JF Ptak Science Books

"America Asleep" (1923) and "Awake and Act" (1935)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2700

The “radicalism” that was a menace to America outlined in this slim pamphlet by the attorney Joseph T. Cashman (died in 1936 at 59) launched into the public consciousness in Scranton, Pa., in 1923, was Communism. Communism came in many flavors, and the author, as a member of the National Security League¹, outlined some of them finding Commies in the United Mine Workers and the American Civil Liberties Union, to name two. The UMW was taking orders from the Third Internationale, which was also on its way to take over other trade unions. Then there was the larger issue of national security that was the base concern of the National Security League, which evidently went a little overboard with their issues, at one point in 1918 accusing the entire state of Wisconsin of treason.

So, the “asleep” part is the USA not paying attention to the Communists taking over the unions newspapers, and having an influx of immigrants who were not American enough who were destined to cause trouble to our way of life, and for not recognizing that teaching foreign languages in school would lead to division, and so on. For them what was going to save the country was uniformity, obedience, pledges of all sorts (like the Lusk Law in New York where teachers had to swear to their piety, patriotism, an wholesomeness), mandatory military service, and a vast increase in military funding to secure our borders. Welcome to 1923.

In other news, there's this pamphlet from 1936, a miserable message from a miserable man, telling the U,S, to wake up...and become National Socialists. 

Fritz Julius Kuhn was president of the German American Volksbund and a nasty, hateful character who worked in service of National Socialism in the United States. He wound up in trouble and in jail for mishandling funds, and once the U.S. got into the war, he found himself arrested as an enemy alien and sent to spend time in the interment camp on Ellis Island. He was kicked out of the country, and then arrested again by U.S. Occupation Forces and sent to Dachau in 1947 as part of the Denazification effort of Gen. Lucius D. Clay. Of course Dachau wasn't the Dachau of Kuhn's idol, so he unfortunately did not experience the camp of his intentions. He died in 1951, and that was that. Provenance: the Library of Congress, the pamphlet being a gift from the Bund.

In 1936 Kuhn wasn't yet interested in taming the U.S. for the Nazis, though he was interested in protecting it from the greatest evil of mankind--Communism.. Actually, it turns out to be Bolshevism, but the controlling power to this is"the war battalions of the Jewish capitalists of the stock exchange" which was "the international (J)ewish attack of world Marxism", which he said is what was attacking Germany, presently. There's a lot more of this rhetoric in the pamphlet...actually, that is all there is in it, this sort of language, written by a non-native speaking chemist walking in Hitlerian glory and not all that smart. He was smart enough though in his rants, and tirades, and his anger was such that he was able to get 20,000 people to attend a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939 where amidst his adjectival malignancies he ranted against "Franklin Delano Rosenfeld" and his "Jew Deal", much like the language used in someone else's beloved Ezra Pound's traitorous broadcasts from Italy during the war. This was the straw that broke the stinking fascist's back, though, terminally pissing off Mayor Laguardia who went after Kuhn's taxes and found fraud and embezzlement. And so off he went.  But not before ruining the memories of those people who witnessed their friends become engorged by his wrath and hatred, a ruined man with ruinous ideas who ruined people. 

Notes:

1. “The National Security League (NSL) was an American patriotic, nationalistic, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that supported a greatly-expanded military based upon universal service, the naturalization and Americanization of immigrants, Americanism, meritocracy, and government regulation of the economy to enhance national preparedness. Many of the programs advocated by the NSL, such as a unified national defense agency, an interstate highway system, universal conscription, English as the official language, and a unified national budget, were highly influential. Although the organization had declined before it finally folded in 1942, many of its ideas would become national policy in the United States.”--Wikipedia

Scarce Collection of Portraits of Physicists, 1908

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This scarce publication--Bildnisse zeitgennossischer Physiker--is a collection of about 320 portraits of leading physicists, collected together as an homage to Viktor von Lang on the occasion of his 70th birthday.  The book was made to look like a family portrait album, resembling stiff cardboard pages that would have open places in the pages for a collection of cartes des visites to be slid into place via at slot at the bottom of the window. The physicist are from Germany, France, the UK, Spain, the U.S., Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Japan, and a few other countries.  Interesting to note here are the three portraits of women physicists: Margaret Maltby (Barnard, and first woman to receive a doctorate from a German university); A. Serdobinskaja (St. Petersburg); and O. Steindler (Vienna).

Lang (1838-1921, one of the founders of crystal physics and from 1865 to 1909 (!) the director of the Physikalisches Kabinett in Vienna) is listed in some references as the author though I’m pretty certain that the work was edited by someone else and presented to Lang as an appreciation for his long contribution to science. There is also no mention of a place of publication.

There are only four copies of this book found in WorldCat, and I only found a handful of the published photos online, so I thought to reproduce the book in its entirety Each section is expandable; the images were scanned at 200dpi so I think they will stand up nicely for individual reproduction. 

Questionable Quidity: “A very unexpected feature of war-time has been the decline of insanity" (1918)

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Among the many unexpected sentences that Prof. J.A. Lindsay¹ (1856-1931) writes in his article “The Eugenic and Social Influence of the War” (in The Eugenics Review, volume X, No. 3, October 1918) are the following:

“A very unexpected feature of war-time has been the decline of insanity.”

And

“... that war, fruitful though it is in shock cases and neurasthenia, does not increase, but may even tend to diminish, insanity.”

I've included the two long paragraphs in which they occur, below, and also provide a link for the full article.

Of course this makes no sense as it stands, but there it is.

Dr. Lindsay's article is followed straight away by Charles Darwin's son, Major Leonard Darwin, who wonders about the eugenic survivability of the war in his "The Need for Widespread Eugenic Reform During Reconstruction". 

Eugenics as a way of life was in its heyday at this point, though its demise was approaching, and its ideas (for far as establishing it as a field of intellectual study) discredited in the next decade or so, even though the journal The Eugenics Review would survive into 1962. 

Here are the quotes (bold mine):

Very Heavy Journalism, Old School--a Gift from H.L. Mencken

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Here's another lesson in the continuing and forever-expanding series on not judging by appearances: the following terrific images were found in a very tall and slender, stiff and demure 1920's publication celebrating the Thomson Printing Works of London (and Glasgow, Dundee, and Manchester). The calf-bound book has the feel of an antique wallet, and even though the binding is sumptuous the cover is imprinted "A memento of a visit to the Thomson Printing Works, Dundee, Glasgow, Manchester", which made it a rather expensive give-away--if that is so it was probably given only to the special few and not to the great unwashed. (My copy belonged to H.L. Mencken, who kept it until 1935 when he gave it away). Anyway Thomson was a busy printing house/publisher, sending out millions of pieces, and the illustrations in the publication gives the reader an idea of the heavy hardware that went into the process. It is all very impressive. Also the photos of the human aspect of the firm--the crowded work and editorial and etc. rooms--well, it gives you an idea of the closeness and noise of the place as it might have been on a late summer afternoon in 1928.  [And by the way, I just checked WorldCat for this title and there's only one copy listed--National Library of Scotland--which means the thing is pretty rare, and which also means that these terrific photos have probably not been shared very much at all...]

The heavy hardware:

I wonder how much just the type weighed in the composing room?