [ca 1964-65].  Printed folio circular (ca 36cm x 22cm). Single sheet folded to four pages.

When racism and rabid anti-Communism get together the results are always a joyful expression of self-realization for the zealously righteous, revealing a breathtaking psychopathology usually associated with  the anti-Christ in Jesus' robe. The above graphic reproduces a photograph of Martin Luther King, Abner W. Berry, Aubrey Williams, and Myles Horton in a classroom of the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The text identifies these subjects, calling them the “four horsemen of racial agitation...[who] have brought tension, disturbance, strife and violence in the advancement of the Communist doctrine of ‘racial nationalism.’”

The Highlander Folk School was founded by Don West and Myles Horton in 1953 as a training facility for southern civil rights workers; it was the frequent and favorite subject of attacks from anti-integrationists. The present broadside, issued under the auspices of the Georgia Commission on Education, is similar to another, larger broadside of the same ilk print-signed by Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin. OCLC notes only two locations (CSU Sacramento & Historic New Orleans Collection).

Martin Luther King...At Communist Training School. [Athens, GA]: Georgia Commission on Education. N.d. (ca 1957). Broadside, printed recto-only on a single legal-size sheet (ca 36cm x 22cm). Thirteen lines of text and central graphic.

• • •

A funny thing happened to Right-wing Democrats on their way to the lynching. Before the ink was dry on President Johnson's signature to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they mentally bolted from the Party and, in 1968, with Presidential candidate Richard M.. Nixon taking advantage of their profound discontent, ran into the Republican Party's open arms and warm embrace where they and their heirs have remained  cozy and  happy ever after though perpetually disgruntled; chronic lip-service, from  wiser Party leaders who seduce for the Presidential nomination, abandon for the election  and then pragmatically lead the country from only center-right, has been their bitter reward for loyalty. Now, fed-up and having driven traditional mainstream Republicans out of the Party to become the new Republican base, they, along with what was once the Republican far-Right fringe, are the true RINOs,  Republicans In Name Only.  It's a another great, albeit strange and deeply ironic, Only in America story.

__________

All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks. Mr. Bair is a specialist in the history, literature, and art of American social movements including the radical politics of both poles; the Left-wing falls under his purview, as well. Bair is one of the go-to rare booksellers for students, collectors, and curators interested in this subject.
__________

Has the American Left-wing  published odious agitprop? Of course. But though stinky, it is rarely, if ever, as blatantly and shamelessly hateful. And it is almost always designed better.

__________
__________

Alfred Dreyfus, Anti-Semitism, and the Museum of Horrors

by Stephen J. Gertz

No. 6. Le Traitor. Dreyfus as a hydra-head dragon.

Alfred Dreyfus  (1859 – 1935) was a French artillery officer of Jewish faith whose trial in 1894 on charges of treason for which he had been framed became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history. Convicted of the false charge, he was sent to the French penal colony at Devil's Island in French Guiana to serve a life sentence in solitary confinement.

Beginning in the Fall of 1899 immediately after Dreyfus’ re-trial at Rennes and at the opening of the Paris World’s Fair, a series of scurrilous, blatantly anti-Semitic posters was issued by Gérant, publishers in Paris, The hand-colored lithographs were created by an artist working under the pseudonym V. Lenepveu. They were eventually confiscated by the police, who also stopped their production. 

No. 49. Le Casserole de Fontainebleau.
Alfred Dreyfus as a rabbit about to be stewed.

A total of fifty-one of these hand-colored lithographed broadsides ridiculing  Dreyfus and his statesmen, businessmen, journalist, and Jewish leader supporters  ("Dreyfusards") were issued under the general title, Musée des Horreurs (Freak Show).

No. 45. Le Baron Alphonse.
Baron Alphonse James de Rothschild, eldest son of James.

The broadsides dramatically illustrate the increasingly hostile debate throughout the Dreyfus Affair. “Means were dirtier and more violent even than today. The clash of principles degenerated into the sort of brawl that follows a good wake. The tone of debate was inconceivably virulent: scurrilous, personal, and mostly directed below the belt" (Kleeblatt, N. The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, Berkeley, 1987, p. xxvi).

Of all the posters that the affair engendered the present series “was perhaps the most ambitious... Lenepveu succeeded in these visual character assassinations by attaching peculiar animal bodies to naturalistically rendered faces” (ibid. p. 298). 

No. 44. Le Baron James.
Baron James de Rothschild.

"The flood of press, poster and postcard caricatures stigmatising the ‘Jewish Republic,’ notably during the Panama Canal scandal, continued throughout the [Dreyfus] Affair, reaching hitherto unequaled heights of virulence, especially in 1898 and 1899. If anti-Semitism can exist without imagery, those who wanted to whip up public opinion against the Jews systematically used a visual vocabulary inspired by both traditional anti-Semitic and anticlerical imagery. Anonymous or famous caricaturists such as Willette, Caran d’Ache, Forain, Orens and Le Petit tried to outdo one another in their attacks on Alfred Dreyfus, the Jews, [Émile] Zola and the Dreyfusards. The sheer number, colours, obscenity and cruelty of their depictions in La Libre Parole, La Croix, Le Pilori, L’Antijuif, Psst…! and Le Musée des Horreurs had overwhelmingly more impact than the Dreyfusard caricatures [of those in the anti-Dreyfus camp]" (Alfred Dreyfus, Le combat pour la justice).

No. 43. Karl Mayer le Contrabandier.
Karl Mayer-Rothschild.

"With the Jews, the Musée des Horreurs, the Freak Show, has a field day. If the 'freaks' such as Zola, Labori or Picquart are drawn by simply adding their recognizable faces on the body of an animal, the facial features of the Jews are all caricatural...

"Look...at the faces of the Baron Alphonse de Rothschild as a one-eyed octopus, and his sons, Philippe de Rothschild, Edouard de Rothschild, and Karl Mayer-Rothschild: the caricatures here are grotesquely distorting their faces in order not simply to mock them... but also to demonize them.

"This is when one can see how slowly, but surely, a botched spy case dragged part of the French public opinion into the most disgusting fanaticism. The need for the caricature to be elliptic, keeping the decoding easy and funny, leads to the dangers of sensationalism by exaggerating attitudes and deforming nuances. The goal was to invite a gut reaction from the man in the street. The mob was the ultimate target. But the mob, indeed, often answered the call for action.

"These often tasteless and outrageous documents are indeed part of the collective memory which transcended a judicial error into a test for the French Republic and a symbol for the fight for basic human rights" (Jean-Max Guieu, Professor of French, Georgetown University, Bibliographer Emeritus, Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair, University of Pennsylvania. Video interview transcription).

No, 43. Charlotte Mayer.
French painter and socialite. Charlotte Mayer né Charlotte de Rothschild,
was the daughter of Baron James de Rothschild.

Dreyfus's re-trial in 1899 led to  re-conviction and dishonorable discharge from the French army. The trial was another sham but in 1906 he was completely exonerated of all charges and reinstated into the army when the complete story of his framing by jealous officers and dubious initial investigation came out during a subsequent, unbiased inquiry. He served as an officer in WWI.

Complete sets of these lithographs are extremely difficult to come by. A fine collection of nineteen of the original fifty-one has recently, however, come into the marketplace.

__________

LENEPVEU, V. (pseud.). Musée des Horreurs [Freak Show]. Paris: Impr. Gérant: Lenepveu, 58, rue Dulong..., 1899-1900. First issue. Fifty-one hand-colored lithographed broadsides, each 50 x 65 cm.

__________

Images courtesy of Davar Antiquarian Books, currently offering these rare lithographed posters, with our thanks. For inquiries, contact Davar's proprietor,  Ari Grossman, here.

__________
__________

The Stammering Transports of an Ecstatic Man: Meidner's September Cry

by Stephen J. Gertz

 

"I cry in a loud voice. I listen to my mind but can not decipher the deep words. With flying arms I will go on from noon dream. ...” Ludwig Meidner, Septemberschrei.

A beautiful copy of Ludwig Meidner’s Septemberschrei  has come to market. With only 100 copies printed, it has become quite rare; the book is being offered for $7,500.

Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) is regarded as a key representative of  urban Expressionism. But in 1918 the German printmaker and writer produced fourteen lithographs that would, in 1920, be integrated into his post-World War I manifesto on the arts, Septemberschrei, September Cry, a passionate outpouring against the very movement that made his reputation and its subjective anti-realism, rejection of the temporal, and distain for nature. The enthusiastic acceptance of mechanization, abstraction, and the concomitant spurning of nature had led to the horrific, monstrous machine warfare that consumed Europe. One can imagine Septemberschrei pouring from the mouth of Munch’s screamer:

"The manner in which many of us lived and worked before the war was not right...What we need for the future, all of us, is a fanatic, fervent naturalism; oh, a passionate, virile, and unflinching veracity, like that of Masters Multscher, Grünewald, Bosch, and Breughel...our visions must be articulated as clearly and powerfully as those of Multscher and Grünewald...let us always think of these two! And let us not forget the noble, reliable, prudent craft of these heroes...Yes, craft - precious, laborious craft - which has its own severe beauty! All too frequently we have been remote from our world. Our desired goal was a geometric formulation, and the most advanced artists in particular obsessively strove for abstraction and concrete art. All you painters with your heads in the clouds, you want to forget the earth and to squeeze the spirit pure and immaterial directly out of your tubes of paint. But behold for just a moment the glorious reality of things...Let us hold fast to the earth, lest we end up in the boundlessness of the wild blue yonder. Let us return to a passionate realism, to a deep, loving faith in the physical reality of the world."

The figures in the lithographs of September Cry are seers of a new future yet “the fourteen lithographs of prophets that accompany his text, however, were still representative of his ecstatic style. Meidner's quest for for a 'fanatic naturalism' was undertaken in in the 415 intaglio prints that he produced between 1919 and 1922. While some painters studied Max Doerter's painting manual in order to develop beyond Expressionist formalism, Meidner undertook a study of the graphic techniques of artists like Dürer and Rembrandt" (Crockett, German Post-Expressionism: The Art of the Great Disorder 1918-1924, pp. 62-63).

The prophets of Septemberschrei are all in the image of Meidner, who was as obsessed with self-portrait as Rembrandt.

“After [Oskar] Kokoschka, it is to Meidner that we owe the most important portraits of the generation of Expressionist writers, to which he himself - by virtue in particular of his books Im Nacken des Sternemeer (Behind One the Sea of Stars,’ 1918) and Septemberschrei (September Cry, 1920) - very much belongs. These works are personal admissions, clothed in expressive vernal formulas, ‘ardent confessions, stammering transports of an ecstatic man...’ The drawings [in Septemberschrei] display the whole panorama of the features that characterize Meidner” (Lang).

Meidner’s reactionary stance against Expressionism was not welcome in all quarters. Expressionism was considered the only approach that could capture the essential truth of reality in the twentieth century, a hard, urban, cynical, mechanistic, inhuman world that no amount of wishful thinking could erase. Critic Wilhelm Hausenstein decried "the shamelessness of...the neo-naturalistic baroque-naturalistic vehemence of Meidner" (Hausenstein, Die Kunst in diesem Augenblick, as cited by Crockett, p. 22).

Meidner’s highly emotional flood was an embarrassment and insult. The extreme intensity of experience that Meidner expressed was, for some, too much, as if, in his shock, the war had loosed an avenging, apocalyptic angel of the arts,  a Christ-figure in the wilderness struggling with the devil, shouting to God, seeking a true path out of the wasteland and to the Sermon of the Mount.

It is axiomatic that after a cataclysm a society will question everything that led up to it. The war had changed everything; to ignore the horror and return to business as antebellum usual was strictly for ostriches. These neo-naturalist artists and writers were birds of a different feather altogether, with eyes wide-open to keenly see that a world turned upside-down was not about to turn right-side up again, that, indeed, right-side up had been the wrong side up to begin with. The nineteenth century was now officially dead and buried, the millions who died during the war littering its corpse. But to throw the beauty of the natural world, however ugly, out with the bloody bathwater was immoral.

Meidner fled Germany in 1935. Though his rejection of abstraction in the arts would, theoretically, find sympathy with the Nazis, the idealized beauty that Hitler embraced and mythologized was not for Meidner, who sought and found the lyric bloom in the ugly truths of the real world. And, too,  Jews were, by 1935, persona non grata, a grim reality that was a bit too earthy, even for Meidner, whose ecstasy transported him out of Germany before the Nazi  Ministry of Transport transported him to Dachau et al and a most unnatural death.

__________

MEIDNER, Ludwig. Septemberschrei. Hymnen, Gebete, Lästerungen. Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1920. Vorzugsausgabe (Special Edition), one of 100 hand-numbered copies on handmade Van Geldern-Bütten paper, with all fourteen lithographs signed in pencil by Meidner in the margin. Large quarto. (2), 75, (5) pp. fourteen original lithographs hors texte, lithographs hand-printed by Pan-Press.  In the publisher’s deluxe binding of quarter vellum over patterned brown paper over boards.

Lang 234, p. 54; Jentsch 88; Rifkind/Davis p. 528f.; Raabe/Hannich-Bode 203.2.

__________

Images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd., with our thanks.
__________
__________

Rare and Racist American Books For Children

by Stephen J. Gertz

Ten Little Niggers. New York: McLoughlin Brothers, n.d. (c. 1895).

There is a world that many Americans would like to return to. It was, theoretically, a simpler time, of simple, straightforward values, simple government, simple freedoms.

These are yearnings we can all share, as mythical as they may be. What we cannot share is all that went along with it, including a brutally ugly streak of overt racism; it is completely and utterly indivisible from those halcyon days of yesteryear.
 

Nine Niggers More. London and New York: Frederick Warne & Co., n.d. (c. 1896).

Yup, those were the good ol' days, when you could call a black person a nigger without castigation. You could use the word on radio without fear of losing your broadcast because some people are too sensitive and need to get with the program; it's the audience's fault, not the broadcaster's.

Yes, those were less sensitive times. If you had cement between your ears, no problem; everybody did. Nuance, who needs it?

MONTGOMERY, Frances Trego. Billy Whiskers in the South. Akron: Saalfield, 1917

Now, of course, you can't call a black man a nigger without being armed against reprisal. You'd think black people would be over it by now but no, they keep clinging to offenses hundreds of years old. It's time to take back America from those who won't allow us to say or do what we want without punishment.
 

BAILEY, Carolyn Sherwin. Lil' Hannibal. New York: Platt and Munk, 1936.

The word and all it represents is anathema to all thinking people.

Is there any time a white person can use the word?

Years ago, when I fought in the amateurs, my stablemates and I called each other every racist epithet in the book. Blacks were niggers, Mexicans were beaners, and I, the only one in the joint, was a kike. No one was offended. We were friends; the words were thrown around easily and, dare I say it, with affection and respect. The words were not meant to hurt and were never taken as such.
 

PHIPPS, Mary. Liza Jane and the Kinkies. New York: Sears, 1929.

Outside the gym, with strangers, another story; never in a million years. Context is everything, which is something that many don't get. Only a supremely stupid person would use the word and think it casual and inoffensive.

My mother was raised in a small town in Texas whose black population literally lived on the other side of the tracks. I was taught that the N-word - never uttered in her home when she was growing up - was never, ever, to be used; it was deeply offensive and demonstrated a profound lack of respect. There is great irony here: My maternal grandfather was a member of the local chapter of the Klu Klux Klan. And here is the greater irony: For many at the time (the 1920s-early 1930s), including my grandfather (who died before I was born), enlisting in the Klan was akin to joining the Rotary Club, a local booster organization. You joined not because you believed in the ugliness but, rather, accepted it as a go along to get along means to maintaining business relationships. Bigotry? You took the bad with the good. If you were a cracker it was a non-issue; what's wrong with hating blacks?
 

Pantomine and Minstrel Scenes.: A Picture Carnival for the Young.
London and New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1883.

It is this sort of passive racism that lies at the bottom of much of the contemporary American political scene. It is deniable yet not believable. Many otherwise good people remain blind to the racism that virtually every American possesses, to one degree or another.
 

Ten Little Colored Boys. New York: Howell Soskins, 1942.
Featuring die-cut heads.

When you are raised with books such as these to provide the only models of Black Americans that white American children will likely see, you will grow up a racist, no matter how "charming" the books may be. And the children of those children, though once removed, will be heirs to that tradition. And if your life is not going the way you believe it should you will find a reason. It is not Black Americans, American Muslims, Jews, Hispanics - name your ethnic or religious group - that are to blame. it is the white person staring you in the face as you wash your face and hands that is responsible for your woe.
 

BAKER, Josephine. La Tribu Arc-en-Ciel. Netherlands: Mulder and Zoon, 1957.

It is inconceivable that an American publisher would have issued Josephine Baker's La Tribu Arc-En-Ciel, featuring her "rainbow" of children of all races, in 1957, the year it was published in Europe. Now, no problem; we've come so far. Yet remain so firmly in place.

It may come as a surprise that these books are avidly collected, not by racists, but by Black Americans. Same story with anti-Semitic literature; collected by Jews.

Take back America to the good old days? No. Never again.

__________

All images courtesy of Aleph-Bet Books.

__________

__________