Onward Christian Soldiers 

[Part 8]

 

 

 

Note

This new version of Onward Christian Soldiers that I’ve compiled consists of the original contents published by Noontide Press in 1982 plus the “missing” text that, for reasons explained below, was in the Swedish version published in 1942.

I’ve also included some supplementary texts here giving the history of the missing parts of Day’s book. Also book reviews by Revilo Oliver and Amazon readers (see Part 1).

KATANA

 

 

Contents

 

 

Maps of Northern Europe & the Baltic States

THE REST OF DONALD DAY by Paul Knutson — 1984

EDITORIAL NOTE by Liberty Bell

The Resurrection of Donald Day — A review by Revilo P. Oliver. The Liberty Bell — January 1983

TWO KINDS OF COURAGE by Revilo P. Oliver. The Liberty Bell — October 1986

AMAZON REVIEWS

__________________

ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

Chapter

Introduction

Permit Me To Introduce Myself * (all new)

1 Why I did not go Home *………………………………. 1

2 The United States  *………………………………………. 7

3 Latvia  ………………………………………………………… 21

4 Meet the Bolsheviks  *………………………………….. 41

5 Alliance with the Bear  *……………………………….. 53

6 Poland  ……………………………………………………….. 63

7 Trips  ………………………………………………………….. 85

8 The Downfall of Democracy * ………………………. 93

9 Jews  …………………………………………………………… 101

10 Russia  *………………………………………………………. 115

11 Lithuania * ………………………………………………….. 131

12 Danzig  ……………………………………………………….. 145

13 Estonia  ……………………………………………………….. 151

14 Sweden  ………………………………………………………. 159

15 Norway  ………………………………………………………. 169

16 Finland  ………………………………………………………. 183

17 England  *……………………………………………………. 197

18 Europe  *…………………………………………………….. 201

19 Epilogue  *…………………………………………………… 204

Index of Names  ………………………………………………….. 205

* Contains new material (dark blue text) missing from original Noontide edition.

MAP

of Northern Europe 1920s (click to enlarge in new window)

MAP

of Baltic States 1920s (click to enlarge in new window)

 

 

 

LIBERTY BELL PUBLICATIONS

June 1984

THE REST OF

DONALD DAY

by

Paul Knutson

Donald Day, who had been for many years the foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune in northern Europe, wrote a record of his observations, Onward, Christian Soldiers, in 1942. His English text was first published as a book in 1982. It was printed by William Morrison and appeared under the imprint of the Noontide Press of Torrance, California, As Professor Oliver pointed out in his review of that book in Liberty Bell for January, 1983, the text had been copied, with some omissions and minor changes, from an anonymously issued mimeographed transcription of a defective carbon copy of the author’s manuscript, which had been brought to the United States in someway, despite the vigilance of Franklin Roosevelt’s surreptitious thought-police.

That was not the first publication of Day’s book. A Swedish translation, Framat Krististridsman, was published by Europa Edition in Stockholm in 1944. (That paper cover, printed in red, green, and black, is reproduced in black-and-white on the following page.)

 

 

Copies of this book still survive in Sweden and are even found in some public libraries. There may still be a copy in the Library of Congress, where, however, it was catalogued and buried among the very numerous books of a different Donald Day, a very prolific writer who midwifed the autobiography of Will Rogers and produced book after book on such various subjects as American humorists, the folk-lore of the Southwest, the tourist-attractions of Texas, and probably anything for which he saw a market, including a mendacious screed entitled Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Own Story. By a supreme irony, the Library concealed Framat Kristi stridsman in its catalogue by placing it between the other Day’s Evolution of Love and his propaganda piece for the unspeakably vile monster whose millions of victims included one of the last honest journalists.

The Swedish translation contains some long and important passages that do not appear in the book published in California and are not found in the mimeographed copy. By translating these back into English, I can restore Donald Day’s meaning, but, of course, I cannot hope to reproduce exactly the words and style of his original manuscript. I can also restore from the Swedish the deficiencies of the mimeographed transcript.

It seems impossible to determine now whether the parts of Day’s work that are preserved only in the Swedish were deleted by him to shorten his text when he sent a typewritten copy to the United States or were added by him before he turned his manuscript over to the Swedish translator at about the same time. At all events, the Swedish now alone provides us with some significant parts of bay‘s book and many Americans will want to have Day’s Work complete and entire.

For the convenience of the reader, I have, by arrangement with the publisher of Liberty Bell, included corrections of the printed English text where it departs, through negligence or misunderstanding, from the mimeographed text from which it was copied. I have passed over obvious typographical errors in the printed book, and omitted small and relatively unimportant corrections. For example, near the end of p. 44 of the printed book, the sentence should read, “All reported that the officials of the Cheka, later known as the GPU and NKVD, were Jews.”

Day did not use footnotes, so the reader will understand what all the footnotes [indicated by the symbol *] on the following pages are my own explanations of the text.

The supplements below are arranged in the order of pages of the printed book, as shown by the note in the small type that precedes each section, The three sources are discriminated typographically thus; Italics show what is copied from the printed text to give continuity.

Ordinary Roman type is used for what is in the mimeographed copy but was omitted from the printed version. This, of course, is precisely what Day wrote in English.

What I have translated back from the Swedish appears in this style of type. These passages, as I have said, convey Day’s meaning without necessarily restoring exactly the words he used in his English original, from which the Swedish version was made.

*****

 

 

Editorial Note

 

Liberty Bell

With the foregoing supplements, we have at last as accurate a text of Donald Day’s Onward, Christian Soldiers as we are likely to have, barring the remote possibility that the manuscript Day gave to his Swedish translator may yet be discovered.

The Swedish translation is pedestrian, as indeed is Day’s English style, but a comparison of the Swedish with the extant parts of the English assures me of the translator’s general competence. In one passage, which we have only in the Swedish, in which Day reports his refusal to become a well-paid and dignified member of our Diplomatic Service with a “little Morgenthau” as an “adviser” to tell him what to do, the translator was evidently confused by the irony of some English phrase such as “executive for a Jew” and reversed Day’s obvious meaning;, this was corrected in the foregoing text.

The mimeographed version is evidently a transcription from Day’s carbon copy, with only such errors as only the most expert typists can entirely avoid. There is, however, one very odd error in the mimeographed version corresponding to our printed page 4 above; it reads “the Great Rocky mountains of the border of Tennessee and North Carolina.” That is geographically absurd, of course, and the Swedish (stora Rijkiga Bergen) shows that Day wrote “Great Smoky mountains,” as we have, printed above. It is probably only a coincidence that the Swedish word for “Smoky” could have suggested, to a person who knew no Swedish, the error made by the typist in California who copied Day’s carbon copy.

When Day relies on his recollection of what he was told years before, his memory is sometimes faulty, and we have naturally made no changes in what he wrote. He makes an obvious error on our page 4, where he says that the Cherokees were driven from their lands and moved to Indian Territory “toward the end of the last century.” Actually, the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation by an American army took place in 1838. The Cherokees, by the way, were the most nearly civilized of all the Indian tribes in the territory that is now the United States and Canada, and it is true that their expulsion from the lands that had been guaranteed to them by treaty inflicted great hardships on them: they lost most of their property, including their negro slaves, and large numbers of them perished as they were quite brutally herded from the Appalachians almost half way across the continent to what is now the southern border of Arkansas.

Ethnologists who have made intensive studies of the Indians of North America (e.g., Peter Farb) regard Sequoyah (Sequoia) as perhaps “the greatest intellect the Indians produced.” He was the son of a Cherokee woman by an unidentified white trader, and, growing up with the mother’s people, regarded himself as a Cherokee. He, however, was an exception to what Day says about half-breeds. Day may have been confused about the date of the expulsion because a few of the Cherokees succeeded in hiding from the perquisition in the wilds of the Great Smokies and were eventually given the small reservation they now occupy east of Bryson City in the toe of North Carolina. There was some agitation about them “near the end of the last century.”

The circumstances in which Day’s carbon copy was smuggled into the United States remain obscure. When the mimeographed transcription was made and first issued, it contained a prefatory page on which an anonymous writer said,

“It is my understanding that this book was published in; 1942, and then merely made an appearance at the book-sellers, when all copies were immediately withdrawn and destroyed without a single copy escaping the book-burners, I was also told that Mr. Day died shortly after this incident.”

The page was presumably withdrawn when its author learned that Day was still alive at that time and an exile in Helsinki, since the Jews who rule the United States would not permit him to return to his native land.

It is curious that the man who made the transcription, which did effectively preserve Day’s work for the future, and who was evidently a resident of California, had heard a somewhat less plausible version of the rumor that was current in Washington in 1943. (See the review by Professor Oliver in Liberty Bell, January 1983, p. 27). It is quite possible that the source of both rumors was an effort by the apparatus of the great War Criminal in the White House to prevent the publication of the Swedish translation, which, as Day tells us in the last item in our supplements, was delayed in the press for two years by a “paper shortage” and it is noteworthy that the paper for it was finally obtained in Finland, not Sweden,* Until the book was finally published in 1944, the enemies of mankind could have imagined that their pressures on Sweden had effectively prevented Day’s exposure of one phase of their activity from ever appearing in print.

[* Day’s book was published by Europa Edition in Stockholm, which, however, had to have the printing done by Mercators Tryckeri in Helsinki. Although copies of the Swedish book have been preserved, Day’s work would not now be generally known — and would be supposed lost by Americans who heard of it — if the anonymous gentleman in California had not issued his mimeographed transcription.]

_______________________

 

KATANA — The Liberty Bell article continues with a list of text to be added or amended to the Noontide edition. All these changes (indicated by the dark blue text) have been entered in this expanded version of Onward Christian Soldiers.

 

 

Word Totals for the Additional Text

Introduction – –

Permit Me To Introduce Myself – 5,738 (all new)

Chapter 1 – 23

Chapter 2 – 307

Chapter 3 – –

Chapter 4 – 653

Chapter 5 – 1,225

Chapter 6 – –

Chapter 7 – –

Chapter 8 – 408

Chapter 9 – –

Chapter 10 – 907

Chapter 11 – 6

Chapter 12 – –

Chapter 13 – –

Chapter 14 – –

Chapter 15 – –

Chapter 16 – –

Chapter 17 – 2,167

Chapter 18 – 1,179

Chapter 19 – 89

Total words in original = 85,311

Total additional words = 12,702

_______________

Total words in expanded version = 98,013

 

 

ONWARD

 

CHRISTIAN

 

SOLDIERS

 

 

1920-1942: Propaganda, Censorship

and One Man’s Struggle to Herald the Truth

Suppressed reports of a 20-year Chicago Tribune

correspondent in eastern Europe from 1921

Donald Day

With an introduction by Walter Trohan,

former chief of the Tribune’s Washington bureau

THE NOONTIDE PRESS

 

 

 

Chapter 7

 

Trips

 

 

 

 

Residence in a single city over a term of years does not make anyone intimately acquainted with the cultural and economic development of a country. In order to see what is taking place, it is necessary to make trips through the country itself.

Traveling by car year after year through the Baltic States, Poland, East Prussia and Finland, one always saw something new. It was easier to compare the rate of progress of each country. Each year the villages seemed to become cleaner. More new houses were in evidence. There was a still surer sign of increasing wealth in the larger and improved barns erected by the farmers. The roads improved. Everywhere I found proof of progress and increasing wealth and a better standard of living, except in Poland. There the countryside seemed stagnant.

I traveled many miles by car in Poland. Proceeding from Riga to Warsaw, we generally started early morning and at night we slept in some small East Prussian town near the Polish frontier and, next morning, continued the journey to Warsaw. I tried many different roads from the frontier into Warsaw. I tried coming up through the Polish corridor from Gydnia. I tried entering through Pommerania and proceeding via Posen to Warsaw. But I never succeeded in finding a good road or even one being kept in repair.

[Page 86]

In the territories Poland acquired and putsched from the Germans there had once been good roads. These were also full of holes and perilous to travel. Punctures were frequent because the roads contained many horseshoe nails. I found the Polish peasant helpful and courteous, despite their miserable life. But it was not advisable for a Christian traveler to ask directions from a Polish Jew. After being misdirected on two occasions I investigated and discovered there is a prevalent superstition among Jews that if they can give false directions to a Christian they will have good fortune in their next business enterprise.

I further learned that after nightfall one could not leave for a moment, an auto parked in any Polish village or town. Even if the car were locked, thieves would remove the radiator cap, valvecaps from the tires, tear off the windshield wipers and everything else removable. The American flag which waved in front of my car was no protection. It was also stolen on a number of occasions. In the villages it would create a sensation and groups of Jews would gather to stare at this emblem of a country which has not yet learned to distinguish between European and Oriental, between a Christian Nordic outlook on life and a Slav mode of behavior and living; a country in which they were free to conspire and intrigue and where they hoped they would someday occupy the dominating position that they occupied in Russia. Although I call these little settlements Polish villages, still a better name for them would be Jewish villages, for in many of them the Poles were in the minority.

Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania at the beginning of their national existence declared war on the village. It was difficult to find a village in the two northern Baltic States. Like the Finns and other Scandinavians, the Estonian and Latvian farmers liked to build their farmsteads far from their neighbors. It took the Lithuanian government many years to replace the villages with farmsteads but the result fulfilled the hope of the government.

The Slav type of village found in eastern Europe has contributed little to the inhabitants of them. The three most important people in the village are the Starastvo, nominally the oldest peasant who decided most questions arising in communal life, the priest and the policeman. The career and promotion of the latter two is dependent upon the amount of revenue and fines they collect from the villagers. It is largely for this reason that when a peasant obtained some money, either from the sale of produce, or a remittance from some relative abroad, they either spent it for vodka or buried it in the ground. The average villager was afraid to reveal he had money for this usually resulted in a visit from the priest or policeman.

[Page 87]

For many years the southeast comer of Latvia was the most poverty stricken and backward portion of the country. Illiterate, with a high birthrate and an almost equally high percentage of crimes and disease, Latgallia’s interests were chiefly represented in the Latvian parliament by priests. It was this section the Poles claimed from Latvia.

The Latvian government finally decided on radical measures. The land was surveyed, split into farms, the villages forcibly liquidated. The peasants, who for many generations had lived in squalor, exploited by the estate owners and blessed by the priests, were compelled to move out on these farms. Results became apparent almost immediately. The sale of kerosene, sugar, cotton goods, three essential staples, increased with every year. This forcible emancipation was only a small example of government interference into the private life of its citizens. Its success certainly justifies similar experiments and on a larger scale.

Some windy sage once remarked that the best government is the least government. This no longer holds true. Life has become too complex. It is just as necessary for nations to protect themselves from rapacious organizations as it is to preserve society from the onslaught of criminals. It does not matter whether these organizations are churches who seek to expend their temporal powers, properties and influence, or whether they are secret societies such as Masons, Knights of Columbus, Knights of Pythias, fraternal organizations of universities or political parties.

The time comes when the activities of such groups in exploiting or preying upon communities and nations reaches a limit and they do more harm than good. Then they either face liquidation by revolution or state control of their activities.

Such are the thoughts which come to mind when you travel by car along the bumpy tracks which pass under the name of roads in Poland. You also have time to contemplate the scenery as progress is slow. As one passes village after village with their thatched roofs, unfenced fields, ill kept garden patches, where fruit trees and berry bushes are noticeably absent and with swarms of undernourished, rickety, ragged and barefooted children, one becomes appalled at the general poverty. The egotistical comforting thought that perhaps those peasants are contented because they know nothing better and are used to a struggle for meager existence does not satisfy one’s conscience. One very seldom sees even a substantial school building which might be considered a sign of better things to come.

Miles ahead, at the crossroads, surrounded with dingy unpainted buildings and a few stores, looms the spires of a church. A church so large that it dwarfs the tall trees beside it. A church containing so many bricks that the building material it contains would construct several hundred substantial farmhouses and barns. It is the kind of landscape which one pictures existed back in the middle ages. One almost expects to see a knight in armor accompanied by his squire approaching instead of a motorcycle with a sidecar operated by Polish soldiers bouncing crazily from one side of the road to the other in a mad ride to some local staff headquarters.

[Page 88]

The imposing church and the tiny peasant huts; The plump priests and emaciated peasants; The sinister, sallow-faced Jews in their long black kaftans and greasy little picee (curls) dangling before their ears; The hollow-eyed children; And the horses! Straining at their rope harness; Pulling loads exacting their last ounce of strength; spring, summer, autumn, winter, you could always count their ribs. Didn’t they ever get enough to eat when the country was covered with grass? No matter whether their owners were peasant or priest, soldier or Jew, the horses were always starved. They fitted into the pervading picture of hopelessness, of poverty. For some reason the Poles prefer a mongrel horse with a strain of Arab blood, unfitted for heavy farm work. And the blind horses -but I have already told about them.

The journeys we made by car three or four times each year in all seasons and weather from Riga to Warsaw were adventures. We would start early in the morning. The road through Mitan and Meitene to the Lithuanian frontier was always kept in good condition by the Latvians.

Sometimes we would encounter on the frontier the car of the Belgian minister to Latvia, a notorious tightwad. Meat, poultry, butter, eggs and some other products were a trifle cheaper in Lithuania than Latvia. This diplomat would travel to Joniskis, just across the frontier, purchase enough provisions to last a fortnight and save perhaps five or ten dollars on each journey.

Constructed by Russian engineers during the reign of Catherine the Great the postroad running from Petersburg to Riga and through Lithuania to Tilsit sometimes goes for many miles in a straight line. Although there is little important traffic along this road, the Lithuanians kept it well repaired. The two largest towns passed in Lithuania are Schaulen and Tauroggen. In twenty years of Lithuanian rule, many thousands of farms appeared on the country-side and hundreds of new modem buildings were erected in the towns. Lithuania revealed much greater progress in all sections of the country that could be observed in any district in Poland.

Particularly noticeable were the many modem school buildings. Children were healthier, people were better dressed. Farmers were building modem dairy barns. Scrub cattle were being replaced by thoroughbred strains. Even the Lithuanian pig took on a more aristocratic shape to provide more enticing hams for export. Lithuania was choked with food.

There was a large illegal traffic in foodstuffs over the East Prussian frontier which continued from the inflation period down to the outbreak of the new world war.

[Page 89]

And roast goose was the cheapest delicacy in Lithuania. In these lean days in Finland, the stomach frequently unfolds pages of mouth-watering memories. The pessimists wonder if such stomach-filling days will ever come again. The optimist, in thrilling anticipation, can already picture a roast goose, stuffed with apples, accompanied by an equally fragrant dish of sauerkraut and other “trimmings” being placed on the table. The optimist gets far more out of life than the pessimist. Why, he can even picture, himself regretfully refusing to have a second helping, or rather a third helping, of one of the most toothsome delicacies produced by creation, even though at the moment he feels he could absorb an entire goose by himself. To come to think of it, that is another thing we are fighting for over here in Europe, roast goose for everybody, not just for the commissars.

East Prussia does not appear to be a large district on the map. From end to end it is solidly German. It is irrelevant that some of its churches still conduct their services in the Lithuanian language or that many of its inhabitants have names of Lithuanian or Polish origin. What does matter is, its manicured landscape presents views of continuous delight to a farmer. Its forests are as carefully cultivated as its fields. Its roads are as neat as the German housewife keeps her children. Its fields are fenced.

The pastures contain herds of thoroughbreds, both cattle and horses. Its farms, large and small, are efficiently and beautifully cultivated. In East Prussia the traveler feels himself in the modem world, an orderly society with a high living standard and an old culture. There are poor people, as there are everywhere, but there is no stark poverty. Life’s good things seem to be most evenly divided as, for instance, they are in Sweden.

Frontiers make patriots. But in the case of East Prussia they have also been a spur to progress, an incentive towards efficiency. East Prussia reveals the gulf separating the German from the Slav. Its frontiers mark the demarcation of Western Civilization and Eastern Despotism. But not all of its frontier, for the same German culture, or should one say Nordic culture, exists in the Baltic states which, if they had been blessed with a century of peace, would have evolved into other East Prussias, other strongholds against the East.

Tilsit is a friendly little town. One Christmas Eve a heavy snowstorm made further travel impossible and we remained in the Koeniglicher Hof.

The restaurant was closed, for the staff was gathered round the Christmas tree. We were not invited to this intimate little ceremony but they brought a little Christmas tree with a dish of pfefferkuchen to our room.

[Page 90]

We went to church up the main street to discover the pastor was preaching his sermon in Lithuanian. That evening we played with the toys we had bought for our child friends in Riga.

En route to Warsaw we generally traversed Tapiau, Friedland, Hartenstein, Ortelsbarg to Willenborg on the Polish frontier. We spent the night at one of the latter towns for I would never risk a night journey in Poland.

Allowing for one or two punctures the trip from the frontier to Warsaw, a distance of just 100 miles, took from five to seven hours, depending on the state of the roads.

After 1933, on these journeys through East Prussia I occasionally caught glimpses of the new German army. Wonderfully trained and splendidly equipped these troops were seldom encountered on the main roads. Test marches and maneuvers were conducted on side roads where there was less traffic. The sign of these German military preparations was welcome to anyone coming from the Baltic States who knew the plans of Bolshevik Russia. Military experts, including Latvians and Estonians who had served in the Imperial Czarist general staff, told me one German soldier was equal to eight Russians. This estimate was based on experience of the World War.

We traversed other routes from Tilsit to the Polish frontier. Sometimes stretches of little used roads which would be in excellent condition on one trip, within a period of some weeks, when we passed the same way, would be filled with holes. There had been exceptionally heavy traffic. Then some signposts would announce that special police permits were required to pay visits to people living in these districts. Photographing was strictly forbidden. So it was evident that more powerful fortifications had been erected facing eastwards. They were completely concealed by the hills and forests.

To understand the East Prussians one must comprehend their love of work. I have found this to be a characteristic of the German everywhere, both in the United States and Europe. But in East Prussia it is paramount.

I have been visiting on estates where the Baron would arise at five o’clock to begin his day, just as busy and filled with work as the day of his farmhands. This love of work is not solely due to a spirit of acquisitiveness. It seems to come more from a love for efficiency, from a desire to accomplish as much as possible in the space of a short life-time, from the knowledge gathered from past generations that any moment this work might be interrupted by war. Sometimes one gained the impression that an East Prussian would rather work than make love. There is not much gaiety in the East Prussian. A glance at the store windows in Koenigsberg, Pillkallen, Lyck and Gilgenburg reveals the women like to dress in sombre colors. The favorite color is black, then comes dark greens and purples. Wars and the ever present threat from the east have laid a heavy hand upon this country. Yes, the women of this frontier region have mourned their dead in many, many wars.

[Page 91]

The more I learned about East Prussia and its inhabitants, the more difficult it became not to laugh when I heard the Polish chauvinists voice their claims that this territory should be annexed to Poland. In the Polish corridor it was possible to see what would happen. There the estates and larger farms were fighting a losing battle against the Polish state which was confiscating their lands piecemeal and settling ignorant, lazy, incompetent peasants upon plots of soil not large enough to provide them with a decent standard of living even though they farmed it efficiently. The Polish government assisted the settlers to build a hut, but not a barn. So they kept their livestock in their one room hut and the entire family slept on top of the stove. Many were too indolent to dig a well and the slovenly women walked long distances to obtain water from an unclean pond or stream.

It was not hard to imagine East Prussia’s fate should it fall into the hands of the Poles. The corridor was a wedge of depravity in the body of Germany. It evoked a wound which rankled for many years and showed no signs of healing, but instead grew more foul. Bromberg, Thorn and other towns in the corridor, which I visited frequently, resembled the towns of East Prussia. But they were German built towns inhabited by other races. The Germans had been replaced with Poles and Jews.

Buildings deteriorated from lack of repair. Streets were filthy. Shop windows were dirty and displayed inferior goods. Everywhere was evidence the corridor now contained a different culture, a backward, lower culture.

When one heard the professional Polish patriots declaiming where Poland’s future frontiers should extend, one was amazed the Poles were not first thinking of putting their own house in order before aspiring to acquire more of other people’s property. As it was, their houses already contained enough of other people’s property obtained illegally through putsches.

There was only one conceivable solution to the corridor problem. That was to raise the living and cultural standards of Poland to equal those existing in Germany and then opening the frontier as much as possible to promote neighborly relations between the peoples living on both sides of it; like the American-Canadian frontier. But that was impossible.

[Page 92]

I sometimes brought foreign friends with me by car across the frontier to Warsaw just to show them the difference between Willenberg and Chorzale, two small towns just five miles apart separated by an imaginary line drawn by man across a landscape. There were two centuries’ difference contained in those five miles. I felt it was something that had to be seen to be believed.

The greatest contrast was between the children. In Willenberg they wore shoes and stockings and looked as though they had daily contact with soap and water. In Chorzale many children were barefoot, even in November. In Willenberg the children sucked lollypops. In Chorzale they gnawed raw potatoes.

Now there was no special difference in the character of the land. Both towns were surrounded by estates and farms. There was less forest in Poland because much of the woods had long disappeared into the stoves of the peasants and little planting or proper cultivation had been done.

There seemed to be only one conclusion to be drawn. That these contrasts were due to a difference existing between the nature and capabilities of the inhabitants. Geography may have much to do with the forming of the character of peoples and nations, but landscapes are frequently altered by man. Landscapes can tell us the nature of the men inhabiting them.

In the Nordic countries many had not only learned how to combat nature but also how to cooperate with her. Trees not only line the roads by the brooks but they break the monotony of the meadows and adorn the farmstead. Everywhere one sees a love of nature which is also a love of beauty. This love of beauty is, of course, not confined to the Nordic countries. I have also seen it in the lonely little potted geranium in the tiny window of a Polish peasant’s hut. But it more often is encountered in the North. You often find that in places where nature is fought the hardest she is loved the most.

Chapter 8

 

The Downfall of Democracy

 

 

Some Poles like to assume that the United States has a debt to Poland because a few Poles assisted the Americans in our revolutionary war. H this debt did exist then it was paid many times over by the support the American government gave to Polish aspirations for independence and by assisting to finance the last Polish republic.

The Polish government viewed the United States as an object for exploitation. Besides expediting to America her unassimilable Jewish and other minorities, Poland was intensely interested in preventing the Americanization of five million Poles already in the United States.

The Polish government maintained and subsidized a large organization for this purpose in Warsaw. Free trips to Poland, decorations for the deserving and a never ending flood of propaganda contributed towards this aim. These activities paid big dividends. The remittances from America averaged from twelve to fourteen million dollars per year. They were not affected by the Polish government’s default on its debt to America.

In 1933 some member of the Polish government conceived the idea of convening a “World Congress of Poles” in Warsaw. Elaborate preparations were made and the Congress met in the summer of 1934. The World Polish Alliance charter was supposed to be kept secret until brought up for vote. The government hoped that its paid foreign agents and subsidized Polish organizations abroad would be successful in hastening the adoption of the charter with a minimum of discussion.

[Page 94]

I succeeded in obtaining a copy of the charter and, translating it, discovered it was merely a plan to enable the Polish government to obtain complete control of Polish organizations in the United States. Two of these, the Polish National Alliance and the Polish Roman Catholic Union, were fraternal insurance organizations with resources amounting to many millions of dollars. Both sent delegations to Warsaw.

John Cudahy, the American ambassador to Poland, called in the leaders of the Polish-American societies, and explained to them the would be congress was a maneuver to obtain control of their organizations and funds and advised against any affiliation with the project.

The congress met in the hall of the Polish parliament. Foreign Minister Beck and most of the Polish cabinet attended. John Kwick, president of the PNA made a speech. He bluntly told the assembled delegates that the American contingent felt themselves to be Americans of Polish decent and not Poles, that they had come to Warsaw to attend the congress but not to pledge their allegiance to either the congress or to the Polish government. With this speech the entire congress collapsed. The festive ceremony which had been arranged to take place in the Wawel castle in Krakow when the charter was to be signed was cancelled. After the adjournment I interviewed Kwick in the dingy government hotel adjoining the parliament house and he repeated and amplified his statements in English. I cabled the story home.

This dispatch caused much discussion among Polish organizations in America, and Kwick, before he left Poland, denied his interview with me.

This made no impression on The Tribune, which published an editorial praising the position taken by the American delegates. The Polish government felt they had wasted a large sum of money and an entire year of calculated intrigue to obtain control of the resources of these rich societies. The intrigues were continued but were now directed against Mr. Cudahy and myself. After many unpleasant experiences we both left Warsaw. Mr. Cudahy became American minister to Ireland and I returned to Riga. We were both happy at the change.

Ambassador Cudahy ably represented the United States in Poland. He was an old friend of Colonel McCormick, publisher of The Tribune, who instructed me to meet him when he arrived on board a Polish liner in the harbor of Gydnia. The Poles wished to show him special honor. Instead of occupying a compartment in the comfortable new sleeping car running between Gydnia and Warsaw, Mr. Cudahy was placed in a private car. It was not much bigger than an American caboose. It was one of those very small and old cars inherited from the rolling stock of Czarist Russia. It had four wheels and contained one large and two small compartments and an observation platform. This light vehicle was attached to the end of a fast train and as we bounced along over the not-any-too-good Polish roadbed, I felt sorry for the ambassador who was bouncing even more emphatically in his car at the tail-end of the train. In the morning when we arrived in Warsaw I hastened to the end of the train and watched Mr. Cudahy slowly and painfully step to the platform. Did you get any sleep? I queried.

[Page 95]

“No”, he replied, “don’t ask me about that awful trip. Don’t you see I have to smile for the photographers?”

That evening in the hotel Mr. Cudahy phoned suggesting we go out for dinner in some nice quiet hotel not too far from Warsaw. I suppose you mean the country club, I said. “That would be fine,’’ he assented. I broke the news that Warsaw had no country club and there was not a single restaurant in the neighborhood of Warsaw fit to eat in and the best restaurant in the city was Simon and Stocki, just across the street. I invited Michael Obarski, managing editor of the Polish Telegraph Agency, to join us. Obarski was a good newspaperman and a friend of many years standing. Because of his government connections he was a good man for the ambassador to know.

The disappearance of the ambassador from the hotel frightened the personnel of the embassy and the staff went out to search for him. We were soon discovered by one of the secretaries who, uninvited, imposed himself on our company. I condoled the ambassador, informing him he must submit to this form of control as long as he held this post.

Mr. Cudahy had many experiences in Poland, some amusing, others unpleasant. He was an enthusiastic hunter and had hunted after big game in Africa, Alaska and many other distant places. The Poles invited him to attend one of the diplomatic hunts arranged for Reichmarshal Goring at Bialowiccza, one of the largest forests in Europe, where the Polish Kings once held their hunts. I met him after one of these hunts and he was a very disappointed man.

When Cudahy returned to Washington he arranged to have another post. In my cable about his transfer I mentioned he had been promoted to American Minister to Ireland. Later Cudahy was again appointed ambassador, this time to Belgium. His courageous defense of King Leopold against the defamation campaign of the British propagandists ended his political career under the Roosevelt administration. In his thoughts and actions, Cudahy represented the real United States, not the Roosevelt cabal. He and Kennedy, who for a short period represented America at the Court of St. James, stood out among the Roosevelt appointees abroad.

Perhaps it is of some significance that both men are Catholics and the Catholic church in the United States, which reflects a large section of public opinion, opposed the entry of America into the war.

[Page 96]

The Polish press in the United States occasionally furnishes evidence concerning the ambition of the Poles and other unassimilated minorities to change the character of American culture. The New American, the official monthly organ of the Polish Students and Alumni Association of America, in its issue of November 1938, discussed the appeal of a writer named Louis Adamic asking for material to help him describe a complete picture of the Polish American. Bronis Kalp (probable Kalpinski) writes:

“And I felt that here we must respond, for we have waited long for this man who wants to speak for us and for the rest of those who live here and who want to help in the building of America, not by discarding the ancient culture of their ancestors but by contributing it to all the other cultures for the formation of the ultimate America. As Louis Adamic says, the true American will come when all the best parts of each culture will be taken to use in the making of an entirely new American culture based on all traditions and not only the Anglo-Saxon.”

This is not a single challenge. It is being voiced by many who are allied to American spirit and culture, which despite its defects and shortcomings did develop the pre-Roosevelt United States which had admirers and friends all over the world. Roosevelt, together with the foreign groups in America, is today liquidating democracy in the United States.

And democracy itself fosters the very weaknesses which contribute and aid in its destruction.

The downfall of democracy is due, very largely, to corruption. Democracy is tolerant of corruption because it is so corrupt itself. Under a democratic form of government groups of men form political parties to promote group or class interests. In cities and nations where reside many different nationalities those groups are more in number than places where the population is homogeneous.

New York City has always contained the largest percentage of foreigners of all American major cities. It is largely because of this that the administration of New York City is the most dishonest and corrupt in the United States.

A very large book could be written about corruption in American municipal politics. Politicians devote much of their time to thinking of ways and means to divert the taxpayers’ money into their own pockets and into those of their followers and supporters. While I have written of the corrupt politics in other nations, I wish to emphasize here that we have the same varieties of corruption in America. The terrible extent of municipal corruption in the United States cities and towns is passively accepted by the electorate. Newspapers are forever fighting and exposing it. Occasionally the voters go to the polls and oust a dishonest administration but the “clean-up” is seldom permanent. The cities in the United States which have an honest and efficient administration are few and far between.

[Page 97]

This corruption spread, first into the governments of different states.

For many years the national administration was comparatively honest and efficient. Graft and corruption were limited to a few appropriation measures, such as the so called Rivers and Harbors Bill, which enabled the senators and congressmen to reward some of their faithful with government money for a pretense of service and work. This bill was allegedly to keep harbors and rivers open to navigation.

The first world war introduced corruption on a large scale into Washington. The attempt to prohibit the sale of alcohol throughout the United States introduced corruption and disrespect for the law into the American family itself. Out of prohibition developed gangsters and racketeers who corrupted police departments, the judiciary and local and government officials.

It must be said to the credit of the older Saxon and other Nordic elements in America that they furnished a very small percentage of this lawless anti-social element in American life. The great majority of the gangsters and their ilk come from unassimilated aliens among whom the Jews and Italians play the leading role, both as active lawbreakers and as lawyers who counseled and defended these criminals before the courts.

It is an interesting fact that the development of mismanagement, corruption and graft in American cities is almost in direct proportion to the increase of the foreign element. And today we can regard the Roosevelt administration as the first minority government in the United States history. And with Roosevelt the corruption in the national government has approached those depths of dishonesty exemplified by New York City.

During the past decade we have seen in Europe many instances where corruption became so widespread and general that it threatened the existence of the nation itself. There have been revolts in many countries which have turned to authoritarian forms of government, dictatorships.

There are many different kinds of dictatorships. Sometimes they represent a special class of the population. Sometimes they represent the desire of an entire nation which, disillusioned with the breakdown of democorrupt government, willingly supports a movement which promises to clean up.

If we study the history of Europe after the first world war, one of the most remarkable developments is the collapse of the democratic form of government. The new European states, sired by President Wilson’s proclamation “self determination of small nations” and damned by the Versailles treaty, all adopted the French parliamentary system of government.

[Page 98]

This proportional system of representation whereby any political group could obtain a place in the government if it could obtain sufficient votes looks lovely on paper and it functioned for a few years in several new states. Lithuania’s parliamentary system was the first among the new states to collapse. From her declaration of independence on 16 February 1918, until 1926 when Professor Augustinas Waldemaras pulled off his first successful putsch, Lithuania had fourteen cabinets. Each functioned on an average of eight months while a new parliament was elected on an average of every eighteen months.

Lithuania had seven parties of Lithuanians and four representing its minorities, some of which were also split into subdivisions. The parliamentary system broke down in Italy, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and in other countries. In all these states the nationally minded element inherited control of the government. Internationally minded elements, the communists, socialists, clerical parties and minorities were outlawed.

This was the first stage of the European revolution. It was, in most countries, a revolution of the youth. Youth is always in the majority.

Democorrupt governments are afraid of the youth. Some states fixed the voting age as high as 25 years for men. Youth is usually radically minded.

My boss, Colonel McCormick, coined an apt epigram when he said:

The man who has not been a socialist before he is 25 has no heart.

The man who is a socialist after he is 25 has no brain.

As the Colonel is an outstanding patriot he probably referred to international socialism, for at the time of this remark the conception of national socialism was unknown in America.

The revolutionary movements in Europe attracted not only youth, but parents who raised children only to see them confronted with the spectres of unemployment and hunger. The new governments found their primary and most important task was to provide work for their people. Many succeeded. Corruption most certainly has not yet been entirely eradicated, but throughout Europe there seems to be a general movement towards honesty. In the United States this movement has not yet begun to crystallize. Although combating corruption may appear almost as hopeless a task as frustrating fornication, unless corruption is curbed we may as well prepare for communist revolutions in the remaining democratic countries and the extinction of those classes who have tolerated this state of affairs.

[Page 99]

Not many nations have succeeded in retaining a parliamentary form of government. In those countries where the party system survives, party and class politics have been largely abandoned for the duration of the war. A realization seems to be growing that their future existence depends upon their governments’ ability to combat corruption and give their people an honest and efficient administration.

Baron Dr. Bortil von Alfthan, a Finn, an efficiency engineer and for many years my colleague and correspondent of The Chicago Tribune in Finland, has compiled an interesting chart,* He calls it an analysis of the social structure during different ages. I am including it here because it is thought-provoking and seems to give a concise and clear picture of an important phase of the evolution now taking place all over the world, [See next page.]

 

 

Dr. von Alfthan’s comment upon this chart is as follows:

“When hand work became insufficient to feed the growing masses directly from the earth, machines were invented and the technical age began. Industry requires great capital, and the capitalists became the ruling class whilst warriors were reduced from a class dominating society to a class serving society.”

“When industry developed rationalized mass production, the balance between production and consumption was more and more upset, as evidenced by ever increasing unemployment whilst simultaneously grain was burnt and coffee thrown into the seas. New methods of balancing economic life had to be invented. The leaders of this process will rise to the nobility position whilst the money nobility will be reduced to a class serving society instead of dominating it.”

“In both cases the new leading class is formed out of the best elements of all three layers of society of the vanishing age, whilst the reactionary members of the former ruling class are pressed downwards.”

“The alleged automatic self-adjustment of conditions, by the commodity prices under the Jaw of supply and demand in a free market worked satisfactorily during the period of rising capitalism, but now has been outrun by technical development.”

“The invention of machines is now being supplemented by the invention of new methods of organization, so as to restore the balance.”

[* The chart in the mimeographed copies has been corrected from the Swedish. The arrows in the columns opposite the social pyramid show the social mobility by which a class in one era is formed from members of classes in the preceding era. Dr. von Alfthan’s analysis invites comparison with James Burnham’s famous and phenomenally successful book, The Managerial Revolution. Burnham’s description of what was happening in contemporary society is independent of his opinion of its desirability and probable consequences, which subsequently changed drastically. Dr. von Alfthan’s era of “Reformism” is, of course, represented by both Fascism and Communism, but was most completely realized in German National Socialism.]

Many clear thinking economists foresaw the present world convulsion years ago and published warnings against it. Their warnings passed unheeded. There is no doubt that the epoch of capitalism is drawing to an end and that the day of the organizers, as Dr. von Alfthan points out, has dawned. Today the world is in a process of reorganization. This is even admitted in the ruling circles of England and the United States where there has been much discussion of the after-war world.

President Roosevelt and Premier Churchill have promised the world four freedoms. It does not matter much what they are, although I recall something about freedom from fear, freedom from poverty, freedom from work and free passes to all baseball and football games. Judged upon past performance the promises of either of these men are not. very attractive.

Besides, they are cherishing as their ally the Jewish-Bolshevik government of Russia which will have nothing to do with the four freedoms. And since these men are openly allied with the Jews, let us devote the next chapter to them.

 

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NOTES

 

* Images (maps, photos, etc.) have also been added that were not part of the original Noontide edition.

 

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Knowledge is Power in Our Struggle for Racial Survival

 

(Information that should be shared with as many of our people as possible — do your part to counter Jewish control of the mainstream media — pass it on and spread the word) … Val Koinen at KOINEN’S CORNER

 

 

Version History

Version 1: Published Mar 19, 2015