Category Archives: Twentieth Century

Pasaquan

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Near Buena Vista, in Marion County, Georgia, exists Pasaquan, a compound built by visionary artist Eddie Owens Martin (1908-1986). It’s somewhat like Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden in Pennville, Ga., although not exactly Christian – in the late 1930s, during an extended illness, Martin experienced a delirious vision of a trio of extremely tall personages who grew their hair upward. They identified themselves as special envoys from Pasaquan, a place where the past, the present, the future, and everything else all come together. They announced that they had chosen Martin as their prophet and dubbed him “St. EOM” (pronounced “ohm”). In subsequent visions they gave him extensive instructions about the proper conduct of his daily existence, and revealed to him how he could communicate with the energies of the universe. St. EOM accordingly began to meld his life toward a basic philosophy of truth, nature, and earth. While studying ancient cultures in the museums and libraries of New York, Martin became fixated on hair and its symbolic role in past cultures. He began to grow out his own hair and beard, which became a distinctive look for him.

He was also shown how he could render the world of Pasaquan artistically, and in 1957 he began to do exactly that – he returned to Georgia and began to transform his late mother’s small frame house and four-acre plot of land into the extended complex seen today. By the time of St. EOM’s death in 1986, it had grown to include six major structures, all connected by brightly painted masonry walls, colorful concrete sculptures, and other landscape elements and paintings.

St. EOM (or the tall personages) did not designate a successor prophet, and in his will he bequeathed Pasaquan to the Marion County Historic Society. Members formed the Pasaquan Preservation Society in 1991, but keeping it up was too great a task. In 2013, therefore, the site was purchased by the Kohler Foundation of Wisconsin, which sponsored an extensive renovation under the aegis of Columbus State University. Pasaquan was reopened to the public in 2016, and it is certainly a fascinating place to visit. Some photographs (which, as ever, can’t really do justice to the place):

It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re ever nearby. A good book on Pasaquan is Jonathan Williams, et al., St. EOM in the Land of Pasaquan: The Life and Times and Art of Eddie Owens Martin (UGA Press, 2018). The information above is derived from the onsite museum. 

The Little White House

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Warm Springs, Georgia, is home to the so-called Little White House, which served as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s personal retreat. FDR first started coming to Warm Springs in 1924, three years after he had been diagnosed with polio. The titular warm springs of the area allowed him a certain freedom of movement now denied to him by his illness. He liked the area so much that he purchased land and had a house built on it, which was finished just before he took office as president in 1933. Over the course of his twelve-year presidency FDR visited the Little White House sixteen times, and died there on April 12, 1945. Although FDR’s main presidential library and museum are at Springwood in Hyde Park, New York, the Little White House is well preserved by the Georgia DNR, and has a great museum, almost as good as a NARA-sponsored one. 

FDR was cagey about his limited mobility, and most Americans didn’t know about it or “chose to ignore it,” as a sign indicated at the museum. But he came to Warm Springs for a reason, and the museum is honest about why. 

Also on display: FDR’s 1938 Ford Convertible… 

…with specially designed hand controls. 

    

I was a youthful stamp collector, and this display brought a tear to my eye. Memories!

But the best part of these sorts of museums are all the homespun crafts. Here is a National Recovery Administration quilt. 

A hand-carved wooden chain spelling out FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT (!). 

A model ship. FDR was a great aficionado of sailing and the Little White House contains many such model ships. 

An extensive handmade cane collection. People would send these to FDR. 

You’ve got to love his first inaugural address written out and forming a portrait.

The museum’s prize possession is the “Unfinished Portrait,” which artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff was working on when FDR died at age 63 of a cerebral hemorrhage. 

An iconic photograph by Ed Clark of Life: Chief Petty Officer (USN) Graham Jackson playing “Goin’ Home” on the accordion, as FDR’s funeral train left Warm Springs. 

I was curious to note that FDR’s friend and confidante Daisy Suckley was present when he died. Suckley is the subject of the movie Hyde Park on Hudson (2012) which we saw recently. It is a dramatization of a period in 1939 when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited FDR at Springwood in the hopes of gaining American support for Britain while war loomed in Europe. It’s billed as a comedy-drama but succeeds at being neither. Bill Murray is pretty good as Roosevelt; Samuel West and Olivia Coleman are competent at playing the young (and accidental) king and queen, although they certainly can’t compete with Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, and their discomfort at the brash Americanisms they encounter isn’t particularly amusing or convincing. The film actually has an R rating for “brief sexuality,” but it shows no sexuality at all, not even kissing! Suckley is cast as one of FDR’s mistresses, and the most dramatic scene occurs when it is revealed to her that FDR has… other mistresses! But what did she expect? 

(And, as with all such movies, no real work actually being done. There is a scene when Suckley first arrives at Springwood, and must pass through a room full of functionaries poring over documents and busily telephoning other important people, before she gets to see FDR in his substitute Oval Office and examine his stamp collection. But that’s it. The functionaries never reappear, and for the rest of the movie the president of the United States has all the time in the world to drive around in his car, preside over dinners, wrangle with his mother and wife, etc.)

My wife actually hated Hyde Park on Hudson, especially how it has Suckley making peace with her place in FDR’s regular rotation, and how this was cast as a mature, grown-up attitude. She wondered whether the movie wasn’t funded by MoveOn.org. Thus, I was pleased to learn that most historians reject the idea that FDR’s relationship with Suckley was a sexual one. I reckon what we need is a movie entitled Warm Springs, which would deal with FDR’s time in Georgia and how he learned to sympathize with the common man through his interactions with the locals, with no titillating, invented details about an affair with one of his staffers. 

Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit

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Flagge des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit, DDR bis 1990. Wikipedia.

From The Foundation for Economic Freedom:

10 Terrifying Facts about the East German Secret Police

To maintain power for 40 years while their people starved and plotted to escape, the Communist Party had to get very good at controlling people and undermining anti-state activists. But outright street violence and assassinations weren’t good for the Party image, so the Ministry for State Security got creative. Better known as the Stasi (the German acronym), these secret police were the “Schild und Schwert der Partei” (Shield and Sword of the Party). Their sole function was to keep the Communist Party in power. They didn’t care how.

The Stasi were prolific gaslighters. In the 1950s, repression was brutal, physical torture. Early in the 1970s, eager to be accepted on the international stage, the East German Secret Police had to get more subtle. The aim of Zersetzung (a repurposed military term meaning disintegration or corrosion) was to “switch off” any activist individuals and groups who might threaten the Party. Police collected medical, school, and police records, interviews with neighbors and relatives, and any other evidence they could get and would then customize a direct hit on an individual’s mental health.

If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. Some forms of harassment were almost comical: agents spread rumors about their targets, flooded their mailboxes with pornography, moved things around in their apartments, or deflated their bicycle tires day after day. Others were life-altering: Individuals labeled as subversives were banned from higher education, forced into unemployment, and forcibly committed to asylums. Many suffered long-term psychological trauma, loss of earnings, and intense social shame as a result of Stasi lies.

The Stasi had 91,000 employees at its peak—roughly one in every 30 residents was a Stasi agent. More than one in three East Germans (5.6 million) was under suspicion or surveillance, with an open Stasi file. Another half million were feeding the Stasi information. This level of surveillance and infiltration caused East Germans to live in terror—you really never knew if you could trust anyone—though most had no idea of the scope of these activities until after the Berlin Wall fell.

Stasi files laid out together would cover about 69 sq. miles. Recording detailed personal information on a third of the populace required a tremendous amount of paper. More pages of printed text were generated by the Stasi than by all German authors from the Middle Ages to WWII. Thousands of citizens were targeted as anti-government “trouble makers,” their homes were searched, phones and cars—if they were lucky enough to have either—were bugged, their letters opened and copied, and their movements secretly filmed or photographed. Every document went into a personal Stasi file. So far, hundreds of millions of files, 39 million index cards, 1.75 million photographs, 2,800 reels of film and 28,400 audio recordings have been recovered from Stasi archives. Millions more were shredded before they could be made public.

In 1992, the secret files the Stasi had kept on millions of East Germans were made available for review. Citizens can request to see their personal files, which are housed by the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives on 63 miles of dedicated shelving. Sixteen thousand sacks of shredded documents still await reassembly. The agency tasked with maintaining them employed at least 79 former Stasi members as late as 2007, according to Wikileaks. Three million individuals have applied to see their records, with decidedly mixed results. Many former subjects of Stasi investigation or surveillance found out only from these files—20 years later—that their parents, children, spouses, or lifelong friends had been informing against them.

Six more facts at the link. I know an East German woman whose family refused to look at their Stasi files, because they did not want to know who was informing on them and thus potentially lose old friends. The author finishes with this cheerful thought:

Large-scale data collection by today’s National Security Administration and Homeland Security follows the same pattern, according to well-known whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg. The “See something? Say something” culture of citizen informers, the collection of personal info without warrants, and the assumption of guilt all feel eerily familiar.

Northern Ireland

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Flags and Vexillology.

Today marks the centenary of the creation of Northern Ireland, when the Fourth Home Rule Bill went into effect. Someone posted to the Facebook group Flags and Vexillology a photograph of an early flag for Northern Ireland, a blue ensign with six six-pointed stars surrounding a shield of the traditional province of Ulster. This flag, however used, was superseded by the Ulster Banner, taken from the shield of the arms of Northern Ireland, which was granted in 1924. 

Heraldry-wiki.com.

Paul Halsall also draws our attention to an article at West Cork Historical Society Forum, about what happened to the once numerically strong (but still minority) Unionist/Loyalist population of Cork after 1920.

In 1919 the Unionist community in County Cork was prosperous, numerous and committed in varying degrees to the Unionist cause. They had their own newspaper, held parades and maintained a complex social system. Yet by 1923 their community lay decimated, torn asunder by a campaign of murder and intimidation and forced into a supposedly “Free State” which did little to protect them. What brought about such cataclysmic changes? How was the campaign of murder conducted and for what reasons? Did Cork Unionism maintain its identity during those violent years – and can this still be seen today?

The numerical decline between 1911 and 1926 of the Protestant (and mostly unionist) community in Cork, and indeed throughout Southern Ireland, is startling. The historian Hart puts the level of Protestant decline during this period at no less than 34% (the Roman Catholic population declined by merely 2%) and comments that “this catastrophic loss was unique to the Southern minority and unprecedented: it represents easily the single greatest measurable social change of the revolutionary era”

It is difficult to argue with Hart’s assessment that this population decline is unique in British history – representing “the only example of the mass displacement of a native ethnic group within the British Isles since the 17th century”

More at the link. Those who weren’t murdered fled to Northern Ireland or Britain. Reminds me of my own Loyalist ancestors following the American Revolution. 

The Farnsworth House

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Wikipedia.

From The Spectator (hat tip: Instapundit), a review of Broken Glass, a new book about Mies van der Rohe’s controversial Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill.

To see the Farnsworth House in reality is to understand how perfection can be revealed in steel and glass. It is an understanding no visitor can resist. But to live in it — as I once did for several days — is to put every assumption of the modernist aesthetic to severe test.

It is an astonishingly beautiful building, as visceral as it is intellectual. The way in which elementary materials and ‘nearly nothing’ have a transcendent effect is profound. It floats, perfect proportions denying material weight. From outside it looks agreeably alien; from inside, its transparency makes landscape captive. And the architect’s attention to the logic of structure and to detail is revelatory. Rivet heads were painstakingly ground off at steel junctions to make visually perfect joints. The frame is made with such fanatical precision that it responds to impacts like a tuning fork. As a whole, the Farnsworth House improves upon nature, which was Voltaire’s definition of art.

Yet it is absurd. Mies insisted on building on the Fox River’s floodplain, the better to enjoy the local woods. He refused thermally efficient double-glazing. Only after protest was Farnsworth allowed a wardrobe; Mies said it was a weekend house and the necessary single dress could be hung out of sight behind the bathroom door. He was adamant that his own furniture designs were used rather than his client’s preferences. Moreover, his architectural training had not included Mechanical & Electrical Services, so he knew nothing of plumbing, heating, air-conditioning, drainage or power supply. Water seepage from above complemented the rising damp caused by the turbulent, intrusive Fox below. The house was an oven in summer and a freezer in winter. Ugly stains soon appeared. When Farnsworth complained about the exiguous fireplace, Mies said: ‘Get smaller logs.’

The original budget had been $10,000. But this ‘functionalist’ architect was notoriously sloppy in business, and the account came to seven times as much. Despite his managerial incompetence, Mies took Farnsworth to court over unpaid fees and won. Her revenge was to fill the house with unsuitable furniture — and eventually to go to live in Italy (where her relationship with the poet Eugenio Montale was another episode of Euro-flavored unrequited love).

Farnsworth House is a magnificent catastrophe, a manifesto of designer arrogance, a maintenance nightmare, an unlivable space where God fought with Satan over the details, especially the boiler and drains. And it is now a national monument, a pilgrimage site for architecture students from all over the world. Widely imitated (by designers whom Nikolaus Pevsner called ‘three blind Mies’), it has never been bettered. In a sense, it couldn’t be.

I wrote a paper in college about Mies van der Rohe’s directorship of the Bauhaus in the early 1930s, before it was closed by the Nazis, which assured its fame forever. Thus did most of the material that I consulted for that paper take a rather hagiographic approach to modernist architecture and its practitioners. It took Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) to expose their arrogance and even incompetence. 

Anyway, the Farnsworth House is now a museum, and you can take a virtual tour of the place. 

The Churchill Myth

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From The Guardian:

Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?

Priyamvada Gopal
 

A baleful silence attends one of the most talked-about figures in British history. You may enthuse endlessly about Winston Churchill “single-handedly” defeating Hitler. But mention his views on race or his colonial policies, and you’ll be instantly drowned in ferocious and orchestrated vitriol.

In a sea of fawningly reverential Churchill biographies, hardly any books seriously examine his documented racism. Nothing, it seems, can be allowed to complicate, let alone tarnish, the national myth of a flawless hero: an idol who “saved our civilisation”, as Boris Johnson claims, or “humanity as a whole”, as David Cameron did. Make an uncomfortable observation about his views on white supremacy and the likes of Piers Morgan will ask: “Why do you live in this country?”

Not everyone is content to be told to be quiet because they would be “speaking German” if not for Churchill. Many people want to know more about the historical figures they are required to admire uncritically. The Black Lives Matter protests last June – during which the word “racist” was sprayed in red letters on Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, were accompanied by demands for more education on race, empire and the figures whose statues dot our landscapes.

Yet providing a fuller picture is made difficult. Scholars who explore less illustrious sides of Churchill are treated dismissively. Take the example of Churchill College, Cambridge, where I am a teaching fellow. In response to calls for fuller information about its founder, the college set up a series of events on Churchill, Empire and Race. I recently chaired the second of these, a panel discussion on “The Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill”.

More at the link. I confess that I’m a sucker for the Churchill myth, but even I will admit that he has more than a few skeletons in his closet, and it’s not a bad thing to examine all aspects of a person’s legacy. Christopher Hitchens explored this issue back in 2002 for The Atlantic. (Hitchens does claim the Churchill was right about the one thing that mattered.)

UPDATE: A friend comments:

It’s interesting that Gopal situates her critique of Churchill within the academically uncontroversial bounds of providing a more truthful and nuanced picture of an important historical figure.

We all know that’s not what she is aiming to do and that it is about destroying one narrative and replacing it with another.

That’s why she has encountered so much emotional resistance and it’s disingenuous to pretend that this is nothing more than a liberal exercise in pursuing historical truth.

Otto Rahn

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Dan Franke asks: “You want a medieval studies Nazi Germany mystery? Look no further.” From Wikipedia:

Otto Wilhelm Rahn (18 February 1904 – 13 March 1939) was a German writer, medievalist, Ariosophist, and an officer of the SS and researcher into the Grail myths. He was born in Michelstadt, Germany, and died in Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol) in Austria. Speculation still surrounds Otto Rahn and his research.

From an early age, Rahn became interested in the legends of Parzival, the Holy Grail, Lohengrin and the Nibelungenlied. While attending the University of Giessen, he was inspired by his professor, Baron von Gall, to study the Albigensian (Catharism) movement and the massacre that occurred at Montségur.

In 1931, he travelled to the Pyrenees region of southern France where he conducted most of his research. Aided by the French mystic and historian Antonin Gadal, Rahn argued that there was a direct link between Wolfram von Eschenbach‘s Parzival and the Cathar Grail mystery. He believed that the Cathars held the answer to this sacred mystery and that the keys to their secrets lay somewhere beneath the mountain peak where the fortress of Montségur remains, the last Cathar fortress to fall during the Albigensian Crusade.

Rahn wrote two books linking Montségur and Cathars with the Holy Grail: Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade Against the Grail) in 1933 and Luzifers Hofgesind (Lucifer’s Court) in 1937. After the publication of his first book, Rahn’s work came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who was fascinated by the occult and had already initiated research in the south of France. Rahn joined his staff as a junior non-commissioned officer and became a full member of the SS in 1936, achieving the rank of Obersturmführer.

It was an uneasy partnership for Otto Rahn; later, he explained his SS membership to friends in the following way: “A man has to eat. What was I supposed to do? Turn Himmler down?” Journeys for his second book led Rahn to places in Germany, France, Italy and Iceland. Openly homosexual, frequenting anti-Nazi circles, and having fallen out of favor with the Nazi leadership, Rahn was assigned guard duty at the Dachau concentration camp in 1937 as punishment for a drunken homosexual scrape. He resigned from the SS in 1939.

But the SS would not allow anyone to resign without consequences. Soon, Rahn found out the Gestapo was after him, and he was even offered the option of committing suicide. He vanished. On 13 March 1939, nearly on the anniversary of the fall of Montségur, Rahn was found frozen to death on a mountainside near Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol) in Austria. His death was officially ruled a suicide.

Crazy stuff! 

Thomas A. Dorsey

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A Wikipedia discovery, with a local connection:

Wikipedia.

Thomas Andrew Dorsey (July 1, 1899 – January 23, 1993) was an American musician, composer, and Christian evangelist influential in the development of early blues and 20th-century gospel music. He penned 3,000 songs, a third of them gospel, including “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley“. Recordings of these sold millions of copies in both gospel and secular markets in the 20th century.

Born in rural Georgia, Dorsey grew up in a religious family but gained most of his musical experience playing blues at barrelhouses and parties in Atlanta. He moved to Chicago and became a proficient composer and arranger of jazz and vaudeville just as blues was becoming popular. He gained fame accompanying blues belter Ma Rainey on tour and, billed as “Georgia Tom”, joined with guitarist Tampa Red in a successful recording career.

After a spiritual awakening, Dorsey began concentrating on writing and arranging religious music. Aside from the lyrics, he saw no real distinction between blues and church music, and viewed songs as a supplement to spoken word preaching. Dorsey served as the music director at Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church for 50 years, introducing musical improvisation and encouraging personal elements of participation such as clapping, stomping, and shouting in churches when these were widely condemned as unrefined and common. In 1932, he co-founded the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, an organization dedicated to training musicians and singers from all over the U.S. that remains active. The first generation of gospel singers in the 20th century worked or trained with Dorsey: Sallie Martin, Mahalia Jackson, Roberta Martin, and James Cleveland, among others.

Author Anthony Heilbut summarized Dorsey’s influence by saying he “combined the good news of gospel with the bad news of blues”. Called the “Father of Gospel Music” and often credited with creating it, Dorsey more accurately spawned a movement that popularized gospel blues throughout black churches in the United States, which in turn influenced American music and parts of society at large.

“Rural Georgia” = Villa Rica, a town about an hour to the southwest of Reinhardt. Note that this is not Tommy Dorsey, the famed big band leader. 

The Four Chaplains

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On this day in 1943 was sunk the SS Dorchester by the German submarine U-223, an example of a fairly regular occurrence in the Atlantic during the Second World War. The Dorchester was a passenger steamship requisitioned for the American war effort and was transporting U.S. troops from New York to Greenland; the whole thing was over very quickly, with the unfortunate result that 674 of the 904 men on board perished. 

Wikipedia.

This episode is famous for the actions of the Four Chaplains, who voluntarily gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out. They joined arms and said prayers as they went down with the ship. Since that time they have become a symbolic of heroism and self-sacrifice; that two were Protestant, one Catholic, and one Jewish, has become an edifying example of “interfaith in action,” as the postage stamp says. (One could say that this story comes across as propaganda, an attempt at salvaging some inspiration from the usual wartime disaster, but it really happened, and it really is inspiring.)

Children by Post

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Apparently, at one point you could send children through the mail. From Smithsonian Magazine:

One of the most overlooked, yet most significant innovations of the early 20th century might be the Post Office’s decision to start shipping large parcels and packages through the mail. While private delivery companies flourished during the 19th century, the Parcel Post dramatically expanded the reach of mail-order companies to America’s many rural communities, as well as the demand for their products. When the Post Office’s Parcel Post officially began on January 1, 1913, the new service suddenly allowed millions of Americans great access to all kinds of goods and services. But almost immediately, it had some unintended consequences as some parents tried to send their children through the mail.

“It got some headlines when it happened, probably because it was so cute,” United States Postal Service historian Jenny Lynch tells Smithsonian.com.

Just a few weeks after Parcel Post began, an Ohio couple named Jesse and Mathilda Beagle “mailed” their 8-month-old son James to his grandmother, who lived just a few miles away in Batavia. According to Lynch, Baby James was just shy of the 11-pound weight limit for packages sent via Parcel Post, and his “delivery” cost his parents only 15 cents in postage (although they did insure him for $50). The quirky story soon made newspapers, and for the next several years, similar stories would occasionally surface as other parents followed suit.

More at the link.