Thanks to  the Charleston Country Public Library

Eliza Lucas was born on Antigua, which was then part of the British Leeward Islands, where she grew up on one of three sugar cane plantations owned by her father, George Lucas, who was a lieutenant colonel in the British Army.[1] When she was ten, she was sent to school in London to learn the accomplishments believed to be necessary for a young woman in society.[2] The school seems to have been an unusual one: the curriculum included bookkeeping in addition to the usual skills of needlework, French, and music. She wrote to her father that her favorite subject was botany, perhaps a foreshadowing of her future life as farmer on a large scale.

In 1738, the Lucas family moved from Antigua to South Carolina, where Colonel Lucas had inherited a plantation from his father. He soon bought two more. The following year, as tensions between England and Spain increased , George Lucas, now a major, was called back to his post in Antigua When those tensions exploded into the War of the Austrian Succession[3] in 1740, he was named lieutenant governor.

Major Lucas left sixteen-year-old Eliza in charge of the Carolina plantations, which he had mortgaged to pay for his last military promotion[4], and of a household that included a sickly mother, a younger sister, and a number of enslaved people. Eager to make the plantations pay, and perhaps to reduce the debt, she began experimenting with new crops that could replace or complement their production of rice. She planted a large stand of oaks, in anticipation of future income. She tried ginger, cotton,[5] alfalfa, flax, and hemp. Each of them failed. Finally, in 1739, she planted indigo, which was being grown and processed in the West Indies in response to a demand in the British textile industry.

By 1744, Eliza had grown a large enough indigo crop to attempt the complex process of producing dye, working with two indigo processing experts from the West Indies, a French grower named Montserrat and an enslaved dye maker from the French West Indies named “Quash”. She sent a sample to Britain, calling it “Carolina Indigo,” which was favorably received.

Eliza married Chief Justice Charles Pinckney that same year. She raised a family, including two sons who played important roles in the new American republic. After Pinckney’s death, she managed his plantations as well as her own. Throughout her life, she continued to grow and process large amounts of indigo for the British market. Later she also experimented with producing silk.

When she died in 1793, George Washington served as a pallbearer at her funeral at his own request—perhaps a symbol of how important her work had been.

Eliza’s success (and that of her enslaved mentor) transformed agriculture in colonial South Carolina. Other planters followed her example. The crop fit into the established slave plantation economy of the region. It could be grown on land that was not suitable for growing rice, which was the primary cash crop in the southern colonies at the time. By the beginning of the American Revolution, indigo made up one-third of the colony’s export trade.

[1] I believe in sharing mother’s names where I can. Eliza’s mother was Ann (probably Meldrum) Lucas. That “probably” tells us how little we know about her.

[2] In other words, the accomplishments that would lead to a good marriage.

[3] One of several European wars that spilled over into Europe’s colonial colonies in the eighteenth century.

[4] While an occasional field promotion occurred promotion by purchase, rather than by merit, was standard operating procedure in the British army at the time.

[5] Cotton was grown in the United States as early as the mid-16th century, primarily for domestic use. It did not become a cash crop in the American south until the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, at much the same time as cotton was overtaking wool in Britain’s textile mills.

Fanny Palmer, ca 1876.

Fanny Palmer was born in Leicester, England, where she received her first training in art, specifically drawing, perspective and watercolor, at Mary Linwood’s academy for girls[1]. She ran a drawing school in Leicester for several years in the 1830s. Later, Fanny and her husband, Edmund Seymour Palmer, decided to get into the lithography business as well. Fanny trained as a lithographer with Louis Haghe, one of the founders of what was considered the best British lithographic firm of the time; meanwhile, her husband became as a professional printer.

The Palmers opened a lithography business in Leicester in 1842. In 1844, they immigrated to New York, where they opened a shop under the name F & S Palmer, Lithographers.[2] During this time, she produced a large and diverse body of work—including sheet music, cartoons and war illustrations as well as the better known prints for home decoration—and demonstrated a sophisticated use of the medium. When the business failed several years later, the Palmers sold it to the owner of another printmaking business, one Nathaniel Currier, the founder of what became the famous Currier and Ives firm, the most successful and prolific printmaking company in the United States.[3] (You see where this is going, right?)

Closing the business opened new opportunities for Fanny, who soon had a full-time position as an artist with Currier and Ives.[4] She was the only woman illustrator on the staff and one of the most skilled and prolific artist in the Currier and Ives stable: one of the small number of their artists whose works they issued with a signature. In print after print she gave form to the romanticized vision of American life that was part of the Currier and Ives brand.

She created some two hundred [signed] lithographs for the firm, including two prints that became iconic representations of the United States’ westward expansion:Across the Continent. “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way “(1868) and The Rocky Mountains. Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1866).[5]  She is also known to have worked on many more that were released without a signature, including a large number of the firm’s still life prints.

In addition to holding a full time staff position with Currier and Ives,  it appears that Palmer also ran a lithographic workshop in her home, where she trained several apprentices, several of whom went on to become innovative lithographic artists and found important lithographic studios of their own. In other words, she created a legacy in addition to producing a substantial body of work.

Palmer was not the only woman involved in the business of lithographic prints. Some were hired to transfer drawings to polished lithographic stones. Others were employed to hand-color printed lithographs. By mid-century, a few who had been trained at the Philadelphia School for Women[6], even found work as lithographers. But Palmer was the most successful and well-known. Her works were enormously popular. In fact, Currier and Ives expert. Ewell L. Newman claims “It is likely that during the later half of the nineteenth century more pictures by Mrs. Fanny Palmer decorated the homes of ordinary Americans than those of any other artist, dead or alive.” Wow!

[1] Mary Linwood (1755-1845) was a celebrated artist in the early 1800s, known for her full-scale embroidered versions of famous paintings. It appears that her work was in high demand in the royal courts of Europe (!) and she maintained a permanent exhibition of her work in London. Rabbit hole, here I come.

[2] I am intrigued by the fact that Fanny (F) got first billing.

[3] Currier and Ives billed itself as a “Publisher of Cheap and Popular Prints.” Truth in advertising.

[4] Her husband became a tavern keeper.

[5] It is interesting that Fanny, who grew up in England and was probably exposed to the rhetoric of British imperialism, uses the word “empire” to describe the push west.

Together, the two works can be seen as visual representations of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Across the Continent is an allegorical depiction of expansion, organized along a dramatic diagonal created by a train track. On one side of the tracks is a bustling American frontier town, with a small train of covered wagons departing into the background. On the other side is an image of a remarkably tame wilderness, occupied by a few Native Americans, two on horseback and two in canoes in the distance.  The Rocky Mountains shows the next step in expansion: a wagon train winding its way toward the viewer with the mountains looming in the distance. Native Americans, again on horseback, watch the wagon train from a low ridge in the foreground, not quite as distant as before.

[6] Which we have seen several times before. The school is unavoidable if you are thinking about women artists in nineteenth century America.

Two years and two months ago,*[1] My Own True Love and I finished an epic road trip down the Great River Road. It took us ten years and it was absolutely wonderful.*[2] We’ve been considering what our next big multi-part road trip should be ever since.*[3]

For a while we thought about driving Route 66, which turns 100 this year. But we’ve finally decided on following the Lewis and Clark “trail.”

Like the Great River Road, which wasn’t actually a road, the Lewis and Clark trail isn’t exactly a trail. The expedition travelled by water whenever possible, so the modern “trail” often runs as close to the applicable river as it is possible to get. The two guidebooks we have warn us that even where they traveled by land, it is difficult, if not impossible to follow the trail as they took it in 1804.

The starting place is obvious. According to Meriwether Lewis, “The mouth of the River Dubois is to be considered as the point of departure.” Our first stop on the road will be the Lewis and Clark State Historic Site in Hartford, Illinois, on the site of Camp Dubois. How far we get after that on the first leg of the trip is unknown.

Part of the fun of a road trip is discovering the unexpected, but we would also love to hear any suggestions you might have. What are your must-see sites along the trail—famous and obscure alike? Which widely heralded sites are duds, or closed for renovation? What little town has a great restaurant, bakery, farmer’s market or place to two-step to a honky-tonk band? Traveling history nerds want to know.

In return, you’ll get lots of stories from the road.[4]

[1] Not that I’m counting

[2] You can read my summary of the trip here and detailed stories of our adventures here.

[3] For those of you who wonder why it has taken us two years and a bit, all I can say is a LOT has happened since then.

[4] If you don’t follow me on Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram, now would be the time. I like to post things seen along the way that are too small for a blog post and too fun not to share.

These days I’m hanging out a lot with Bohemians (or possibly that should be bohemians) in New York at the turn of the century: radicals, reformers, artists, and a handful of people who are just plain weird. In the process, I am coming across interesting people doing fascinating things. Case in point: photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991)

After a brief stint as a student at Ohio State University, Abbott started her artistic career studying sculpture—first in New York, then in Berlin, and finally in Paris, where she worked as Man Ray’s[1] studio assistant. The experience changed her artistic focus[2] to photography

In 1926, after two years of working for Ray, who allowed her to use his darkroom for her own photographs, Abbott set up a photographic studio of her own, where she became a serious rival to her mentor, known for her portraits of the artistic and intellectual circles.(Think “Lost Generation.”) One newspaper review went so far as to call her “the best portrait photographer in Paris, which, is to say, in the world.”

Portrait of Janet Flanner by Berenice Abbot. ca. 1925

In January 1929, Abbott returned to New York, for what she intended to be a short visit. Instead it proved to be another major turning point in her career. As she later described it, “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,”

Using a handheld camera, she began to walk through the city, taking what she called “tiny photographic notes” of its infrastructure and its street life[3]. Her project may have been inspired in part by the work of French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who documented the transformation of Paris from the 1880s through the 1920s.[4] But where Atget’s work was known for its wide views, Abbott developed what she described as “bird’s-eye” and “worm’s-eye” points of view for her work, often capturing the contrast between the old and new in the rapidly transforming city

At first the work was a passion project: 266 small black and white photos pasted in a standard photo album, arrange by subject and location. In 1935 she received funding from the Federal Art Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration. The photographs were displayed as a traveling exhibition and published as Changing New York, which enjoyed both critical and commercial success

In addition to the portraits and documentary photographs for which she is famous, Abbott wrote and illustrated guidebooks about photography and invented new photographic equipment and techniques.

She also integrated art and science in her work. One of her later projects was photographs of scientific phenomenon created in collaboration with MIT. Combining clear demonstrations of abstract scientific principles with artistic vision, her photographs were used to illustrate physics textbooks throughout the 1950s and 19960s.

[1] Short version for those of you who haven’t spent much time thinking about early twentieth century photography: Man Ray began his artistic career as part of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He began to experiment with camera-less photography in 1922, soon after he arrived in Paris, putting objects on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing them to sunlight. While he is best known for what he dubbed “rayographs,” he also built a career as a fashion photographer.

[2] Unintentional photography metaphor, but having seen it I chose to keep it. Sorry.

[3] Her process makes me think of the painters of the Ashcan School, who arrived in New York a generation earlier and painted scenes they saw as they walked the city’s streets.  (I’m reading a lot about the Ashcan School these days with no clear purpose other than I really like their work.  No further reason needed, right?)

[4] After Atget’s death, Abbott bought his work and negatives. She spent forty years making sure his work was remembered.

When Karin suggested Lydia Pinkham (1819-1883) as a woman entrepreneur that I should look at, I pooh-poohed the idea. I wasn’t sure that Pinkham was a real person. (She was.) And even if she was a real person, she would be too early for my purposes. (True.) But not too early for a blog post.

Lydia Estes Pinkham was a household name—and face— in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her image appeared on bottles of her famous tonic and in ads selling them. In fact, according to one of my sources, her image was so familiar that some American newspapers used her picture when they reported Queen Victoria’s death in 1901.[2]

She was born into a large Quaker family —the tenth of twelve children—on a farm in Lynn, Massachusetts., where she attended the Lynn Academy and was actively involved in movements dedicated to the ideas and causes of the time, including Swedenborgianism, abolition, temperance, and women’s issues. She spent several years working as a teacher in Lynn and worked with Frederick Douglass as the secretary of the Freedman’s Institute.

In 1843, she married Isaac Pinkham, a widower with a daughter. Together they had several more children. For the next thirty years, Lydia was primarily a homemaker, though she had a side hustle as an herbalist with a focus on perfecting an herbal treatment for “female complaints.”

For years she shared her tonic with family and friends, many of whom believed the formula helped them.[3] When the family’s finances, always shaky, reached a new low as a result of the bank failures of 1873[4], Lydia, at the urging of her son, Daniel, decided to try selling bottles of what they named Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.

Ads for the product leaned heavily on slogans such as “Only a woman can understand a woman’s ills,” and in fact Pinkham’s compound was one of the earliest products made by a woman for women. The use of Pinkham’s image in advertising, another of Daniel’s ideas, underscored the idea.

Pinkham went further and invited women to write to her for advice. The company received so many letters that Pinkham set up an all-woman Department of Advice to respond to them. She also wrote a book intended to help women understand their bodies— the nineteenth century equivalent of Our Bodies, Our Selves. The book was distributed at no charge under several different titles.

Doctors dismissed the compound as just another quack nostrum; in fact, one of its primary ingredients, black cohosh, is used today to ease menstrual difficulties.[5] Women embraced it. The business grew from a one-woman operation to a factory that brewed and shipped roughly $300,000 of the tonic and related pills and lozenges each year at the time of Lydia’s death.[6]

The company stayed in business until the mid-twentieth century. Today at least two companies offer similar products, under variants of Lydia’s name, with an ingredient list very similar to her original tonic.

[1] Many thumbs up, with the caveat that it is more violent than the first two episodes would lead you to expect.Two middle-aged women on the run from bad guys, and from themselves. Funny and smart. Excellent storytelling. Think Thelma and Louise meets James Bond.

[2] I have not been able to verify this, but I couldn’t resist sharing it.

[3] An alternate version of this story has Lydia using family and friends as lab rats as she perfected the formula. Potato,.Potahto.

[4] The first of four major economic crises that hit the country in the late 19th century, the panic of 1873 was the result of over-expansion in railroads, and triggered by a stock market crash in Vienna which led European investors to dump their American securities

[5] Despite Pinkham’s stance on temperance, the tonic also had an high alcohol content, a fact that was clearly stated on the label, with the explanation that the alcohol was used solely as a preservative. If taken as directed, the alcohol would not have been an issue, but there is no guarantee that it wasn’t misused.

[6] Roughly $10 million today

I will admit that I resisted reading Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City and the Birth of American Fashion by fashion journalist Nancy MacDonnell, despite the fact that several people I admire recommended it.

I’m not sure why. Over the years I have happily gone down rabbit holes related to the social impact of sewing machines, the development of aniline dyes, and the rise of that astonishing new institution, the department store. This time last year I took you with me on an unintentional series of posts on changes in ladies’ lingerie.[1] I’m as big a sucker as anyone for beautiful historical clothing, beautifully displayed—especially if it comes with a side of historical context.

I finally picked up Empresses of Seventh Avenue because of the reading I am doing around 1) female entrepreneurs and 2) life in early 20th century New York City. It turned out that the book was not on-point for either subject, but MacDonnell caught my attention from page one with a short introduction that sets the stage with French dominance in the fashion industry, and the blunt statement “Then the Nazis invaded Paris, and everything changed.” I kept reading.

MacDonnell devotes a chapter to Louis XIV’s deliberate decision, aided by his powerful finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to reshape the damaged French economy by making France the arbiter of fashion and center of the luxury trades related to it.[2] She outlines the growth of fashion reporting from the fashion dolls of the seventeenth century to the illustrated women’s magazines that appeared as a result of new printing technologies in the mid-nineteenth century. She describes the industry of Parisian haute couture , the workings of the fashion industry in United States before World War II, and how the two intersected. I found all of it fascinating.

The heart of the book, however, is the designers who created the American Look during World War II and the journalists who, almost against their will, helped make New York a fashion capital that would rival Paris. She introduces vivid personalities with the skill of a novelist: the dueling editors of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, journalists who were enamored with French fashion and journalists who crusaded for American design, and American designers, who were often personalities in their own right. She describes the distinctive work of each designer, turning me into a Claire McCardell fan in the process.[3]

The Empresses of Seventh Avenue lost my attention after Dior introduced the New Look in 1947—not enough history and too many spot biographies of the designers of my teen years and young adulthood for my tastes. Nonetheless, I am glad I read the book and recommend it to anyone interested in clothes, fashion history, or stories of smart women making things happen.

[1] In case you missed them: The Secret Behind the Gibson Girl’s Shape. Ida Rosenthal: Dressmaker Turned Underwear Tycoon, and Lady Duff Gordon aka Lucile

[2] Fairy tale writer Charles Perrault  and his version of Sleeping Beauty make a cameo appearance. I love it when old interests unexpectedly collide with new.

[3] The cape coats!. The suits!  The practical pockets!

***

Recently a friend of mine texted me from Culloden in Scotland[1]–the battlefield where the Duke of Cumberland routed Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite forces and effectively ended the Jacobite cause. (Charles was later involved in a half-hearted French plan to invade England in 1759, but it came to naught.) She wanted to know if I wanted a Jacobite blue bonnet.

My answer–which didn’t surprise her–was no. Despite the fact that the exiled Stuarts clearly had the better legal right to the throne, I’ve always had a soft-spot for that hard-working sober-minded prince, William of Orange. And I’ve never had much use for Bonnie Prince Charlie–who I’ve always thought of as a putz rather than a failed romantic hero. (If you have strong opinions on the subject, feel free to yell at me in the comments below.)

Karin’s offer of a Jacobite blue bonnet led me to think about the fact that history buffs tend to chose sides. Sometimes it is because we agree with one side’s political position. Sometimes it’s because we have a family connection to one side of a conflict or a vested interest in the outcome. Sometimes it’s simply a question of who won. (Though Lost Causes also have their supporters.[2])

And sometimes it simply comes down to preferring one historical figure over another. In my graduate school days, classes on Victorian England quickly divided themselves into two camps on the question of who was the greatest Prime Minister of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Disraeli or William Gladstone. The members of Team Disraeli and Team Gladstone all had good solid arguments supporting their guy, but when you pushed them it eventually came down to a question of personality. [3]

Choosing sides isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as you realize you have a preference. In the end, no one writes objective history.

So tell me, oh Marginalia, what historical sides have you chosen and why?

[1] Not quite as exciting as the time she called me from Tipu Sultan’s palace at Seringapatam.  While I occasionally grumble about feeling like my cell phone is a leash, there is something pretty cool about getting instant communication from far flung historical sites.

[2] Which brings us back to Bonnie Prince Charlie. I have to give the man credit for persistence.

[3] Me? I vote for Sir Robert Peel. Call me contrary.

Sir Robert Peel

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In a recent blog post, I introduced you in passing to activist and journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. As is so often the case, Vorse is worth a closer look.

Born to an upper-middle class family in Amherst, Massachussets in 1874, Vorse was a prolific and high-profile novelist, labor journalist, and activist.*

In 1896, after a period of studying art in France,* she continued her studies at the Art Student’s league in New York City, which had a reputation for progressive teaching methods and radical politics. She soon discovered that she had no real talent for art and took up progressive causes, including women’s suffrage, in place of painting.

Vorse was married twice—to journalist Albert Vorse in 1898 and radical journalist Joseph O’Brien in 1912—and widowed twice. Both Vorse and O’Brien supported her writing and shared her progressive values.

Her career as an activist and journialist blossomed after O’Brien’s death in 1915.

That year she joined with a group of left-wing writers, including John Reed, Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser and Edna St Vincent Millay, to found the Provincetown Theater Group., which was dedicated to showcase new American talent outside the rules of the commercial Broadway theater.

In the early years of the First World War, she and other progressives formed the Women’s Peace Party, with the goal of bringing the war to an end. She was one of the party’s delegates to the 1915 International Conference of Women in the Hague.

More importantly, at least in terms of the impact she made, she also turned to serious journalism. She already supported herself as a writer of short stories for women’s and general interest magazines and of romantic fiction novels, which she later dubbed “lollypops.”** Beginning in 1916, she traveled across the United States and Europe reporting on social justice issues, with an emphasis on the impact of events on woman and children that was unusual in labor journalism at the time. Her work appeared in a wide range of mainstream publications including the New York Post, Harper’s Weekly, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, McClure’s Magazine and even McCall’s.

Her biographer Dee Garrison summed up her journalism career: “Across the space of half a century, wherever men and women battled for a wider justice, she was apt to have been there.” She reported on striking miners in Michigan and striking textile workers in New Jersey and South Carolina.She covered the Scottsboro Boys’ trial in Alabama and the battle between coal bosses and miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, where she was run out of town by thugs working for the bosses. She reported on the United Auto Worker’s strike in Flint. Michigan, in 1937 and on the steel workers’ strike in Youngstown, Ohio, where she was grazed by a bullet fired by company guards. She reported on conditions in Stalin’s Russia and Hungary under Béla Kun—experiences that led her to write in her diary “I am a communist because I don’t see anything else to be, but I am a communist who hates Communists and Communism.” In 1952, she wrote an extensive and hard-hitting investigation of dirty politicians and organized crime on the New York and New Jersey water front.

Her career as a journalist ended in 1959, at the age of 85, when she suffered a stroke on her way home from reporting on a textile workers’ strike in North Carolina.

* I am fascinated by the number of privileged children of the Gilded Age who devoted themselves to social change.

**Much like novelist Graham Greene, who dubbed his thrillers “entertainments,” as opposed to what he believed were his more serious novels dealing with issues of faith and politics. Subjects that also play an important role in his thrillers.

First up, a book review from 2021:

I love this cover!

Let me start with the short version: Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape and Home is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read in a while.

Here’s the long version:

In 2017, former Sports Illustrated journalist Alexander Wolff  set out to explore his family’s German roots. The result is an extraordinary mixture of memoir, journalism, history, and an up-close look at one family’s complicated relationship with Nazi Germany.

Two biographical narratives stand at the heart of Endpapers. Wolff’s grandfather, Kurt Wolff, was a leading publisher of contemporary literature in Germany, publishing authors whose works would later be burned by the Nazis. ( Think Kafka, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass.) In 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, he fled Germany with his wife Helene and took refuge in the United States, where they founded a new, equally influential, publishing house, which served as gateway for introducing American audiences to major European authors in translation, including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.*  They left behind Kurt’s family from his first marriage, including Wolff’s father, Niko. Niko served in the German army, spent time in a POW camp and emigrated to America in 1948, with a little belated help from his father. He became a chemist with Dupont and assimilated to a degree Kurt never managed. But he never told his son about his wartime experience. And Wolff didn’t ask.

In the course of tracing their stories, Wolff discovers family secrets. He learns the intricacies of which family members escaped being labeled as Jewish by the Nazis and which did not. He realizes how deeply his grandmother’s family, the Mercks of Merck Pharmaceuticals, were involved with the Nazis. He takes a fascinating and horrifying detour into the tragedy of the 1972 Olympics in Munich.** And he eventually confronts the questions of guilt, shame and accountability that many Germans of his generation struggled with decades earlier and the larger questions of “moral inheritance” in general.

Ultimately, Endpapers is not only the gripping story of one family’s history, but an important exploration of our collective responsibility for the past.

* They also published Anne Morrow Lindbergh, which I find somewhat ironic given Charles Lindbergh’s political positions.

**It turns out that a security specialist hired by the Olympic Committee to “tabletop” the event predicted the murder of the Israeli Olympians in the Olympic Village with frightening accuracy in one of several worst-case scenarios. The committee chose not to act on them.

* * *

CODA: Endpapers is a prime example of why I always read the acknowledgements. Wolff buried some good stuff in the midst of the usual “thank-you” list, including a brief discussion of historical novels that shaped his feel for the period and this gem:

Nor could I have told this story without two other women close to Kurt and Niko, my grandmother Elisabeth Merck Albrecht and step-grandmother Helen Mosel Wolff. Their voices underscore how much this narrative, despite its patrilineal spine, owes the women of our family. It is a truism borne out to me repeatedly over years of writing about sports figures, many of them alpha males reluctant to reveal their vulnerabilities: all praise to the mothers and sisters and wives who dress the skinned knees, keep the scrapbooks, vividly recall the failures and thus better sense the full arc of a story.

Sing it, Mr. Wolff!

This morning, I sat down to redress that oversight. As a first step, I googled the book so I could find a bit more about Lipstadt. Right there on the front page of results was my review from 2020. Huh?

I don’t know how I failed to find it before,[1] but I think it is worth sharing again. As far as I’m concerned Beyond Belief remains the best book out there on the question of what the American public knew about the Holocaust and when they knew it.

I am currently taking notes on a pile of secondary source that I read over the last few months. I stuffed them full of sticky tabs as I went and moved on. On the surface, it’s not the most efficient way to do research, and I don’t always have the time to do it. But when time allows, I find it tremendously valuable. Coming back to the material a second time with a fresh eye and more information allows me to make connections that I didn’t make the first time. Re-reading is like re-writing as far as I’m concerned. It’s where the magic happens.

I just finished my second pass on Deborah Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief: the American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. The first time through it didn’t even occur to me to share it with you.[2] And yet, and yet: it is important, not only for understanding how Americans could have remained ignorant of the Holocaust at the time, but also as a starting point for the mindset that makes today’s charges and counter-charges of “fake news” possible.

The work had its roots in the classroom. After Lipstadt told her class that detailed information about the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jews had been available to the Allies very early in the war, one of her students angrily responded “But what did the public—not just the people in high places—know? How much of this information reached them? Could my parents, who read the paper every day, have known?”

Lipstadt argued that a great deal of information was available. American reporters who were stationed in Germany until the United States entered the war had reported on the Nazis in detail, including information about Germany’s persecution of the Jews.

The student wasn’t convinced. “No,” he said. “I can’t believe people could have read about all this in their daily papers.”

Beyond Belief began as Lipstadt’s attempt to prove that she was right. Her final conclusion, which she offers to the student in her acknowledgements: “I was right, but so were you.”

The book consists of a detailed look at who reported what and when, what their editors did with it after they reported it,[3] and how readers responded. Some of the most powerful portions of the book, and the ones that I think are most important for us today, discuss what Lipstadt describes as “the barriers to belief.” The most critical of these was a legacy from World War I. Stories of German atrocities were reported in the first World War that later proved to be false. The result was an attitude of what journalist and historian William Shirer called “supercynicism and superskepticism” about reports of atrocities. As a group, Americans said “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” unfortunately, this time the stories were true.

Be warned, Beyond Belief is not an easy read. Lipstadt’s style is clear, but her work is dense with data. Nonetheless, I found it a worthwhile read for reasons well beyond my current research.

[1] Stressed, stretched, and tired perhaps.

[2] I don’t normally discuss purely academic works of history here in the Margins. They have a different purpose and a different audience and occasionally are just plain hard to read.

[3] Important stories often got buried deep in newspapers. Editors (and sometimes reporters) added seeds of doubt to the reported stories. And some papers didn’t run the stories at all.