JF Ptak Science Books

Scientific Appraisals of Curving a Baseball, 1877

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Ah, the mechanics of curving a baseball as found in the summery summertime pages of  Scientific American, August 18, 1877, page 100. The author, an "H.C.", admits that they might not be correct, but they're going with it anyway, at least at this time. 

Also I should point out that "curveball" appears in print for the first time only two years earlier, at least that is so by the Oxford ENglish Dictionary: 

• "Curveball. Baseball. A delivery in which the pitcher causes the ball to deviate from a straight path by imparting spin."
• "1875   Providence (Rhode Island) Evening Press 4 Oct.   Both sides batted heavily and by the close score made an exciting game. Macullar played worthy of a professional, and the tricky Bancker sent in his curve balls with telling effect."

And as long as we're at it, the chronology of first appearance publications of baseball-related things, according again to the OED, include the following: baseball, 1845; baseball player, 1856; baseball game, 1857; baseball bat, 1858; shirt, 1860; cap, 1865; team, 1869; diamond, 1871; glove, 1884; and baseball fan, 1885. Odd, no, that "baseball fan" appears 40 years after "baseball"? 

Found Art: Found Documentary Photos in an Obscure Publication (1931)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The catalog description for the slim 1931 pamphlet,  The Southern Forestry Educational Project Final Report (American Forestry Association of D.C.) 1937, doesn't exactly make the generally-curious reader generally curious. As it turns out it packs a lot of data and info into its thirty-two very tight and crisply-written pages--better yet are the photo illustrations, which were a real surprise, and have for the most part nearly every measure of what documentary photography would become in just a few years under the Farm Security Administration. American Forestry sent trucks out into the deep parts of Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia to host community meetings in which there were lectures and movies on forest use, maintenance, and fire prevention--for many first movie experience. All tolled from 1928 through 1931 there were 7,370 lectures and "picture shows" given to some 1.1 million attendees, which sound like pretty big numbers to me.  

[The analysis shows that of the 4,606 picture shows only 504 were given at "Negro schools"; of the 2,764 lectures 1,200 were given to audiences at schools for African Americans.]

 

When the Words Feel Like the Bad Paper They're Written On--Trashing Frederick Douglass (1895)

JF Ptak Science Books  

1895 was a great big year in science--there were major contributions by Cantor, Poincare, Ramsay, and Perrin, among others, though the biggest of them all was the semi-accidental discovery by Roentgen of X-rays, a monument in the pursuit of further/deeper.

My own little 1895 discovery last night may be a well-established bit but was unknown to me, and it proved to be the opposite of further/deeper. I was trying to squeeze some life out of what looked like a pamphlet as dry and brittle as the bad newsprint it was made of:  History of the General Assembly of North Carolina, January 9-March 15, 1895, Inclusive (printed by E.M. Uzzell in Raleigh, 1895), which sounds just flat-out anti-interesting (especially with the very specialized time period).  It turns out that the 160-page work is written in a easy, journalismo sub-Menckian way, with a nod to humor here and there and a dose of familiarity, a good narrative style that was useful and breezy.

And as I hunted for some sparkly point in the daily comings and goings of the legislature, I ran right into the dark void.

The hole was a short report, “The Douglass Infamy”, which was an infamy of its own. Over the few pages of the article/review it discussed the  “humiliation of the white people of the south” caused by the General Assembly of the legislature choosing to suspend and adjourn their meeting out of respect  for Frederick Douglass, who had suddenly died during the session. The author referred to the action as "an offense against the dignity and sentiments of this proud State" ("State" is capitalized, "Negro" is not),  Douglass to as “the miscegentionist" straight-away after condemning the act of respect due the man, and was an "...author of many malignant and untruthful aspersions on the whites",  and referred to his as "an inferior race, incapable of civilization except for that under the whites".  Closing down the government was a "humiliation to white people" and disgusted some legislators to the point where they denied that the action had taken place. I think this was because it elevated Douglass to a level of equality, which just would not do: "The whites of North Carolina...regard any approach by the Negro to social equality with...abhorence [sic]". 

The was a significant amount of hateful nonsense in this entry, railing against Douglass, who in their view wrote terrible untruths about white people and who was “also guilty of miscegenation”, having married a white woman.  

“Thoughtful Democrats who have looked beyond the present moment and who have preferred to bear such party ills as they had, if such there were, rather than fly to others they knew not of, predicted that the fusion with Republicans of any considerable number of those who were formerly Democrats meant Republican domination, and that Republican domination meant, in one form or another, negro [sic] domination. The Douglas incident reveals the animus of that party and is a menace of its aims. (After the official declaration of the Fusionists, the General Assembly did not adjourn in honor of the birthday of Robert E. Lee, a legal holiday, but did adjourn out of respect for the memory of Frederick Douglas.)”

Finding this article was not surprising, really, though it was unexpected to some degree; there were a few other bits in the pamphlet similar to this, so the article did not stand alone. The part that is so amazing is that it the "Douglass Infamy" was just part and parcel of a documentary and interpretive  report on the action of the state legislature for a few months in 1895; and yet, there was this hateful business, taking up as much space and brain waves as noting that it was a cloudy day.  

"Separate Cinema"--100 All-Black Movies for Rent, 1944

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

This is well outside what I usually write about here, but I could not resist sharing this interesting find.  "All Negro Cast Features" is a five-page section in a 150pp film distributor catalog from 1944, listing 100 all-Black movies for rent. I know very little about this genre of film-making, but in checking out some sites dedicated to the subject I found that only about a third of the hundred were mentioned—which of course sparks curiosity and interest.  

 [See the wonderful "Separate Cinema" site from whom I borrowed the phrase in the title to this quick post at http://www.separatecinema.com/exhibits_vintageyears.html (with posters!); also the IMDb/Afro-Centric Film Collaborative "Definitive List of  Black Movies from the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's," which as it turns out lists only 32 films from the 1940s.]

The “All Negro” offerings (no films in the catalog are dated) included 37 features ranging from 1931-1944, with ten in the 1930's and three in the 1940's. Only 12 of these are referenced in full on the Separate Cinema site, with four others tangentially mentioned and dated. There are then two pages  of shorter, movies including: Short Subjects (14 films), "1-Reel All-Negro Cast Subjects (16 films), "Features with Prominent Negroes..." (4 films), "Cabin Kid Comedies" (8 1-reel films), "Musicals" (9 1-reel), "Joe Louis Fights" (9 1&2-reel films), and "Spice of Your Program" (3 2-reels).

Some of the descriptions for the feature films are spare, some not, though even the quick descriptions of some of these movies are captivating--for example, for Harlem is Heaven (1932), the entry reads "Bill Robinson, the dark cloud of joy with Eubie Blake's orchestra".  On the other hand, the description for Marching On reads "the picture that leaves you gasping" without any reference to it being one of the very few films dealing with African American military life during WWII.  

In any event someone out there in Interwebtubelandia may find this list useful or supplementary.

All of the images of the text are expandable:

 

Churchill and the Conservatives Abandoned--an anti-Labour Pamphlet of 1946

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Even though Churchill was enormously popular in the public mind (well over 80% approval rate in 1945...I guess the question would have been what was up with the remained who disapproved?) the Conservatives and Churchill with them were utterly swept away from power in the general election of the summer of '45, in the heights of victory in Europe and before the war in the Pacific was not yet ended. Clement Attlee was in charge as head of Labour—he was very skilled and competent and accomplished, though these characters were not manifest in his public persona, hardly a Churchill who shone through and through. It all made sense, in its way, though it was a shocking turn of the screw in the U.S. That's not to say that the Conservatives weren't shocked, though at least there was an understanding on that turn of affairs came to be. I doubt that was the case in D.C.

In any event, this pamphlet shows the vestiges of political posters for the '45 election a year or so later, promises that in their future looked not-so-good what with rationing still going on, a problematic economy, housing issues, battle weariness, and so on. The pamphlet was written by the Conservatives who tried to remind voters that Labour's labour has been lost, and one should return the privilege of government to the Conservatives. That wouldn't happen for almost another 10 years, when they and Churchill made their return in 1955.

The cover is very striking, and makes a clear point.

(It seems this is a rare pamphlet--I can find only one copy accounted for in WorldCat/OCLC, and that in the British Library.)

10,000 Windows Filled with Cigarettes (1938)

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Vincent Riggio (1878-1960) was a classic rags-to-riches story: Sicilian-born, lower East Side, quit school to work, opened barber shop on 117th, etc., and by 1947 was one of the highest paid execs in the country at $484k/yr., heading up sales for the American Tobacco Company.(Its hard to translate this wealth, even after fiddling with CPI—at the time though 30 million of the 39 million families in the US Census for 1950 made less than $5k/yr.)

Anyway Riggio wrote a Christmastime book¹ in 1938 on "Sales Organization" for the ATC, a piece of boosterism and a how-to for sales of cigarettes and the beauty they represented. One part that stopped me was the instruction on filling “10,000” windows in high-traffic areas with ciggie displays.  There were 93 cities in the US with 100k or more population in 1930 (105 in 1940, 50 in 1910, and 68 in 1920) so even if the windows concentrated on the big cities that’s 100 big windows (think classic giant window displays busy intersection) per each of the 100 cities. That’s in addition to massive amount of print ads and radio/sporting event sponsorships. (And remember the print ads used movie stars, doctors, lawyers, Santa, sports figures, and so on, plus the combination of the cigarette with the possibility of expressive manhood AND sexual allure.) These folks got their message across, which was too bad. 

And for the record ATC was founded in 1890 by Buck Duke, and was one of the original 12 companies² comprising the first index for the Dow Jones averages (1896). ATC was busted³ in 1911 as a monopoly, after which it became a simple oligopoly.

Notes:

1. Riggio, Vincent. American Tobacco Company, Sales Organization. Printed by ATC on fine laid paper. 7”x5”, 61pp. Embossed cloth.  I can’t find this in WorldCat/OCLC.  

2. The twelve companies included American Cotton Oil, American Sugar, American Tobacco, Chicago Gas, Distilling & Cattle Feeding, General Electric, Laclede Gas, National Lead, North American, Tennessee Coal & Iron, U.S. Leather preferred, and U.S. Rubber.

3. United States v. American Tobacco Company, 221 U.S. 106 (1911), “...which held that the combination in this case is one in restraint of trade and an attempt to monopolize the business of tobacco in interstate commerce within the prohibitions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.”--Wikipedia

A Remedial Introduction to "Politics" for Newly-Enfranchised Women in the U.K. (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post

To Women Voters¹--a short and thin-lipped tearsheet printed by Sir Joseph Causton (viz Midsomer!) of London--was printed in 1918 for the Lloyd George U.K. Coalition Government.  (The coalition government of Lloyd George lasted until 1922 when it was replaced by that of Bonar Law.) It was printed in response to the Representation of the People Act of 1918², which enfranchised a certain set of women to the vote. This pamphlet was a very remedial introduction to the most basic ideas of government,  defining the subjects of “Politics”, “Duties of Citizenship”, and the “Coalition Government”, mostly in the service of having the women who could vote and would do so to vote for the Lloyd George ministry. The writer made a brittle assumption that women knew nothing about government and politics, and proceeded accordingly.

I've reprinted the pamphlet below. 

Notes:

1.  8.5” x 5.5”, 4pp (one sheet folded in half).  Provenance: from the collection of Prof. E.D. Adams to Leland Stanford Jr University, and then the Library of Congress. The LC surplus stamp is on back cover, while the small Stanford stamp is at the bottom of page 2.  

2. “The Representation of the People Act 1918 widened suffrage by abolishing practically all property qualifications for men and by enfranchising women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. The enfranchisement of this latter group was accepted as recognition of the contribution made by women defence workers. However, women were still not politically equal to men (who could vote from the age of 21); full electoral equality was achieved in Ireland in 1922, but did not occur in Britain until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928.”--Wikipedia

A Beautiful Apocalypse (1508)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This vision of The Apocalypse doesn't look overwhelmingly apocalpse-y, to me, but the message was put across to the viewer that something bad was happening, what with the hail and brimstone and lightning and fire being visited upon the dissolving church in the background and the murdered clergy in the foreground. The woodcut appeared in Joseph Gruenbeck's Speculum naturalis coelestis & propheticae visionis, printed in Nuremberg in October 1508, being a short (18 leaves) prognostication on the fate of humankind and its wicked ways. It is a very orderly fall from grace, but a fall nevertheless, and the reader no doubt was reminded of the waiting ring of fire. 

Beer Vs. Wine, 1828

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Here we go: I found this fascinating little table in the article "Diet in England and France" in the Journal of the Franklin Institute for July, 1828. I think that the table displays what seems to be common knowledge about consumption in the two cultures, though it also provides some interesting numbers ("compiled from authentic documents") to back everything up.  The first section displays gross numbers, while the second breaks it down to consumption in terms of per capita. The Brits drink far less wine than the French, though the French drink even less (by an order of magnitude) of tea than the Brits. 

 

Teepees and Petroleum Companies, 1885

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I was working on this 1885 pamphlet¹ on petroleum in Wyoming territory, and was stopped by the cover illustration. As you can see, the cover shows a teepee (which would be about right seeing that most of the numerous Indian tribes there in the territory before White incursion were nomadic)—behind it though we see oil derricks, which I am sure was not the case, unless the derricks were on Indian land. In 1880 the (non-Indian) population of Crook County was 239, which “jumped” to 2,300 in 1890, (then to 6k in 1910 where it has stayed about constant since). In 1890 the Indian population in all of Wyoming was 2,063 (or thereabouts, according to the U.S.1890 census special volume Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed), and of that figure nearly the entirety of the population--1,861--were on reservations. And according to the census report of the 189,000 reported Indian population in the country 133,000 were on reservations, while another 50,000 were living in Indian Territory which did not in the government's mind count for being on a reservation, making for something like 5,000 Indians not on reservations or I.T. territory in the entire U.S. and territories. So, picturing the teepee set before a petroleum industry scene was exceedingly and vapidly prosaic.

Notes:

1. Gilbert Ellis Bailey (former State Geologist of Wyoming). Petroleum in Wyoming Territory and special report on the Stockade oil district and the property of the Lakota oil and coal mining company in Crook County, Wyoming. No publisher or place of printing is noted. No date (though it is certainly before statehood in 1890); Stanford guesses 1885.  8.25”x5.75”, 19pp, with a small folding map of the county.  Printed wrappers. Provenance: U.S. Geological Survey Library, gifted to the Library of Congress in 1921. One copy only (Stanford) located by WorldCat.  

Time, Motion, and Awe in Regards to Moving Pictures

JF Ptak Science Books   (This is a revision and expansion of a post from 2012.)

Leonardo wrote backwards and from right to left, Benjamin Button lived backwards at the hands of Scott Fitzgerald, Rene Magritte's man in the mirror saw the back of his head, Ignatz the Mouse I am sure saw the back of his head looking around the world with the world's most powerful telescope, rugby passes are all done backwards, paper images of vue optiques appear backwards, lightning for all intents and purposes starts backwards from the ground up, reverse mathematics are worked from theorems to axioms, the Chicago River (1900) was engineered to flow backwards for the foreseeable future, while the Mississippi River famously flowed backwards for just a bit in the New Madrid earthquake of 1812. 

I can only imagine what audiences must have felt when they saw the first moving pictures played backwards--seeing them played forwards was a novel-enough (and revolutionary) idea, but the simple idea of reversing the direction of the film would have proved to be equally fascinating.  Imagine the first time you witnessed a staged train wreck on film, back there in 1895¹, and imagine being able to see it played over and over again, until you were filled.  I'm not so sure that there were even any still photographs of a train wreck as it occurred to this point, even with advances in film speed and lens, so seeing the even unfold in front of you at leisure must have been overwhelming.  Now imagine these same folks seeing the event and watching the locomotives reconstitute themselves.  It would have been an extraordinary event.  Even observing the Marey sequences (above) and seeing what actually happens when a person bends over to pick up a pail of water would have revealed almost as much in new detail as when Galileo was in the middle of his earliest observations. 

In a way the chance of controlling the direction telling of a story and seeing it displayed via moving images, and being able to see them backwards, may well have seemed a form of third-person time travel.  This came on the heals of what is for all intents and purposes the first time travel novel in  H.G. Wells' (also in) 1895 The Time Machine (appearing earlier as "The Chronic Argonauts," in 1888)² and Mark Twain's 1889 but much earlier than the first motion picture to use the idea of time travel (which was in 1921 and based on Twain's work).  Being able to show a motion picture, and then stop it at will, and then reverse the order of time to begin everything all over again--visually--must have seemed a magnificent advantage. 

And so to this end I've got the following few questions for which I have no firm answers:

1. When was the first time people saw moving images of a of a currently deceased person? That is, when did the first dead person become “reanimated” by virtue of their images being captured by a motion picture? This question could be asked of the first viewing of a photograph of a dead person, and also the first experience of listening to a now-dead person whose voice had been recorded by an Edison machine, but I think the moving picture element is much more powerful. 

2. When exactly was the first viewing of backwards motion, of seeing action in reverse?

3. When was the first viewing of a continuous moving picture in which motion was purposely interrupted ?

I've probably overlooked some long list of "firsts" in film, somewhere, but for now these questions are still questions. If anyone out there has answers, I'd love to hear them. 

Notes:

1.  It is interesting that this very early motion picture , made by the great scientist-brothers Lumiere, l'Arrivee d'un train en gare, was produced in the same year as the Wells book.  Just two years later, the Lumiere Brothers published a catalog of their available movie strips, numbering 338 productions.  In 1898, after six catalogs, there were over a thousand strips.  This is remarkable, especially considering that there wasn't a cinema industry yet.  The Lumieres are an interesting pair of people (both of whom survived their invention by about a half-century), making perhaps the most important discoveries in the history of cinema, and continued to be interested in other fields throughout their lives.  The cinema-industry part of their work didn't seem to interest them all that much. 

The history of moving images is complex and long.  I'm not saying at all that it begins with the Lumieres, or with Edison, as the pre-1900 field is well sprinkled with different and interesting attempts at fooling our eye--Chronophotograposcopes, Counterfivoscopes, Phantasmagorias, Klondikiscopes, Vileocigraphiscope, and so on, are just a few examples of the many attempts at locating the seat of photographic motion in the brain.  There are very early efforts, principally by J.A.F. Plateau (1801-1883) who rediscovered in 1829 the "persistence of vision" effect in which the eye will see a continuous stream of images if presented with a flow of static pictures at 16 frames per second over a one second period, which of course is the basis for the rest of everything that was to come.  There's much more, but I wanted to at least point out these few important bits. 

2..  I'm not sure what to  with Mr. Dickens, if he fits in this order with the time traveling Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1843), or not.  Perhaps he does, and if so, then he precedes Mr. Wells, though the latter's time traveler is outfitted with a machine and a scientific basis for the belief in it.  At the very least he is worth mentioning in the same moment.

The Fires of London, 1832

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This bit of not-common data (below) just came to me while I was fussing around in a volume of the Journal of the Franklin Institute (January-June, 1833), and details the fires and the businesses in which they started. It is a curious bit, reminding me of a post I did some years ago about Charles Babbage's tour of the broken windows of London. There were 209 fires, which really doesn't seem to be an awful lot, all things considered. The business, though ("the buildings attacked by fire"), the ones consumed by fire, are mostly in themselves consumed now by time. Blacking makers, brass founders, brush makers, carvers and gilders, coachmakers, coopers, feltmongers, fringe makers, lampblack makers, milkmen,, , oil and color men, rag merchants, sack makers, scaleboard makers, straw bonnet makers, tinmen, and wadding makers, are all pretty much gone as standard enterprises. 

One of the Earliest Appearances of "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Spring, 1944)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2788

I stopped by my old friend the amazing Andy Moursund’s fantastic Flickr site, where in just the first 30 seconds or so I needed to stop and follow Andy’s lead on an astonishing book. The cover¹ is stark, and justifiably so as  Oswiecism—Camp of Death. (Underground Report)² is one of the earliest separately published reports on Auschwitz, published in March, 1944. (Auschwitz, which is the German rendition of the Polish "Oswiecism", comes into being in May 1940, grows by 140,000 prisoners in March 1941, another 200,000 in 1942, and then many more until the end, when something on the order of 1.1 million people were murdered there, 90% of them being Jewish.)

See Andy's site here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/145907841@N08/albums/721577056751817750

I checked the title on the internet archive, where there is a full-text copy available to read (here:

https://archive.org/details/OswiecimCampOfDeath/page/n1

Reading this pamphlet is a very stiffening experience, even if you have a background in reading about the Holocaust.

I imagine too that this may be one of the earliest appearances in print of the hellish sign at the entrance to the KZ, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Brings Freedom”).

We read of it on page 24 of the pamphlet:

“HERE is a large sign over the camp entrance with the words "Arbeit Macht Frei", ("Work Brings Freedom"), while from any spot in the camp one can see the huge chimney of the crematory. It is an ugly, brownish red.”

“A prisoner's life moves between these two points — the sign and the chimney —from the moment he "loses" his life when he enters the camp until the moment he "regains" it as a bit of ashes coming from the crematory.”

“Surrounding the camp for an area several miles in width are cultivated fields from which the previous owners have been evicted. Many farm buildings and workshops adjoin the camp and its barracks. Scores of miles beyond the actual camp boundaries are the coal mines. All work, above ground or underground, is done by prisoners. They till fields, build houses, mine coal, load and unload trains. They produce goods of which only a part is for the camp; the major share goes to the German army…”

And of further interest is this map of concentration camps in Poland:

Notes

1. Cover by Teresa Zarnower (Teresa Żarnowerówna was a Polish avant-garde artist, painter, sculptor, scenographer, and architect). “One of the most important artistic personalities of the Polish constructivist avant-garde in the 1920s…” (Jewish Women’s Association Archive)
2. Oswiecism—Camp of Death. (Underground Report), Sponsored by NATIONAL C.I.O. War Relief Commission, First Edition: March 1944. Copyright 1944 by Poland Fights New York, N. Y. Sponsored by American Friends of Polish Democracy; Published by Poland Fights, 55 West 42 Street, New York 18, N. Y. Assisted by Polish Information Center

Infiltrating Fascist Sympathizer Groups in the U.S. (1943)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

John Roy Carlson (the pseudonym of Arthur Derounien, 1909-1991) was an investigative journalist and during WWII he went undercover and infiltrated many of the right wing/fascist/"patriot" groups operating in the U.S.  The result of that work as a  well-received book called Undercover, My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America¹, which was published by Dutton in 1943 and which went through seven printings in its first two months of publication.  It wasn't yellow journalism, either--it was an expose of Nazi and fascist sympathizers, who--even after Pearl Harbor--supported the ideas of fascism.

Derounien was a busy man, joining and infiltrating such groups as:

• National Socialist White People's Party (formed by George Lincoln Rockwell in a shabby store front on Wilson Blvd in Arlington,Virginia, and renamed the American Nazi Party in 1960);
• Christian Mobilizers (allied with the Bund, this was a militant arm of the Christian Front which had a more-militant spin-off in the American Unity Party);
• America First Committee (a mixture of patriotic, isolationist far right-wing and Nazi sympathizers, infamously spearheaded by Lindbergh, the group disappeared on 7 December 1941; 
• German American Bund, (a loud German-patriotic pro-Nazi group which filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 with 20,000 members, sweatily drenched in Hitler rhetoric, an enormous portrait of G. Washington, Brownshirts,  and swastikas: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/);

plus the Gray Shirts (not to be confused with local boy Pelley's Silver Shirts, abandoned after his jail sentence for sedition and replaced in the 1950's with his new religion of UFOs and religious-something called "Soulcraft"), American Nationalist Party, American Women Against Communism, The American Defense Society, Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, National Workers League, Yankee Freemen, Flanders Hall, American Patriots, and others²--it was a very impressive undertaking. 

[German American Bund at Madison Square Garden, 20 February 1939.  Source: https://youtu.be/WpaYQqzFouw]

His book had a very wide impact, contributing to some degree in bringing together thirty leaders of such groups to trials for sedition during wartime. Carlson had in the intervening year or so, 1943/4, been subject to many accusations and charges of being an enemy alien himself, or Communist, or something--accusations initiated by many of the groups that he exposed. So it seems that in preparing himself for the trials to come that in anticipation of more libels to come Carlson published this short broadsheet call Under Cover News, which appeared five days before D-Day, June 1, 1944.  In it he asked himself questions that he thought his detractors might ask, and answered them. 

Note:

1.   Full text is available here: http://dlib.nyu.edu/undercover/sites/dlib.nyu.edu.undercover/files/under_cover-%20john%20roy%20carlson-1b.pdf

2.  A fuller list of the organizations: 
American National-Socialist Party, German-American Bund, Christian Front, The Ultra-American, Nationalist Party, 
American Nationalist Party, American Women Against Communism, The Gray Shirts , America First Committee, 
No Foreign War Committee, Christian Mobitizers, American Destiny Party, American Brotherhood of Christians 
Congress, The Ethiopian Pacific Movement, Citizens Protective League, Social Justice Distributors Club, 
The American Defense Society, Anglo-Saxon Federation of America, Paul Revere Sentinels, Ra-Con Klub, 
Crusaders for Americanism, Inc. 

 

The Situation of the Jews in Europe, a 1941 Assessment

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Jews in Nazi Europe, February 1933 to November 1941; a study prepared by the Institute of Jewish affairs, submitted to the Inter-American Jewish conference, November 23-24-25, 1941, Baltimore, Md., .Institute of Jewish Affairs.Institute of Jewish Affairs, [New York, 1941]. This 175pp (or so) report made at the end of 1941 was a sort of census about what was happening  to the Jews delegated in geographical sections, at the end of which was an overview summation. The writer(s) were seeing things accurately in terms of overall viciousness towards the Jews, and amongst other conquered peoples, but did not see the full and overwhelming, impossible, extent of the situation and the enormous numbers, not in 1941. (In that year alone, addressing solely the construction of concentration camps, six death/extermination camps were constructed in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec , Sobibór, Lublin ( Majdanek ), and Chelmno, with the result of murdering millions.)

This from the "Conclusion":

"How does the general picture of Jewish life in Axis Europe look? The most important elements are the following: 1. Decrease in the number of Jews in Europe At the beginning of 1933» the area now under Axis domination had a population of about 8,500,000 Jews. Since that time, about 600,000 Jews have migrated. Another 400,000 are now homeless refugees, interned in concentration camps, building railways in deserts, waiting vainly in harbors for a ship, rotting on floating prisons, in the heat of the Sahara and in the cold of Siberia...addition, hundreds of thousands of Jews of the Soviet Union have been forced to leave their homes as evacuees and as refugees. The Jewish birth rate has been decreasing steadily during this period, while the death rate has been increasing at an accelerated speed of between five and ten times the normal pace. The population has been further decimated by the death of thousands in concentration camps, at the hands of the Gestapo and in the flames of total war, while many thousands more took their own lives in hopeless despair...”--Jews in Nazi Europe..., final section (unpaginated). 

The entire document is well worth reading: 

[Source for page images: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c070874352;view=2up;seq=1

[Source for text version: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ssd?id=mdp.39015002352097;seq=303;num=