JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2300

I wondered about this pamphlet, with the odd cover design, odd question, odd feel, odd smell, odd paper.  It turns out that it is a raving, sodding racist work of low order and high hate.  

We are told that Democracy is a menace in the United States now, with an uncontrolled melting pot, being overtaken by “inferior raced hodge-podge”, “inferior human material”, ranting against Democracy and Communism (as written and “contrived” by “the Jew” Marx and the “Half-Jew” Lenin), while the press continues to put out its “stupid emanations” and “poison” against the German government and the “tormented” German people.  

And this is just from two paragraphs.  Quite remarkable, and about as bad as I’ve read. 

Bottom line seems to have been that the U.S. is headed towards an unspeakable betrayal without a revolution of thought aligning the Anglo-Saxon elements against all of the other “filthy elements” of society.  Well.  ALl of these people are dead now, and the U.S. is doing okay, while the  dream-date Nazis of ’36 were gone nine years later.  

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2301

Bob Edwards, MP (1905-1990) was a trade unionist and socialist who wrote a particularly savage appraisal of the British chemical industry during WWII.  The pamphlet stopped me because of the cover design, and then of course by its subtitle:  War on the People, an Exposure of the Chemical Kings and their Nazi Associates.  And the big deal about this was that it is the second edition, and it was printed in 1944.  

I don’t want to start even just a little on the matter of American/Allied multinationals  (like Brown Brothers, Standard Oil, Renault, I.C.I., Ford) doing business with Nazi-controlled companies and concerns, mainly because it is a very deep story and a simple scratch reveals too much and it sounds too odd to be true, but it all seems to be so.  Edwards though concentrates on the British chemical industries, and in particular the Imperial Chemical Industries (I.C.I.), which Edwards has a long association with as his personal labor affiliations in general have been with the chemical trade.

This is already the “third edition” in two years for Edwards, so the pamphlet must have proved (a) interesting  or (b) printed in very small runs allowing for corrected bits here and there.  He addresses the “Chemical Kings” and how much  they effect local and international communities, and extend their political power, and about unfair labor practices, and large profits, swindles, and in one three-paragraph section the association of I.C.I. and I.G. Farben–Edwards concentrating on business arrangements and profits, though at this point there is no mention of any of the Farben connections to the Holocaust.  He moves on to chemical warfare, the “prostitution of science” , poison gas, a magnesium conspiracy with Hitler, and other bits…and allows himself the position of having a solution for it all–the socialization of the I.C.I.  

It is unclear from this pamphlet how Edwards stood on the war, or what it would mean to socialize the massive chemical industry, though it seems at least that the reorganized industry would not be doing business with Hitler, though it is unclear if there would be any involvement with the war beyond that.  

JF Ptak Science Books  

This is quite a flag being flown by Republican interests, waving in a relatively non-existent lunar breeze prior to the 1936 election. That was a lot of discrimination leveled on FDR in that flag, which is particularly disdainful given the successes of the administration in its first term.  (Of course FDR would go on to win in the mother of all landslide, beating Alf Landon and Frank Know 523 to 8 in the electoral college).   The electoral map has seldom been so monochromatic as in ’36, though George McGovern took only a single state in his bid against RMN in ’72.  Landon took Vermont and Maine, and Maine (Squirrel Island) is where the holder of the copyright on this pamphlet–Frank C. Hughes–was from.  Hughes was, um, not a fan of the administration, and seems to have written a number of little pamphlets proclaiming himself as the dire opposition, the ruined associate of democracy, the injured party…a gadfly.

Anyway I guess some of the meaty stuff that could be the cause of some of the stripes on that flag are the occasional favorite of revised opinion and theory nowadays, that FDR messed around with taxes and wages when he shouldn’t have, and imposed the tariff that some think pushed the country further/deeper into Depression. Bottom line is that he saved us all.  

By the way, that’s pretty much the whole pamphlet–there’s one more image, but the whole of it was one sheet of paper, folded.  

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I have seen many thousands of pages in the populist hard-science journal, Nature, from its opening volume in 1869 through WWII–at least those are what I have in the studiom ready for a browse. (In recent years even a good share of the titles in Nature are mysterious to me–I’m more able to do cover-to-cover grazing before WWII.)  In any event I have notice many times certain poetical phrasing in the ads of the later issues (adverts coming into being a few decades after the first by-subscription issues) and I’m a little sorry now for not saving or noting them.  This ad for lab specs is a decent example: it is a nicely designed bit, and small (less than two square inches int he original issue in 1899), and has the nice turn, “render the light soft and cool”, a line that could be used anywhere.  But here it is, selling specs by the redoubtable Negretti & Zambra.