The Armistice Turns 100

We took these photographs on a cold rainy day at the Somme Battlefields, in June 2016. 

That year marked the centennial of the Battle of the Somme, which actually comprised a series of bloody trench-warfare battles between the British and French armies, and the armies of the German Empire.  

Across nearly five months, three million soldiers fought and more than one million were killed or wounded.  On the first day of the battle, the British suffered 57,470 casualties, of which 19,240 were fatalities.  Most historians agree that neither side won.

As is the case in many World War I cemeteries, more than one thousand of the headstones bear the inscription, A Soldier of the Great War, Known Unto God. 

Here are two quotations that I like.

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected.  Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends.*  

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word – the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages,

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.**

*Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975).
**Last verse of MCMXIV, by British poet laureate Philip Larkin (1964).

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2018/11/the-armistice-turns-100.html

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

A Dress Shop in Chicago

North Michigan Avenue 
(Illustration from Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1916)

Mme. Marguerite always said that she arrived in Chicago as an understudy to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. When the theater company returned to Europe, Marguerite decided to part ways with the Divine Sarah.

Ta-ta!

It was 1910. She stayed in Chicago and became a modiste – that’s a word you don’t hear anymore. It means a designer and purveyor of fashionable women’s clothing. Between 1912 and 1948, Mme. Marguerite reigned over the wardrobes of the city’s wealthiest women.

Her first shop, House of Marguerite, opened on North Michigan Avenue to the delight of Mrs. Armour, Mrs. McCormick and other ladies who wanted custom-made gowns.

Their husbands and fathers were industrialists, bankers, entrepreneurs; perhaps the heirs to great fortunes. But when it came to fashion, Marguerite was the authority:

“I’m pleased to say, not a chi chi dress in sight!”

                                                          and

“There was white satin at all of the important French collections last spring.”

Wedding gown by Mme. Marguerite, 1916

Except during wartime, Mme. Marguerite traveled to Europe twice yearly to see the shows in Paris. She became very successful. By the early twenties, she had three shops, three cars, a chauffeur, and a country home in Michigan.

Around that time, Marguerite married for the first time. Henri Farre also was French, although it’s not clear whether they met in France or Chicago.  

A painter and aviator, he had held an unusual position during World War I. Just after Farre enlisted, the Governor of Les Invalides (also director of the Army Museum) asked him to serve as a military artist.*

Farre would “paint certain phases of action, so as to immortalize on canvas true pictures of fighting in the field,” the governor told him.

When Farre explained that he was an aviator as well as a painter, the governor said:

Eh bien, c’est parfait; I had not thought of the fifth weapon. Would you like to be a painter of aviation?

He immediately appointed Farre to the first group of French bombing squadrons: 1^er  Groupe des Escadrilles de Bombardement.    

And so Farre flew through the war, capturing the shattered landscapes and bursting bombs in pencil and paint. He watched and sketched over Metz, Verdun, Zeebrugge, the Somme, and the North Sea. He also painted many officers’ portraits.

In 1918, Henri toured the United States with a collection of his war paintings entitled “Sky Fighters of France.” The Art Institute of Chicago presented a major exhibition of his work. His visit was said to be a propaganda mission because Farre and other officers asked for more American planes and ships. But the tour also raised money for the American Fund for French Wounded.

After the war, Farre received the Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre from the French government. He and Marguerite married in 1922. Settling in Chicago, Farre continued to paint – the Chicago River Bridge, football games at Soldier Field. The Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum owns 75 of his World War I paintings. He died in 1934.

An Aviation Fight at 12,000 Feet, painting by
Henri Farre that was exhibited in New York, 1918

One year later, Marguerite married Dr. John F. Pick. Born in Austria, he would become a leading plastic surgeon in the United States. He studied at Rush Medical College in Chicago and at the University of Prague, where he became an assistant to Professor Frantisek Burian. This was a great honor, for Burian is considered one of the founders of plastic surgery. 

Back in the U.S., Dr. Pick developed a theory about recidivism. He believed that performing plastic surgery on the faces of prisoners, to correct features that were deemed irregular or unattractive, would give them the confidence to reinvent (to borrow a twenty-first century word) themselves upon release.

Between 1937 and 1947, Pick worked at Stateville Prison in Illinois, where he performed 663 surgeries on 1,376 inmates. Of those discharged, 1.7% became recidivists. Pick published his results in medical journals, insisting that “the correction of physical defects would mentally straighten out many inmates.” The theory never caught on.

In 1949, Dr. Pick’s interest swayed from plastic surgery to cancer when he and several colleagues became obsessed with an anti-cancer drug called Krebiozen. A Yugoslavian doctor, Stevan Durovic, created it and brought it to the U.S. that year.

A prominent physician and vice president of the University of Illinois, Dr. Andrew Ivy, became convinced of the drug’s effectiveness. Others, including Dr. Pick and the eminent Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, joined him.

There were clinical trials, and hundreds of physicians nationwide tried the medication for their patients. But the claims proved unsubstantiated and Krebiozen was discredited. The Krebiozen Research Foundation, led by Dr. Ivy, later accused the American Medical Association and American Cancer Society of subverting data. Lawsuits and trials would follow into the mid-1960s.

Brochure promoting Krebiozen, 1950s

In 1952, John F. Pick announced that he had treated his wife, Marguerite, with Krebiozen during the last 15 months of her life as she fought breast cancer. She had died one year earlier with four society dames at her bedside.

1951

*The details of Henri Farre’s experience appear in his book, Sky Fighters of France, Aerial Warfare, 1914-1918.

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/10/a-dress-shop-in-chicago.html

Through the Hourglass: A Dress Shop in Chicago

Turn the Hourglass

Forster Avenue, Mt. Vernon, N.Y.

It’s the 1960s and we live in a house styled after an Elizabethan cottage, built in 1917. Ivy creeps up the stone chimney and twirls around an iron lantern at the front door. 

The house sat on a corner lot. The street it faced, which inclined slightly toward the next block, felt dim and mysterious yet wide and bright. A straight, quiet street with huge elms arching overhead and a slate sidewalk of many hues, crippled in places where the tree roots had pushed through.

The sidewalk lilted up the sunny side of the street and darkly down the other, shaded in part by a granite precipice on which two homes were perched. It extended expectantly in front of a double lot.

It felt like an important street. To begin with, it was perfectly composed. It had the habit of seeming to rise up before you, with the houses and landscape flowing in all directions. Sometimes an imaginary mist floated around.

The massing of slate, stone, and greenery beneath tall trees was such a strong symphony that you invariably thought you heard a clap of thunder or the first chord in the history of the world when you came upon it.

I’m not making this up. This is how it was.  

We kids thought the street belonged to us, but it went back 3/4 of a century. Even during the late 1950s, gas sconces remained in a few of the homes.

So it was that Violet Romer – gorgeous flapper & actress, acclaimed interpretive dancer –

& her brother Romer Shawhan – an architect who flew at St. Mihiel with the Lafayette Escadrille and married the heiress to Pacific Coast Borax, for whose father Zabriskie Point was named –

would interrupt our ball game when their 1938 “Woodie” station wagon rounded the corner and rolled halfway up the block, turning into the driveway of their white frame house.

Did we step back impatiently when they drove by, eager to resume our play? Or were we blown to the curb in space and time?

Of course none of us children had any idea about the vivid places that Violet and Romer had occupied.

I’m always chasing that street into the past.

Drawing by Claudia Keenan
http://www.throughthehourglass.com/

See also April 13 + 27, 2016 posts.