George Sylvester Viereck's Busy Life

George Sylvester Viereck's magazine, The Fatherland (1914)

Imagine the scene outside his father-in-law’s home, about 20 people milling around in the warm August night, shouting that he should leave the suburb of Mt. Vernon, N.Y. and never return. 

Did George Sylvester Viereck push aside the drapes to peer out the parlor window?  Apparently the presence of two policemen guarding the front door did not reassure him of his own safety.

And so as the dog days waned in the summer of 1918, George left his wife and two sons with her father and returned to Manhattan. From there he would continue to edit his two magazines, The International and The Fatherland.   In their pages he strongly supported Germany throughout the Great War, which the U. S. had entered in April 1917.

Later, his work would be labeled propaganda.

The child of a German actress and – purportedly – one of Kaiser Wilhelm II's unacknowledged sons, George immigrated to the U. S. at the age of 13.  Known as Sylvester or “G.S.V.,” he graduated from City College of New York with literary aspirations, having published a small volume of verse in 1904 while he was still a student.  In 1907, George published a second collection of poems which won national attention.

George Sylvester Viereck as a young man

After college, George traveled frequently to his native land.  He developed a particular interest in foreign affairs and became a German nationalist. 

In 1915, agitated by the debate over U. S. involvement in the war, George helped found a nationwide antiwar group called Friends of Peace.  The group immediately demanded that the U. S. stop supplying ammunition to England and that England lift its blockade of German ships. 

Friends of Peace wasn’t really a pacifist organization.  Rather, it intended to prevent an alliance between the U. S. and England.  Its members were largely Americans of German and Irish descent who had a natural – understandable – antipathy toward England.  They included scholars, clergy, publishers, and business executives.

The group held rallies in Chicago, New York, and other cities.  Meanwhile, President Wilson campaigned for a second term on the slogan, “He Kept Us out of War.”  Friends of Peace did not trust Wilson and endorsed the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes (later appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court).

George led a busy life.  A prolific writer – novels and memoirs in addition to poetry and international affairs – he also lectured widely.  Over time he developed a reputation for being anti-American – hence the angry neighbors outside his father-in-law’s home – but that did not seem to bother him.  

The Fatherland became The American Weekly (1918)

After the war, Congress investigated how Germany had used propaganda in the U. S., and George was named as a saboteur.  American agents showed evidence that he had advance knowledge of Germany’s plans to sink the Lusitania.  But there were no consequences, and George resumed writing, turning his anger toward Wilson, the League of Nations, and reparations. 

In the early 1920s, George made his first visit to Europe since before the war.  He stayed for eight months, scoring interviews with Hitler, Mussolini, and the Kaiser, who was now in exile in the Netherlands.

 

His 1923 interview with Hitler occurred just a few months before the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted Nazi coup in Munich.  But the putsch failed and Hitler was imprisoned for nine months, passing the time writing Mein Kampf.   

In the course of the interview, which did not see the light of day until 1932 when it was published in Liberty Magazine (another pro-German magazine), Hitler railed against Bolshevism and Marxism. 

“In my scheme of the German state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel, for the usurer or the speculator, or anyone incapable of productive work,” he told George.

Back in the U. S., George emerged as an unabashed supporter of Hitler and registered as a foreign agent.  He established a publishing house that issued isolationist, Anglophobic and pro-German books. But things caught up with him.  In 1941, just a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, a grand jury indicted George for deliberately hiding the extent of his work as a propagandist.

He would serve about five years in prison, during which time his life fell apart.  His younger son was killed in the Battle of Anzio, and his wife left him after liquidating all of his assets and donating the money to Catholic and Jewish charities.  He died in the Berkshires in 1962.*

In his study hung portraits of Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, and Goebbels alongside those of Freud and Einstein.  “All these people I have known and admired,” he liked to tell visitors.  “The psychoanalyst, the scientist, and the dynamic force – all have been my friends.” 

After World War II

*He lived out his years with his son, Peter, a professor at Mt. Holyoke College.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/08/george-sylvester-vierecks-busy-life.html?m=1

Mr. & Mrs. Bernard H. Ridder

Mount Vernon, N.Y., 1910

After her father’s death, Nellie’s life meandered along. There she is, in the social pages of the Mount Vernon papers, the guest at numerous lawn parties for children. 

It’s pleasant to imagine her chasing bubbles from out of the shadows near the deep porches where adults, including her mother’s patron, spoke quietly.

The city’s first treasurer who subsequently became postmaster and vice president of the First National Bank of Mount Vernon, Clarence S. McClellan served as co-administrator of Daniel Hickey’s estate because Hickey died without a will. Claiming “no business experience,” Hickey’s widow petitioned the court for McClellan, a calm man with a large mustache, to join her.

As guardian of her underage children, Ellen Hickey would provide to the Surrogate’s Court an annual report of expenses made on her youngest daughter’s behalf until Nellie turned 21 in 1908.

In the meantime, the pince-nez’d Reverend Flynn, who had presided at Daniel Hickey Sr.’s funeral, watched over Nellie at the Sacred Heart Convent. There she struggled with catechism. Nellie had distractions.

Records of Surrogate’s Court show that Nellie sought medical attention at least twice monthly. Ellen Hickey must have felt both stricken and annoyed each time Nellie visited the doctor, which necessitated hiring a carriage. One can’t help but imagine Victorian-style woman’s troubles.

Robert Howe, M.D.                                   $  6.00

Wm. Stump, M.D.                                     $  3.00

Jos. J. Sinnott, M.D.

Services at Hospital                     $157.14

Visit                                                    15.00

Visit                                                     6.00

Visit                                                   40.00

Dr. J.J. Higgins

              Visit                                               $   5.00

              Visit                                               $ 10.00

J.J. Thomson, M.D.                                 $   5.00

               

It’s fair to conclude that Dr. Joseph John Sinnott – a young surgeon who graduated from Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1903 – performed an operation on Nellie when she was 21 years old.  

Dr. Sinnott might have made a good husband for Nellie but her mother likely hoped for a man who would amass greater wealth. To that end, Ellen Hickey invested persistently in her daughter’s appearance and social standing:

Mrs. H. Fowler, dressmaker                 $   6.00

                                                                          1.50

                                                                          1.00

A.S. Clark, dressmaking                         $ 55.19

Rosen & Yale, tailor                                $  2.00

M. Jenks, dressmaker                             $20.47

B. Altman & Co.                                       $35.45

                                                                          8.70

                                                                          5.30

                                                                          2.22

M. Kereng, dressmaker                           $  7.25

                                                                     $22.95

R.H. Macy, dry goods                              $  4.44

Stern Brothers, trimmings                     $  2.04

Ufland Millinery Co.                                $22.00

                                                                          3.00

                                                                             

The Manhattan hat shop owned by Moe Ufland was known widely for its extravagant creations: crown of French-blue fancy straw, having the side-crown covered with black poppy leaves, two black spires upstanding at the left back, as described in the Millinery Trade Review in 1914.

Trimmed up and unchaperoned, Nellie was sent off to mingle in places where she might find a husband. In Larchmont, N.Y., she stayed at the stylish Bevan House one block from the beach along Long Island Sound; at Lakewood, N.J., she luxuriated at the Laurel-in-the-Pines Hotel, a winter resort where trains purportedly arrived every 20 minutes from New York City. 

She wasn’t a gold-digger – the term came into use in 1915 to describe working-class women and showgirls who sought wealthy husbands – but it’s easy to imagine Nellie dressing for dinner, lounging in the lobby, hoping to catch someone’s eye.

Hotel Laurel-in-the-Pines, circa 1900 

That person would be Bernard H. Ridder, the newly-divorced son of the publisher of the Staats-Zeitung, the nation’s largest German language weekly newspaper. Bernard and Nellie Hickey eloped on December 31, 1915, two months after the death of Ridder’s father.

The old man did not leave his sons in a good spot. The company had lost money through risky investments in typesetting equipment, although Bernard and his brothers would get it back on track and build it into the large newspaper corporation, Ridder Publications. 

Meantime, back in Mount Vernon, Nellie’s mother moved to the nicer side of town. Eventually Daniel Hickey, Jr. followed their deceased father into politics, becoming a ward supervisor, supervisor of elections, and State Tax Appraiser. He and his siblings continued to live at home.

So the question is: how did Nellie and Bernard come to know each other?  

Very likely they met in 1915, through efforts to create a nationwide organization called Friends of Peace, which opposed U.S. entry to World War I. Its immediate demands were that the U.S. stop exporting ammunition to England and that England lift its blockade of German boats. Bernard Ridder and his father were among the group’s organizers.

In September 1915, Friends of Peace held its first big meeting, a two-day convention, in Chicago. 

Many who attended – including Nellie – were Americans of German and Irish descent who opposed any alliance between the U.S. and England. Labor unions considered joining in, but were scared off by the anti-U.S. rhetoric. 

In this way, Friends of Peace differed from pacifist groups like the Woman’s Peace Party.

One wonders what lesson Bernard Ridder took away from World War I, after which the family fell under suspicion for publishing pro-German propaganda. Two decades later, he would be drawn to Germany after Hitler rose to power, going so far as to meet and publish a sympathetic interview with the Fuhrer.

By that time, Bernard had divorced Nell.

See January 20 + January 24, 2016 posts.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/mr-mrs-bernard-h-ridder.html?m=1

Nellie Hickey & Her Father

Nellie Hickey stands at right outside Chicago's Medinah Temple, 1915;
image is backwards (Chicago Historical Society)

Mount Vernon lies just north of the New York City, a twenty-nine minute train ride from Grand Central Station. It was Nellie’s hometown.  

Across the railroad tracks on Second Avenue, the public library endowed by Andrew Carnegie houses a local history room established in 1976 with bicentennial money. It is rarely open because the library can’t afford to staff it. The tables are piled with files and boxes spilling over with papers.

Lying on a dusty desk is a photograph of two women delegates at a 1915 peace convention in Chicago’s Medinah Temple. The caption states that one of the women is Nellie J. Hickey of Mount Vernon, N.Y.  

Who was she? Perhaps a peace activist or suffragist who worked with Jane Addams? She could have been prominent in local political circles or even on the national scene.  There ought to be information about her in the cabinets arranged like a maze through the dark room, creaky wooden drawers crammed so tight that nothing breathes.

But it turns out that Nellie doesn’t occupy even one folder.  Instead there is much about her father, Daniel C. Hickey, a 19th-century Democratic Party operator, borne out in headlines.      

The Democratic Town Convention.

A LIVELY SCRAP AMONG HEELERS.

Throw Down Sheriff Duffy

To PLEASE HICKEY

 Keen Competition for the Churches

And the RACETRACK.

It was all about political battles. Nellie’s father had a long reach. He probably kept his shady dealings out of the house or at least on the front porch. But the children surely were introduced to a few important visitors; for example, the power-broker William Bourke Cockran, a brilliant orator and congressman who championed Irish home rule.

Further down the road, Cockran would align himself with German-American opposition to U.S. entry into World War I. That made sense because the Germans and the Irish shared a furious loathing of England. 

Thus, although he died years before his daughter went out to the Chicago peace convention – which was, in fact, a pro-Germany rally – at home in Mount Vernon, Nellie’s father had made associations that would shape her future.  

***

Back in time, when Nell’s father schemed and triumphed all over New York State, he had to pinch himself to remember that he came penniless from Ireland in 1840. From his office at 48 Dey Street in downtown Manhattan (right near the site of the World Trade Center), Hickey built a fortune as a railroad contractor. 

Hickey met equal success in politics. With astonishing whitewash, the author of a 1913 history of the county wrote:

Hickey engaged in politics as a pastime, a recreation from the cares of business, an enjoyment that cost him large sums of money, as he was not an office seeker for himself nor did he expect other pecuniary reward.

It was the polite language of the day, but of course Hickey’s pastime had many rewards. After all, he played politics inside the most notorious big city machine in American history: the Democratic Party’s Tammany Hall.

Tammany’s origins lay in late 18^th century New York where its first leader, Aaron Burr, transformed it from a society of speech-makers to a political machine. Through the mid-19^th century the Irish came to dominate the organization.

After the Civil War, William Marcy Tweed became Tammany’s first boss, presiding over the ward system through graft, fraud, and plunder. Everything was corruptible. Although the repulsive Tweed was indicted and died in prison, Tammany arose again under the bosses John Kelly and Richard Croker, both good friends of Mr. Hickey.

THE KELLYITES TRIUMPHANT!

Hickey the Master of the Situation!

However, by 1894 when he died from a cold he caught while overseeing railroad construction in the Lehigh Valley, Hickey no longer was master of the situation. Tellingly, the governor had recently ignored several of his patronage requests.

You can bet that the Tammany politicians jostled each other on the steps of the Church of the Sacred Heart in the flat light of that funeral morning. The men put their heads together to figure out the next play while the widow Ellen Elizabeth Bird Hickey and her six children sat shocked in the chapel.

The family did not need to worry about money, however. Within a few weeks, the papers reported that Daniel Hickey left no will but his estate included $93,000 in personal property and $75,000 in real estate.

 Church of the Sacred Heart,
Mount Vernon, N.Y.

See also January 20 + 28 posts, 2016.

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/01/nellie-her-father.html?m=1