JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2349                                                                                        

I came to this pamphlet from a design/composition point of view, finding in it a peculiar attractiveness in its gritty-typeface and loud speculation.  That said, the title is of little use to tell us of its contents, and so opening to page 37 (in deference to my wife Patti Digh who finds much significance in the number) I found on the opposite page the “it does not matter that the German people of the Reich have a different form of State from America”, and that the form of state so far as the Germans were concerned was “a matter of fate”.  

Interesting, and, well, unfortunate, because the publication date of the work is 1936.  The author, Mr. A.T. Fredex, implores the reader to consider that there is “no more a liberty-loving people than the Germans”, and that they are a free and liberated people.  The German state of today was subject of certain internal “troubles” and that successions of leaders–for the good of the people–were forced to keep the nation together with “more or less gentle pressure”.

And so the skeleton of the fleshy produce of the pamphlet is revealed.  “Already the sneers of the yellow and black races are haunting us”, writes Mr. Fredex, who continues in just the next paragraph that all that remains to happen would be for Socialist France to “mobilize her millions of Negroes” along with the help of “Bolshevist-Mongolian Russia” against Germany, which would be the last refuge of normalcy in Europe, the thing protecting the Western world from who-knows-what.  

All of this is in three paragraphs of one page.  Then comes the race part, the Teutonic purity and excellence part, and the horrors of race-mixing and “mixed blood” that will wind up dooming America.

I skipped ahead, or behind, to the end, where we are warned by Mr. Fredex to awaken our Nordic interests should Germany fail to hold back the assaulting races.

This is really quite a story to unfold in just two of the pamphlet’s 56 pages–the rest of which I think need no further exploration.  

The pamphlet cover, though, retains its interest, forensically speaking, and can only hint at the pamphlet’s evil and filthy contents.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2350

Building on some reaching and questionable physical identification work of Sir Francis Galton, Raphael Pumpelly tried to make photographs of what scientists looked like. 

At a scientific meeting of the National Academy of Science in Washington D.C. Pumpelly (along with Dr. (Thomas Mayo) Brewer and the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, (Spencer F.) Baird) undertook the experiment to determine whether or not there was a certain composite “type” in groups of academicians.  He employed the justly-named head of the photography department at the Smithsonian, Mr. (Thomas Mayo) Smillie, to make a series of 2-second exposures of the scientists upon a single glass plate.  Two seconds per portrait was not long enough to make a defined portrait for a single sitter, but if there 15 or 30 such exposures on the same plate it was seen that collectively there would be a strong impression.  The resulting portraits are interesting in their won way, but probably not without the backstory.