Onward Christian Soldiers 

[Part 2]

 

 

 

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

 

 

Introduction

 

 

Truth or myth, which is met more often in our media today? It is difficult, if not impossible, to state definitively. Although both stem from a common root — freedom of the press — the differences vary from honest mistakes to deliberate or unwitting falsifications with the result the end product is more often fiction than information.

Freedom of the press is regarded as the palladium of democracy, vital to the pursuit of happiness, the quest for liberty, the need for justice, the advancement of education and the growth of affluence, with a leavening of fair play for all. Yet, totalitarian powers claim the encouraging watering of a truly free press makes their claimed paradises bloom; although state power no matter how seductively described in the Lorelei songs of a controlled press leads inevitably to ruthless physical power.

It is most difficult at anytime for any reporter to winnow truth from falsehood, wishful thinking, selfish representation and calculated deceit in his eternal search for misfeasance and malfeasance in and out of power politics. Lately, the reading public has been exhibiting more and more distrust of those in control of the arteries of information, so much so that many think freedom of the press may be in danger of death from swallowing its own lies.

Perhaps much of this is due to the fact that too many newsmen today are confident they know the sociological import of a story before they leave the office and do not bother with searching for facts. Or because newsmen are committed to a political direction, so that they believe themselves to be the possessors of a magical touchstone by which they can measure any facts. Or because wherever they may land in a troubled world, they have pre-established in their own minds just who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, so that they become instant experts without concern about mores or motivations. And also because many news gatherers of today delude themselves that it isn’t the story so much as the way they write it or mouth it that is important. Many delude themselves that they are writing literature, something like Shakespeare or that they are thundering lines of blank verse something like Sir Henry Irving.

Needless to say, they are not.

iv

This conflict between society and the media, which wields massive power over minds without responsibility, is not new. It is an old story and one especially evident in the reporting of news from Soviet Russia from the reporting of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, through wars hot and cold, to the dark and bloody ground of today.

All this is by way of prelude to Donald Day, a newsman, who was a prophet without honor to many in his own country because he strove to tell the truth when others in his arena of Eastern Europe were myth making. Not only was he without honor in much of his own country, especially the intellectual community, but he was hardly welcome in other lands, influenced by the long propaganda arm of the Kremlin, which had branded him in its black book of foreign correspondents as “highly unreliable.” This opinion was shared by many of his reportorial peers in America. I am one of few living men who knew him. He had my respect and admiration when he was working and this has grown since his death.

One of his fellow correspondents, Walter Duranty of The New York Times was widely regarded as the sage of Moscow and the most informed man on the Communist experiment, so much so that the National Geographic Society accepted without question his statement that the Reds had constructed a second railroad line, parallel to the Trans Siberian railroad, and sketched it in on their maps until time proved it a myth.

Duranty wrote his own story under the title, I Write As I Please, but some thought it should have been entitled, “I Write To Please The Kremlin Censors.” Duranty’s book is all but forgotten, while this book of Day’s lives again.

Day came from a newspaper family so that the older traditions of the craft were instilled in him from the cradle. He was born in Brooklyn Heights, NY, in 1896, the second of five children, three boys and two girls. His parents were John I. Day and Grace Satterlee, the father being racing editor of the New York Morning Telegraph. The fourth child of this marriage of a Congregationalist father and an Episcopalian mother was the late Dorothy Day, the Catholic convert and activist, who founded the New York newspaper, The Catholic Worker, and St. Joseph’s House of Hospitality for the Unfortunate. A younger brother, John, was a newsman with the Hearst organization in New York.

The family came west before World War I when the father took an editorship with the long defunct, Chicago lnterocean. Donald and Dorothy attended Robert Waller high school. Dorothy graduated at the age of 16 and won a scholarship to the University of Illinois, where she became a member of the Socialist party and still later, in California, of the Communist party, being one of the pioneers of that movement in this country.

v

In 1927, a half dozen years after Donald began exposing the chinks in the Communist proletarian program, Dorothy became a convert to Catholicism and began blending the teachings of the man of poverty, St. Francis of Assisi, with the call of Karl Marx to workers to rise and strike off their chains. How much her decision to abandon Communism was due to Donald may never be known. Dorothy’s followers who regard her as a candidate for canonization, hold the discovery of the evils of the system was her own and Donald is not here to speak for himself.

On leaving high school, Donald, with the help of his father, became a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau, a press service financed by the various Chicago newspapers, It is said he joined the staff of The Chicago Tribune to cover labor about the same time as the dashing and flamboyant Floyd Gibbons, one of the more famous correspondents of World War I. About the time America entered the war, Donald had returned to New York, where he served as sporting editor of The Morning Telegraph. He enlisted in naval aviation on Friday 13th, August, 1917, which did not prove an unlucky date for him as he survived two training plane crashes.

After the war he joined The New York World as labor editor. In 1921 he was invited to visit Russia by Ludwig Martens the unofficial Kremlin envoy in this country which then did not have diplomatic relations with Moscow. Martens had been asked to leave this country. Day accompanied Martens and his party to Riga, Latvia, where he sought a visa to Russia as the representative of an American news agency. When the visa failed to arrive the news agency disclaimed Day and stranded him in Riga.

Day got in touch with Gibbons then director of The Tribune’s European staff and was hired to report from Eastern Europe and to continue his attempt to get a Russian visa which had been promised by Martens but denied by Moscow.

From his Riga listening post, Day sent the first stories of the Russian famine. He was tireless in interviewing those fleeing Russia and got the first reports of life in the boasted Red Eden. He was the first to interview Americans who were released from Soviet prisons at the instigation of the American government on the recommendation of Herbert Hoover who headed a relief program which not only saved millions of Russian lives but doubtless saved the Bolshevik regime itself.

In his work Day had some of the glamor of the Richard Harding Davis era of foreign correspondence. He worked with Lithuanian irregulars in the seizure of the Memel territory in 1923. He was there when Estonian Communists undertook their bloody attempt to overthrow the Government. He was the confidant and advisor of many figures in the new governments of his area. For 21 years he was on hand in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland. He covered both Finnish-Russian wars; that for liberation in 1917 and that which was a prelude to World War II. He sent many graphic accounts of warfare in sub-zero weather.

Through 21 years Day sought regularly to get the once promised visa. Almost as regularly he was approached by Red agents, who told him he would get the visa if only he would write favorable articles for some months, and if he would agree to report on the activities of governments with which he was familiar.

vi

This Day would not do. He considered the invitation one to join the Soviet espionage apparatus. His dispatches were giving his readers a picture of life in the new republics, all of which had won independence through bitter and even bloody struggles with Russia. These countries had established themselves, not by grants of aid from the outside but by their own efforts. These countries allowed Day to write without censorship, while in Russia correspondents were required not only to submit to censorship but to report to the foreign office every three months for consideration of the extension of their visas. If they displeased the Soviets, their visas were withdrawn. For this reason, The Tribune elected to withdraw George Seldes, its Soviet-ingratiating correspondent from Moscow and leave the coverage of Russia to Day in Riga.

By the test of time Day’s dispatches stand out as not only more truthful but more informative than those of his Moscow contemporaries. During his stay in Riga, Day married. Donald’s father had attempted to dissuade his son from following in his footsteps, warning him he would never get rich in the newspaper trade and advising him to marry a rich widow, since his boy was a handsome and attractive fellow. On his marriage, Day cabled his father:

“Dear Dad: Have followed your advice. Have married a widow, but she isn’t rich.”

Under the shadow of World War ll, Day encountered trouble in Poland for the dispatches he was turning out. Polish newspapers in America complained to PAT, the government owned news agency, that it seldom covered the important stories Day was sending his paper. The nervous government’s answer on the eve of war was to bar Day from his annual visits to the country without giving any explanation.

In 1940, just before its takeover, Moscow succeeded in dominating the Latvian government. One of the first acts of the new regime was to order Day out of the country at full cabinet meeting. It was more of an escape than an expulsion for Day, because he was aware that he and his wife might be detained at a moment’s notice. They dodged Red tanks and infantry as they made their way to Tilsit, on the German border, along the road Czaritza Catherine built from Riga. They ended up in Finland. When Finland allied itself with Nazi Germany in the summer of 1942, Day moved to Stockholm. In August of that year Michael McDermot, then information officer for the State department, called me in to The Tribune’s Washington Bureau to say the department had information from Stockholm that Day was about to defect to Germany and suggested that The Tribune recall Day for consultation to thwart such a move. A visitor’s visa was made available to Mrs. Day.

On August 25, 1942 The Tribune cabled Day to return at the earliest possible moment. When no answer was received, several similar messages followed. Subsequently I learned from Day that he had no intention then of defecting to Germany but felt subjected to harassment by the department. On September 1, he wired from Helsinki asking for leave without pay or that he be placed on pension, saying he had applied to enlist in the Finnish army.

vii

Evidently in cooperation with the American embassy in Stockholm, the Swedish government notified Day his passport had lapsed. He was then a man without a country as far as the United States was concerned. He did turn up in Germany a year later, where he became a commentator on the Nazi propaganda radio, but he confined himself to praising Finnish athletes and lauding the bravery of Finn troops in their war with Russia.

At the end of the war, when the Justice department examined Day’s scripts, no treason could be found, such as marked the broadcasts of Americans who aligned themselves with Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy. While he was in Germany, Day continued his self-declared war against Communism even under American detention. He was released by the American government after careful combing of his broadcasts revealed no taint of treason. Day returned to Finland with his wife.

Two years before his death in Helsinki, September 30, 1966, of a heart attack, Day called my attention to a story he had uncovered in a German counter-intelligence camp.

He was given the story by Andreas Hofer, former Nazi gauleiter for southern Tyrol. Hofer was a direct decendant of the Austrian peasant leader of the same name, who led the abortive Tyrolean revolt against the French under Napoleon in 1810 and was executed. In 1943 Andreas told Day he saw that Germany could not win the war and concluded that the only thing that could save Germany and Europe from the Communist menace was a negotiated peace. He suggested the German general staff concentrate all western war prisoners in some valleys of upper Bavaria, which would have deterred allied bombardment of that region. The area was to be strongly fortified, under the plan, and held as a last ditch defense to force a negotiated peace.

The German high command rejected the plan at the time it was put forward, but in 1944 Hofer was called upon to prepare the plan, which he did. Somewhere along the line, Hofer reported, his plan was turned over to a Russian spy, and the Russian high command altered the plan to make it appear that the Bavarian fortress was already completed, which alteration deceived military leaders in Washington and London when the Russians turned it over. Hofer was induced to tell his story to Rodney C. Minott, an American historian, who wrote a book on the information, entitled: The Fortress That Never Was.

“Gen. George Patton, whose reconnaissance planes had repeatedly scanned the area without discovering any signs of fortification,”

Hofer said,

“knew the American general staff had been deceived. He thought the next best thing to capturing Berlin would be to take Prague. He pressed on through upper Bavaria and reached the suburbs of Prague before he was ordered to halt his advance and retire to upper Bavaria.”

“This clever use of espionage by the Russians enabled them to divert the most powerful striking force of the American invasion army on a false tangent, enabling the Russians to reach Berlin first. This resulted in the loss of Czechoslovakia, the division of Austria and Germany, and the creation of an isolated Berlin.”

At the time of Day’s last great scoop, I endeavored to interest a Tribune editor into taking Day back, at least as a stringer, as I was advised by mutual Finnish friends that he had fallen upon hard times.

This effort failed, to my lasting sorrow, partly because the editor* was preoccupied with his own great man image and partly because I was not persuasive enough. I could not sell my belief that The Tribune owed a measure of justice to a great reporter and a fine man. So, at this late date, I am privileged to light this candle to his memory.

*The editor at the time was Donald Maxwell. —Ed.

Walter Trohan

Columbia, Maryland

October 30, 1981

 

 

 

 

Permit Me To

 

Introduce Myself

 

 

My boyhood was spent in New York City, San Francisco, Cleveland, Tennessee, and Chicago. So I had a wide view of America in my youth. My forbearers, on both sides of the family, have been in America for more than 300 years. On my father’s side they were English and Scotch-Irish. On my mother’s side they were Dutch, French-Huguenot and English.

As for distinguished ancestors, I think we all have a few if we go back far enough. Among mine is General Sam Houston who fought Mexico and captured Texas, New Mexico and Arizona for the United States, and John Sevier, an enterprising pioneer who organized the state of Franklin. This comprised the territory of Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky and when he charged toll on wagon trains proceeding through his territory he came into conflict with the United States government. An expedition was sent against him and his forces were defeated.

He was arrested and imprisoned in Atlanta, Georgia. His troops rescued him from prison, but the state of Franklin disappeared.

John Day was the first pioneer to settle in Eastern Tennessee.

It is a mountainous, heavily forested country and the original inhabitants were the Cherokee Indian tribe. For many years the head of the Day family acted for the Indians in their relations with the American government. My grandfather. Dr. Sam Houston Day, was the doctor for the tribe, They paid him with buckskin bags filled with silver ore and by special arrangement he sent these to the mint in Washington, where they were coined into silver dollars for him. The Indians never divulged the secret of their mine. This outcropping of valuable silver ore has never been discovered and is hidden in the forest covering the Great Smoky mountains of the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. We often hunted that fabulous silver mine on our hunting and fishing trips! but, aside from a large ledge of mica located forty miles from the nearest railroad, we never discovered any mineral wealth. Toward the end of the last century, the American government rounded up the Indians and settled them in Indian territory, now Oklahoma. Oil was discovered under these lands so the Indians became rich.

Contact with white people did not civilize them. Inter-marriages with white people produced a very unsatisfactory type of human being. So early Americans drew a strong color line and today the Indians, through intermarriage with Negroes, have degenerated.

Cleveland, Tennessee, was a typical small Southern town with about 14,000 inhabitants. My second cousin, Columbus Mee, was mayor of the town for about thirty years. He was tall and thin and chewed a plug of tobacco every day. His only other vice was drinking coffee. In this respect he had an affinity with the Finns. On our fishing trips we would always put a trotline with one or two hundred hooks which zig-zagged back and forth across the creek or river for a few hundred meters. This line would have to be tended several times during the night.

Besides fish we caught snakes, snapping turtles, eels and frogs. Columbus would keep the coffee pot on the fire all night and after some twenty cups of coffee he would become greatly exhilarated! We generally had a tub of moonshine whisky keeping cold in the nearby spring; but I cannot remember anyone getting drunk on these fishing trips. Boys and young men did not drink because it was considered disgraceful. It was only years later that Prohibition changed the drinking habits of the Americans and turned drinking from a vice into a sport; and entire families drank to excess.

Clum was fond of snake stories; and in this comer of Tennessee there are plenty of snakes and a variety of poisonous ones. One night we were fishing by an old mill. We had put out our trotline and were still-fishing from a rocky bank which descended steeply into deep water. In the evening I killed a big water-moccasin, which is very poisonous, and tied a string around its neck and sank it in the water below the rocks on which we were perched. Some hours later, after Clum had drunk his fourteenth cup of coffee and was regaling us with some thrilling snake stories, I began to pull the line and the big snake came sliding out of the water right into the middle of our group.

Clum and the others let out a yell and two of them jumped into the creek. I let the snake slide back into the water and threw the string after it and I didn’t reveal the joke till we returned to town and the other fishermen had told our friends of the thrilling encounter.

Tennessee was one of the first Southern states to adopt Prohibition, so the mountaineers found ready market for their moonshine whisky. In those pre-Prohibition days a gallon jug cost a dollar. Properly prepared it was a good drink, tasting remarkably like old cherry brandy, which is,one of the local delicacies found in East Prussia.

The Southern states in America had adopted Prohibition partly as a measure to protect their womanhood. In saloons and dives operated by the renegade white element, mulattos and Jews, the Negroes would become drunk on rot-gut whisky served from bottles embellished with a label on which was printed the picture of a naked white woman, This combination of alcohol and pornography would sometimes so excite the Negro that he would attack a white woman. If caught, he was lynched. But Prohibition failed to prevent lynchings as it failed to eradicate the evils of drink in other sections of society. It helped to undermine respect for the law and gave the criminal element the opportunity to become millionaires. Instead of a national blessing, it became a national disgrace. Finland also adopted a prohibition law and passed through a similar experience. She repealed this law before the United States repealed her law.

The town of Cleveland erected a monument to my grandfather, who was surgeon of Wheeler’s Cavalry regiment, the only Confederate force which opposed Sherman’s march to the sea through the state of Georgia during the Civil War, Those who have read Gone with the Wind know about the misery and suffering caused by that campaign and the war in this section of the United States, My mother’s father was a lieutenant in a New York regiment, which fought on the Northern side.

My father loved horses. He was what they call in America a race-horse man. Sometimes he was well-to-do. Sometimes he was broke. He acted as a Sports Editor for a number of large American newspapers and on two occasions published his own newspaper. Every time he managed to get some money together he either bought a string of racehorses or built a race track. He and his friends built the race track at Mineral Springs, Indiana, and later one at Miami, Florida. He lived during a period of tremendous economic expansion in America, but he was not interested in business or industry. The characteristic I most admired in my father was his contempt for money. Whether he had much money in the bank, or nothing at all, no one could tell. I recall on two occasions where overnight he became a poor man with heavy debts. But he was never shaken by a reverse in fortune and worked hard for years to pay off his debtors. He died very rich in friends. He left us a proud memory and if he left us an inheritance, it was to despise corruption, dishonesty and graft, which were things he had fought all his life, for he loved horse racing and tried to keep it a clean sport. He was acknowledged as one of the leading authorities on horse breeding and racing in America, My father did not want me to become a newspaperman. For many generations there had always been a doctor in the family and he wanted one in his. My brothers and I had no interest in medicine. We all became newspapermen. He also tried to persuade me to to become a lawyer. But the only branch of law I knew anything about in America was criminal law and I thought that criminal lawyers were not much better than the criminals themselves, so I refused. If he did not want me to become a newspaperman, all right, as a joke I suggested I become a policeman. He was horrified. “Why?”, he asked. I told him with my education, I was certain to become a captain in the Chicago police department within twenty years and every police captain I knew owned an expensive automobile, a large apartment house and had also acquired an orange grove in Florida, a peach orchard in Georgia and an apple orchard in Michigan. My father said he would rather brain me than see me join the police department, so I became a reporter at the age of eighteen.

Yes, it is shameful to admit, but the police departments of the majority of large American cities are honeycombed with corruption. Criminals prey upon society, but the criminal lawyers and police frequently prey upon the criminals. Crime in the United States has become an industry. It is one of America’s largest and most pressing problems. It is not even approaching solution. Freedom from corruption. Freedom from crime.

These are two Freedoms sadly needed in the United States, Until they are achieved it is pure insanity for anyone to believe in the practicability of the Four Freedoms spawned by a cigar and a cigarette in a cesspool of mental depravity.

In those years, 1913-17, there were plenty of thrills in a reporter’s job. We covered murder cases and sometimes it was not the police who tracked down and arrested the murderer, but the reporter. In this period a murder was still something so unusual that it was “a big story,” one that would occupy columns of space in the newspapers, often for a week or more.

The police, municipal officials and other authorities treated the press with respect and consideration because they still felt a responsibility to the electorate. In such cities as New York, Philadelphia and others where a political machine controlled the elections, public officials did not have this feeling of responsibility and the press did not receive the privileged treatment we had in Chicago, Near Joliet early one spring a woman was found murdered and raped. The murderer was not caught. The next spring the same thing occurred. The third year there was another murder and, together with several other reporters, I was sent to cover the story. We made our headquarters in a small boarding house.

From there we telephoned the daily developments to our newspapers. It was a small town and had few policemen. The sheriff of the county was the most important official and our relations with him were not very pleasant. Three women had been raped and clubbed to death in his town within three years and the murderer was still at large. It reflected upon his ability as a police official.

We newspapermen decided to form a little police department of our own. Our metal reporter badges did not look very much like the imposing star of a detective, but they did look official.

We began to search for suspects and make “arrests.” Like the police we thought the murders had been committed by a degenerate. We went about town and talked with many people and whenever we heard-of someone with suspicious morals we “arrested” him and brought him to our boarding house for an examination. We did not mention names in our stories but these cross-examinations provided us with material to write about.

One day I heard of a farmhand who seldom came to town and who was regarded as “peculiar” by the people who knew him. I told my colleagues of my discovery but not one of them was willing to share the expense of a horse and buggy. There were few automobiles and still fewer paved roads at that time in Illinois. The suspect worked on a farm twelve miles out in the country. Finally I persuaded a friend who represented an afternoon newspaper to make the trip with me. We arrived on the farm at noon and found the man working in a field. We approached, flashed our reporter badges, told him he was under arrest and that he had to return with us to town. He seemed stunned, and on the way back to town he broke down and confessed he had committed all three murders. We immediately handcuffed him to the buggy, tied up the horse and went a short distance away to hold a conference. My colleague insisted we get back to town as quickly as possible so he could telephone the story to his afternoon paper. I said I had just as much claim to the story as he did, and since we all had an agreement not to “scoop” each other if we should happen to find the murderer, we had to agree on some way to divide the story between the afternoon and the morning newspapers. I suggested the afternoon newspapermen should send in a story about the murderer being arrested and publish his confession of the last murder while the morning newspapers could “follow up” the story with his confession about committing all three murders.

This was agreed upon, and we turned to our buggy for a wild drive back to town.

The parlor of the boarding house was a busy place that afternoon and evening. Every Chicago newspaper wanted columns of material, and photographers were rushed down to take the prisoner’s picture.

Later that evening two of the local policemen called on us and asked if it was true that we had captured the murderer. We had been expecting this and our prisoner had been handcuffed to a bed upstairs. We had provided him with a good supper and plenty of coffee. He had a most remarkable memory and told us in great detail how he had planned and committed the three murders and a number of other crimes. We wished to keep him for ourselves as long as possible, so we informed the police they had only heard a rumor and we knew nothing about the story.

It was only a short time later that the sheriff arrived with reinforcements and boiling mad. He said if we did not surrender our prisoner immediately he would put us all in jail, so we reluctantly turned over one of the most interesting and informative criminals we had ever talked with. We had all agreed to keep the details of the “arrest”, how the “arrest” had been made, a secret and to use it as a “follow-up” story the next day.

We knew it was going to be difficult to get any further information from the sheriff until we had appeased his dignity.

It turned out we had only scratched the surface. The prisoner confessed to more and more crimes and for a week newspaper readers were thrilled with criminal exploits, some of which were several years old.

My colleagues and I felt certain our prisoner had really committed the “club murders,” but when he continued his confessions which became more and more startling with each examination, we became suspicious. The man had a remarkable memory, but when we visited the farmer and questioned him it became evident he could not have been author of all those crimes. Like some other criminals, the prisoner loved notoriety and relished reading stories about himself in the newspapers. I saw the execution, and he was smiling when they placed the black mask over his face. The drop of the trap broke his neck.

We could hear the bone snap. After the usual contortions of a hanged man, he was pronounced dead and another sensational story ended.

The sensationalism of the American press deserves an explanation to European readers. Chicago and other American cities were growing rapidly, but they were growing un-American. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants were settling in compact colonies. Their religious leaders founded churches. Then foreign language newspapers appeared. Theaters, choirs, sport and social organizations followed. With every year the foreign language press increased their circulation, and the alien social and cultural organizations in American cities became more powerful.

Competition between the American newspapers became more and more bitter. Thirty years ago Chicago had six morning and five evening papers published in the American language. Today there are two morning and three evening papers. This decrease further shows how the character of the population had changed.

Hundreds of thousands of Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Jews, Greeks, Italians and other nationalities settled in Chicago. There also arrived an influx of Negroes from the Southern states. All of this alien element was cheap labor. They dragged down the American standard of living. All of these languages and racial groups have their own papers. As these grew in circulation, the circulation and influence of some of the American newspapers decreased. They became bankrupt and died. For some years now the Chicago city council has had its minority groups just like the little parliaments.

What happened in Chicago happened in other great industrial cities. The American press not only competed with each other for American readers, but they also tried to compete with the foreign language press for readers among the descendants of the immigrant families who learned English in their schools, but who did not regard it as their mother tongue.

This influx of foreigners helped to destroy many Chicago newspapers. They were published in the center of the city which sprawls for 26 miles (forty kilometers) along the shore of Lake Michigan, Just outside the central commercial and industrial area which comprises the center of the city the foreigners settled in great groups. These immigrant neighborhoods, slums and ghettos, kept on expanding and the American residents were forced to move farther into the suburbs, away from the foreigners.

American newspapers had to face the problem of transporting their editions many miles before they could be delivered to the subscribers. Each newspaper was obliged to maintain many horses and wagons, later entire fleets of, autotrucks, for distributing their papers. When the Second World War broke out it found Chicago with only three afternoon and one morning newspaper. The Chicago Tribune, And because of its America First policy. The Tribune has been, for many years, under constant attack by the un-American minority groups.

In many American cities, particularly those west of the Mississippi River, the bitter fight for survival between the American and the foreign language areas is still proceeding. In their effort to keep readers and attract others, the American newspapers began to provide more and more entertainment and less and less information. The larger size of the American newspaper is due to the enormous amount of advertising rather than news. In fact, in every American newspaper office the amount of advertising available determines the amount of news published.

While it is true that American newspapers spend large sums to obtain authentic reports on news developments, still the value of these reports to the readers is reduced by the large amount of frivolous and unimportant material published which competes for the attention of the average reader. This includes bridge problems, crossword puzzles, comic strips, etc., which are daily features in the newspapers.

The life of a morning newspaper in America is short, seldom more than an hour and a half. It is read at the breakfast table, on the way to work and then discarded. In the evening another paper, more sensational and trivial, provides entertainment rather than information.

It is for these reasons that the average newspaper reader profits little by the news, facts, discussion and reports of serious developments which should claim attention. This will help to explain why the degenerate reading habits of Americans and their apathy to matters outside their own narrow sphere of interests has enabled President Roosevelt and his Jewish counsellors to drive the United States into an imperialistic war, when the average American citizen has never dreamed of the possibility of the United States becoming a dominating world power, protecting the policy of exploitation of international money powers who, all unknown to the average American, have abandoned Europe and made their headquarters in the United States.

The average American has faith in the President of the United States. When the President gives his solemn pledge that he will not involve the country in war, that he will not send American boys to fight overseas, his word is respected and believed. It should also not be forgotten that Franklin Roosevelt is the first president of the United States who has enjoyed the privilege of talking intimately to the people of America over the radio. In some countries the radio has proved a blessing. In others, a curse. When the American people heard the President make promises, not once, but many times, there seemed all the more reason for them to believe their elected chief of state.

The radio developed in the United States overnight. In the great majority of countries this new avenue of human communication was placed under government control. One motive for this action was that the government leaders thought it better for radio to serve national interests and thus serve the people rather than permit private interests to use it to exploit the inhabitants.

But Americans have made a fetish of private initiative and enterprise. Government control of the radio was opposed (by private capital) because it was alleged to be just as dangerous to individual liberties as government control of the press. So the radio was left for private exploitation. No one in America could foresee that the three great radio networks which developed would come under the control of a national minority group whose aim was to control the government and destiny of the United States. The Jewish monopoly over the American radio has become an even greater threat to America than if this industry had developed as a government monopoly. There are a number of radio stations in America which have independent programs, but their warnings have been lost on the kosher waveband. The American people have been deluded and betrayed in much the same manner as the Russian people were deluded and betrayed. What fate has in store for us largely depends upon whether we continue to use our ears or again use our eyes to shape our destiny.

For centuries mankind obtained knowledge and information through the written and printed word. What comes to us through our eyes is registered in the conscious part of our brain and is there considered and either accepted or rejected. The power of the orators was limited. Today the loudspeaker and radio have magnified the power of the spoken word. What comes to us through our ears enters the subconscious part of our brain and acts upon our emotions. Since the advent of radio, the Americans have been relying more upon their ears than their eyes in acquiring information. They seem to have adopted the Finnish (or perhaps it is Swedish) proverb: “Let the horse think. He has a bigger head.”

Among many interesting adventures I had as a young reporter there is. one that deserves to be inserted in this chronicle. It concerns two aged men, both honored in Chicago as staid and respected citizens, both husbands with a long record of happy married life, both fathers of large families — unusually large families, for one had eleven children and the other eight. One was deputy superintendant of police for many years and later became chief of the police force. The other was a candy manufacturer, a millionaire.

The manufacturer loved to play practical jokes. Now among many Americans of his generation, as well as those of previous and the subsequent generation, was a popular superstition, no, it was more than that, it was almost an idee fixe. These Americans believed that women of the yellow race are, in a certain respect, uniquely different from women of other races.

In fact, they credit the creator, in his task of fabricating mankind, with a touch of originality in finishing off his yellow-skinned female by providing her with an unusual attraction. That acme of male desire which in other women is found as a vertical establishment he is supposed to have installed in the women of the Yellow race in a horizontal position. This heterodox variation is the subject of widespread doubt and debate. But many Americans believe implicitly in this phenomenon. Some have utilized journeys to the Far East to make investigations. Their discoveries were disbelieved.

The manufacturer decided to play a joke on his friends. He journeyed to Japan and China and there commissioned artists of note to paint and contrive for him a number of pictures showing, most clearly and attractively, that this was not merely a rumor but a definite and positive physiological fact.

After an absence of some months he returned to Chicago with several cases of paintings, drawings and embroidered silk tapestries, some reputedly of great age, revealing with verve that the saffron hued beauties of Asia are of lateral genre and so are different from their sisters whose skins are tinted otherwise.

The Chicago customs authorities confiscated the entire collection before the manufacturer could show them to his doubting and believing friends. He was indicted by the federal grand jury which spent much time examining the thrilling evidence. I can only recall one of the exhibits. It was a large silk-embroidered tapestry showing a Japanese lady reclining on many cushions in an expectant position, welcoming her lover back from battle. The impatient warrior was tossing his armour all over the place in his haste. And really, the god-darned thing was horizontal.

My friend, the chief of police, was a collector of just such works of art. In the course of many years he had gathered together a large number of such pictures. They were not open to public gaze. He kept them locked in a special safe in his office at police headquarters.

I mentioned to him the unparalelled collection which had been gathered in Asia by the candy manufacturer. His acquisitive collector’s heart burned with desire. He immediately telephoned to the chief of the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice in the Federal Building and asked him to turn over the collection after the trial. He was met with a blunt refusal. He pleaded and mentioned he had a large collection of similar objects of art and, even though it was the duty of authorities to protect the public from such displays still, he contended, such things should not be destroyed.

His rival law enforcer was more puritan minded. He insisted on destruction of the collection after the trial and threatened to send his federal agents to the city hall and raid the office of the chief of police and seize his collection. The chief invited him to try, that he would run the federal law enforcers out of town.

The conversation became heated. It ended with an outburst of profanity from both sides.

I consoled the chief of police. I had never liked that federal justice agent because of his habit to give stories to a rival paper.

I suggested the chief send out a detective squad and round up a couple of competent safe-crackers and send them over to the press room of the federal building on Saturday afternoon after the courts and offices had been closed. This was done and the antiquated safe in the Bureau of Investigation was opened with little trouble and the tabooed collection of the candy manufacturer was removed. No other valuables were taken.

The chief was delighted. The chief of the Bureau was enraged.

The manufacturer was disconsolate. He had engaged expensive legal talent to help him fight his case. He had announced his intention to fight his indictment up to the Supreme Court if necessary to prove that art was art, no matter what portion of a woman’s anatomy is portrayed. If the artists of the West both old and new, have devoted much time, paint and canvas to depicting the largest and roundest portion of a woman’s being, why shouldn’t the artists of the East paint something else?

The manufacturer demanded the evidence be found. The story of the vanished collection was known to but a few and had not been made public. It could not be recovered without a war breaking out between the loyal laughing police department and the hirelings of the Bureau who were greatly outnumbered.

After all, the G-Men had to depend upon the future assistance of the police department to efficiently perform their routine duties of combatting dope peddlers, white-slavers and counterfeiters, the three classes of criminals which the federal authorities are supposed to eradicate.

I called on the candy manufacturer and assured him his collection was intact and “had not been destroyed by mistake” as he had been informed. It was his turn to be delighted. I said it might be possible for him to view these creations again providing he would promise not to cause any trouble to their new owner. He agreed so I introduced him to the chief of police. Both these men were over seventy. It appeared both had been making the same sort of collections for years and had never met any collector with similar interests. They arranged meetings and traded pictures as small boys trade stamps. In this manner the manufacturer regained some of his Asiatic works of art.

Later the chief and the manufacturer arranged a dinner for their close friends. These doubters of the remarkable physical difference between the yellow women of Eastern latitudes and those of longitudes were convinced.

And the manufacturer had his joke after all.

Thirty years ago, jazz had not yet entered polite society. It was a new form of music bom in the back rooms of Negro saloons in the slums of New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago. The original jazz players were all Negroes and were natural bom musicians. The orchestras were small. They were comprised of a piano, a bass and snare dmm, a comet, a trombone and a banjo. The saxophone was unknown. A few of these little assemblies had a Negro artist who played a horn constructed from an elephant tusk.

These orchestras played without music. At their rehearsals the piano player would play a popular song once or twice to give the lead and they would play it together, each musician giving his variations. In musical slang, each of these performances was “a jam session,” which serious musicians would undoubtedly term a form of musical masturbation. This primitive form of music, born in dives, and brothels and saloons, in Chicago was discovered by newspaper reporters whose search for news made them acquainted with these places.

Late one night during a poker game in the Chicago Press Club the manager of the New Stratford Hotel was complaining that his hotel would soon be bankrupt if he could not discover some new attraction to entice patrons. This hotel was one of the oldest in the city. Its clientele had abandoned it in favor of the new Blackstone Hotel, where the professional dancers Vernon Castle and Irene Dunn were making a tremendous hit with their new form of ballroom dancing: dream waltz and hesitation waltz.

Another reporter and myself told the New Stratford manager to come with us and we would show him a new sensation. We brought him down to the red-light district and showed him these bands. He was delighted and immediately engaged one of them and brought them to his hotel in taxicabs where he sent the regular orchestra home and ordered the Negroes to play. He also engaged several Negro couples to dance the one-step and its variations, for the foxtrot had not yet been invented.

This music was an immediate success and after a few dances some of the guests appeared on the floor to imitate the gyrations of the Negroes. The other reporter and I looked at each other and without saying a word we dashed back to our city-rooms and wrote a story on how the black-and-tan society of the Negro district was teaching the society of the “gold coast” to dance. Our stories appeared on the first page of our papers.

Early the next morning the manager telephoned. He was furious. He claimed we had inveigled him into engaging the Negroes just in order to “obtain a story” and, claiming we had mined. his hotel, he said he was going to sue us both for damages in civil court. That we were going to obtain a story from this exploit never entered my head, and I told him I would come down to his hotel immediately. I arrived at his office an hour later and he met me with profuse apologies. It turned out that our stories had been the best advertisement his hotel had received in many years and when he had arrived at his office he had discovered every table in his restaurant had been reserved for a fortnight in advance. He wished our assistance in aiding him to contact the members of the two orchestras and sign a contract with them to play in his hotel for six months. It developed my colleague and I had helped him to make his fortune. He presented us with a gold fountain pen and the privilege to eat as often as we pleased at his hotel free of charge.

A few weeks later another popular restaurant in Chicago, the College Inn, engaged a jazz orchestra and this new type of music quickly developed into a regular industry. I know that New Orleans claims to be the home of jazz. But the real home of Jazz was the Negro saloon. This lowly birthplace is not mentioned as a detraction. Jazz is a great and widely popular contribution which the Negro has made to the White Man’s civilization. It is music in its adolescent form. Its exuberance and vulgarity intensify its appeal.

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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 2: Dec 8, 2019 — Re-uploaded images and PDF for katana17.com/wp/ version

Version 1: Published Mar 7, 2015