Category: Propaganda

A Solid Ring of Neutrality–German Propaganda, 1940

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

One thing is for sure–this pamphlet, which has no place of publication or date–was definitely a German war propaganda effort, printed in English, published in Germany, and I guess distributed wherever the English-language-winds and luck would take it. My copy come from a collection that I purchased from the Library of Congress, and it is luckily stamped August 6, 1940, for the date it was received by the library. So the summer (or earlier) of 1940 is the date: the Battle of Britain had begun in July, Dunkirk had been evacuated June 4, France surrendered a few weeks later, and the war was not going well for the U.K. Germany was still a year away from their disastrous attempt to conquer the Soviet Union with Operation Barbarossa, and at this time in 1940, the U.S.S.R. was its vital trading partner. Great Britain was waging a successful economic war/blockade against Germany, which was without any real finance and with no reserves to purchase foreign goods, so in spite of the successes of the invasions and Blitzkreig, the Brits were enjoying a certain level of success. And so this pamphlet appears, one of others, a small part of a hearts-and-minds campaign to try and apply pressure to Britain’s allies to convince her to sue for peace.

The main thrust of the maps of the pamphlet was to show Germany surrounded by not-threatening allies, pillowed by neutrals and countries it had overtaken (with no attempt made to label Poland). The interior map (above) is a very faint attempt to show the comparative strength of Germany being surrounded by neutrals in 1939 as compared with being surrounded by enemy countries in 1914. The message of course was that Germany was strong in 1914-1918 in spite of the “threatening” neighbors, so with relatively benevolent neighbors in 1939 they would be even more effective as a war-making national machine. Perhaps this had some influence somewhere, maybe among the Vichy French. And some elements in the U.S.

The Nazis certainly liked their red.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Militaria — Propaganda
Louisiana Sellathon, 1888

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is an extraordinary title page, what with so much information and narrative and data and salesmanship and so on, right there on the cover,conveying twists and turns and temperature and a challenge from the Dogs Days of New Orleans, all challenging the reader to open the pamphlet for a look inside. There are legions of examples of Title Pages of Enormous Complexity and Content that drive from the Renaissance on into the 19th century, but in my experience for the vast majority of them you actually have to open the book to get there. Here the hear of the pamphlet is worn right on the sleeve–and once the pamphlet is opened it gets right down to business, dispensing with the title page entirely.

The work is dedicated to propagandizing the highest qualities of the state of Louisiana–and New Orleans itself–in order to attract new people to come to the state, and doing so in a convention/conference. As stated on the cover, it is “The first one ever held in the history of the country; and which had for its object strictly and solely, to obtain data and statistics; and a statement from these new “Sons of Louisiana” giving their own personal experience ranging from 6 months to forty years of residence, regarding the health and climate of Louisiana, held at the very hottest season of the year during the “Dog Days” in New Orleans, La., August 7th and 8th, 1888, at Grunewald Hall and their invitation to their former neighbors.”

It seems a not-so-calculating throw-of-the-dice to hold the meeting in New Orleans in August. True it doesn’t get Phoenix-hot, but then again there’s the 75-point difference in humidity that does make all the difference in the world. After having suffered through two massive blizzards that year (in January and March, 1888), perhaps the prospect of 92/72 temp/humidity didn’t seem nearly as painful as frigid and 50 inches of snow.

Full text here from Internet Archive.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Propaganda
Poland and WWIV

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2354

This pamphlet certainty has entry to the evocative Fantastic and Improbable Pamphlet Covers Collection, though I was a little stumped by not being able to make it reveal itself to me with a short effort. It was written by J. Kmicic and from what I can see was probably published during WWII, though there is no publishing information and nothing in the text to hang a firm date on. (There is a periodicals reception stamp in it from November 1946 fro the periodicals division of the Library of Congress, but that doesn’t mean it was accessed right after publication, though it does put a limit to how old it isn’t.) As it turns out the keys to WWIV is Poland. That a very strong and heavily armed Poland would be the cornerstone of a defense of the West in the East, that the further the extent of a strong Polish eastern border reached the greater the play “of our Western culture will extend”. Kmicic makes the case that it if Poland were stronger then it could have resisted Napoleon (evidently WWI), and the Kaiser (making WWI into WWII) and Hitler (WWII=WWIII). The WWIV part is murkier because there isn’t a clue so far as I can tell that the author knew what happened to Poland when the Nazis fell and the Soviets moved in. Had that been the case, the call for having a strong and unified Poland would probably not have been played so heavily. A “Mighty Poland”, Kmicic writes, means “freedom for all smaller nations of Europe” and therefore “the impossibility of world war”. There are a few things that I’ve missed no doubt in my speed-read, but I was just after the cover, anyway.

Hitler and Company tied to sell the idea of an aggressive Polish nation, that the attack launched on 3 September 1939 was a preventative measure to stop the advance and attack of Poland against Germany. Not too many people believed it–at least outside of Germany–but Hitler tried it out, anyway. And why not? When most of everything he said was grounded in The Big Lie, why not pile it on? The great the untruth, the more impossible it is, and the ore you say that you believe it to be the case, the more of a possibility exists for others to believe it, too–because who in their right mind would say something so insane about something else that is equally unbelievable? Therefore, the insane statement much be so. That’s part of The Big Lie.

See Polish Designs on Germany, here

And another attempt at winning hearts and minds, this from 1933 (here):

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Fantastic Titles — Militaria — Propaganda
The “Where, When, and How” of Attacking Berlin (1943)

JF Ptak

I found this arresting map in a tiny publication called …Sans Condition, which was published in the first half of 1943. The publication is only 12 pages long but has a number of evocative images of Germany being bombed and lines of German POWs, in general a propaganda piece for French-speaking folk (which was printed god-knows-where) produced deep in the war and at a time when the tide has about turned on the Nazi regime.

The title of this post is the title of the map, “Ils ont decide ou, quand et comment les Allies lanceront leurs attacques”–and you don’t need to know French to know what it says.

And the cover, which is basically “Surrender Without Condition”:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Militaria — Propaganda
Fascist Anti-New Deal Propaganda, 1935

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2339

Just a reminder that even blattant and bad propaganda has its sub rosa content…

This is a nasty (pronounced nazty) piece of work by the loftily-named League for Constitutional Government, comparing Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation and program to an overall regime for world domination under Socialist and Communist dictums/control. Everything is Communist, and whatever wasn’t Communist was Socialist, and there really wasn’t to much of a distinction in anything, except that under everything else were the Jews. It is rough and bumpy work, not well written, not well thought-out, though there was a lot of action that was taking place between the badly-formed lines, and if you looked a little hard at it everything starts turning up Fascist.

It turns out that the League for Constitutional Government is a tough bit to research from home, with not that much written on the organization itself, though there is a fair amount of what can be learned about it by the company it keeps int eh histories of Right-Wing-Lugnut political movements from that period, and all of that association thus far is Fascist. It appears in lists along with the National American (“America’s National-Socialist Party”); “The American Guard, “The White Man’s Party”; the German American Bund; America First; local bad boy Charles Pelley of Silver Shirts infamy; and in publications including The Revealer, a Christian News Journal, Social Justice, ( a Reverend T,. Coughlin organ), just to name a few. It is in comfortable splendor with far Christian right organizations like the Christian Patriots (see Mark J, Mozzell, God at the Crossroads, p.209), and evidently worked to gain control of the east coast section of the America First party (found via Ruth Sarlesp’s The Story of America First, page 28). There’s also quite a spread on Fascist organizations in America that appeared in Life magazine (March 6, 1939, “Fascism in America: Like Communism It Masquerades as Americanism”).

And then there is this from the “Anti-Jewish Propaganda Front” issued by the American Jewish Committee in 1937 (here):

I had never heard of this League for Constitutional Government before last night, and had a difficult time making my way through its somehow dense and loosely packed four-page contents–until it dawned on me that what I was really reading was Fascist propaganda–and that was surprising, mainly because it was so early on it the history of Fascist stuff going on in America.

My copy of this document was once owned by H.L. Mencken, who gave the thing to the Library of Congress, which in turn decided it wasn’t worth having around (at least in duplicate). I don’t need to own it either, though as a piece of quiet-ish political junk it should be somewhere to remind people that even in flaming propagandistic rhetoric there’s more reading to be done between the lines.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Propaganda — Social History
Propaganda and the American West, 1884

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2338

[Image source: Boston Public Library, here.]

This propagandistic political broadside and map had an influence in the thinking of voters in the 1884 presidential election–and in fact it was mostly wrong. That “wrongness” was perpetrated for the Democratic Party at the expense of the Republicans, and held influence for dozens of years in helping to form the idea that the Republicans gave away huge chunks of American land to railroad companies in corrupt deals.

The map: How the public domain has been squandered, map showing the 139,403,026 acres of the people’s land – equal to 871,268 farms of 160 acres each, worth at $2 an acre, $278,806,052, given by Republican Congresses to railroad corporations , published by the Rand, McNally & Company, Chicago, 1884, is the culprit.

Well, some healthy percentage of those land deals were rigged/crooked–but not nearly all; and in fact there were huge sums of money raised by the government in granting enormous land offerings to the railroad companies, who were also monetarily encouraged to continue making their ways west. There were definitely multiple aspect in all of this.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Maps/Diagrams of Imagination & Ideas — Propaganda
Smash the 7th Column–U.S. WWII Home Front Propaganda

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

No, this family wasn’t killed by a firing squad, but according to the pamphlet they might as well have been. By the 7th column.

The 5th Column is the army of spies and saboteurs infiltrating a country; the 6th Column helps this action along, (according to Webster’s): “the aggregate of persons in a country at war who assist the subversive activities of the fifth column by defeatist talk, the spreading of rumors, and other activities that weaken resistance or appease the enemy”.

The 7th column was carelessness–and evidently this was a push to roll back the tide of accidental death and injury in the U.S., something that was particularly important during wartime. According to this tract 102,500 Americans were accidentally killed every year, with another 350,000 becoming permanently disabled and 9,000,000 being injured. “We must stop burning down our factories” says the author, for these injuries and deaths would be along the same lines (in some fashion) of the U.S. being bombed.

This seems as though it could have been an effective tool in getting the view across of fighting the sub-rosa enemy of carelessness in wartime.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Propaganda
Superb Cover Design–WWII Underground Warfare, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2280

“There are no news-cameras clicking where the underground war wages. It is a war of iron nerves against an iron machine, of indomitable men and women defying the Nazi monster, of sudden swift strokes out of the dark, of blows that fall where least expected, hampering, slowing, wrecking the Nazi war machine…”

Underground War in the West has one of he most dyunamic covers I’ve seen in quite some time–not to say that there are absolute “best” designs, but it is certainly a top-tier design, a fine effort, grabbing the attention of even a casual browser, and suggesting action, even without a read.

This pamphlet really seemed like a tiger in a cage—looking through some of the collection here relating to WWII literature on activities in occupied countries, the startling cover graphic of Underground War in the West (printed at some time in 1943, and not before or after) really rattled its cage.  Its contents were non-too tame, either—while being reasonably polite (as was the fashion) it still invoked some very difficult ideas and images.

This was a terrific, mass appeal pamphlet on the underground actions of occupied Europe illustrated with pencil and charcoal drawings by Cuneo, with each page depicting a  resistance activity—including the underground press, medical aid, sabotage, and general murderous nuisance-making and in general pamphlet praises and celebrates the heroism in occupied countries such as Czechoslovakia (with a drawing showing the assassination of Heydrich), Holland (showing the Dutch caring for a wounded RAF pilot), Belgium, France, Greece. Norway, Poland, Yugoslavia and Luxembourg.

There are full-page drawings relating to the strength of occupied people in the face of “Mass Deportation (cannot dishearten them, thousands and thousands of families have been torn asunder in mass deportations…”) and “Firing Squads…thin the patriot ranks yet ever more step into their places” . The section on “Facts from the Occupied Countries” list activities in 9 occupied countries;  under “Poland”, we read that “Germany has drawn a veil of silence around Poland…it is estimated that 2,500,000 Poles have died in concentration camps or by execution up to December 31, 1942. There are 54 concentration camps in Poland…and the average life span in the camps is nine months…”  Nowhere in the pamphlet however is there any singular mention of deportation or murder of the Jewish people—there were hundreds of articles printed in American newspapers up  until this time on the beginning of the (yet named) Holocaust, though acknowledgment of a fact doesn’t necessarily make it widely known in spite of its incredible and massive significance.  This pamphlet, while extraordinary in mentioning the millions of deaths in the concentration camps and “deportations”, was rather ordinary in its coverage of who it was that was being murdered in the camps.

There is also a two-page spread exhibiting examples of underground newspapers:

Only six copies are located in libraries around the world, and those are pretty high-calibre institutions: Hoover Institute on War, Holocaust Library, Harvard University Law Library, London Metropolitan, National Library of Scotland, Oxford University.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Information, Quantitative Display of — Militaria — Propaganda
German Propaganda in Sweden, 1943

JF Ptak Science Books Post 2239

“Sveriges folk vet inte mycket om alt detta”/Swedish people do not know much about this…”

This is an unusual graphic–or at least a graphic display of information found in an unusual location, a publication in Swedish quoting sources from the Free Press from Stockholm (19 June 1943) on the effectiveness of Luftwaffe vs R.A.F. bombing.

It is supposed to be a graphic proof for the ferociousness of the Allies, published in a pamphlet called Konst i spillror (roughly, Art and Rubble, or Art in Rubble, something like this) which I believe was a German attempt to win Swedish hearts and minds by displaying the destructive force of teh other side of the war. The subtitle of the pamphlet is on the destruction of European cultural treasures in Antwerp, Nuremberg, Koln, Lubeck, Karlsruhe, Munich…plus bombed cemeteries, schools, hospitals, and so on. The locations are in Germany, mostly, or German-held areas, and decry the barbarity of the war in the hands of the British, Canadians, and Americans.

I do not have proof of this as propaganda, but it certainly feels like it. Sweden was a neutral country during WWII, managing to maintain its neutrality for the entire conflict. There were evidently soem concessions made to both sides–for Germany the major bit seems to have been allowing the German 163rd rail transport across Sweden in the attack on the Soviet Union (which I imagine was an enemy of my enemy move). On the other hand the Swedes accepted Jewish refugees from Norway and accepted all of the Danish Jews who were supposed to be sent to concentration camps. I can understand the Nazis wanting to try to make inroads into the national psyche, but I have a hard time imagining that this campaign succeeded on any level.

My copy is a photographic negative of the original, made during the war, and was once part of the Library of Congress Pamphlet Collection. As I said, I could be wrong in this interpretation, but I feel fairly confident that it is so.

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Anticipation, History of — Militaria — Perception — Propaganda
Making Human Junk from Children, 1914
JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

“There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings
profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to
train them, but to get high profits from their work.” –Lewis Hine, 1908

These broadsides are tough going. They are the work of advocates and reformers who sought to give children an even chance at growing up as children, rather than joining the hundreds of thousands of 6-12 year olds already in the workforce in America in the first decade or two of the 20th century. They were a simple and very powerful appeal to business-owners and parents to resist the temptation of child exploitation–none though so far as I can tell directly addressed the children. See my other posts on this topics here:
- Children at Work, 1934, an Appeal by the Great Dorothy Kenyon
- Map of Newsboy Work Violators, 1914–Child Labor & Child Scavengers
- Ancient Myths Modern: the Other Statue of Liberty,1911
[Source for the following images at Inquiry Unlimited, follow the link for other examples. ]
·Posted by :

JF Ptak

·in:

Bad Ideas — Propaganda — Social History