From the Archives: Beyond Belief
When I was working on my recent post on the display Americans and the Holocaust,I wanted to link to my review of Deborah E. Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief: The American Press & the Coming of the Holocaust 1933-1946. I couldn’t find one. I decided I must have failed to review the book, even though I regularly recommend it when I speak to groups about The Dragon From Chicago. Oops!
This morning, I sat down to redress that oversight. As a first step, I googled the book so I could find a bit more about Lipstadt. Right there on the front page of results was my review from 2020. Huh?
I don’t know how I failed to find it before,[1] but I think it is worth sharing again. As far as I’m concerned Beyond Belief remains the best book out there on the question of what the American public knew about the Holocaust and when they knew it.
I am currently taking notes on a pile of secondary source that I read over the last few months. I stuffed them full of sticky tabs as I went and moved on. On the surface, it’s not the most efficient way to do research, and I don’t always have the time to do it. But when time allows, I find it tremendously valuable. Coming back to the material a second time with a fresh eye and more information allows me to make connections that I didn’t make the first time. Re-reading is like re-writing as far as I’m concerned. It’s where the magic happens.
I just finished my second pass on Deborah Lipstadt’s Beyond Belief: the American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945. The first time through it didn’t even occur to me share it with you.[2] And yet, and yet: it is important, not only for understanding how Americans could have remained ignorant of the Holocaust at the time, but also as a starting point for the mindset that makes today’s charges and counter-charges of “fake news” possible.
The work had its roots in the classroom. After Lipstadt told her class that detailed information about the Nazi attempt to exterminate European Jews had been available to the Allies very early in the war, one of her students angrily responded “But what did the public—not just the people in high places—know? How much of this information reached them? Could my parents, who read the paper every day, have known?”
Lipstadt argued that a great deal of information was available. American reporters who were stationed in Germany until the United States entered the war had reported on the Nazis in detail, including information about Germany’s persecution of the Jews.
The student wasn’t convinced. “No,” he said. “I can’t believe people could have read about all this in their daily papers.”
Beyond Belief began as Lipstadt’s attempt to prove that she was right. Her final conclusion, which she offers to the student in her acknowledgements: “I was right, but so were you.”
The book consists of a detailed look at who reported what and when, what their editors did with it after they reported it,[3] and how readers responded. Some of the most powerful portions of the book, and the ones that I think are most important for us today, discuss what Lipstadt describes as “the barriers to belief.” The most critical of these was a legacy from World War I. Stories of German atrocities were reported in the first World War that later proved to be false. The result was an attitude of what journalist and historian William Shirer called “supercynicism and superskepticism” about reports of atrocities. As a group, Americans said “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” unfortunately, this time the stories were true.
Be warned, Beyond Belief is not an easy read. Lipstadt’s style is clear, but her work is dense with data. Nonetheless, I found it a worthwhile read for reasons well beyond my current research.
[1] Stressed, stretched, and tired perhaps.
[2] I don’t normally discuss purely academic works of history here in the Margins. They have a different purpose and a different audience and occasionally are just plain hard to read.
[3] Important stories often got buried deep in newspapers. Editors (and sometimes reporters) added seeds of doubt to the reported stories. And some papers didn’t run the stories at all.
History on Display: Suffs: The Musical
Earlier this week, a friend and I attended a performance of Suffs, Shaina Taub’s award-winning musical about the women’s suffrage movement, which I’ve wanted to see ever since it opened off-Broadway in 2022.
The short version? Suffs did not disappoint. I laughed. I cried. I cheered. So did everyone else as best I could tell. There was one moment when much of the audience gasped.[1]
Suffs :The Musical begins in 1913,[2] just as radical young suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977)[3] is about to divide the suffrage movement with her demands for more aggressive action, including an unprecedented suffrage march in Washington on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration. Taub follows the movement through the final passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Paul is the central character, set in counterpoint to and often conflict with Carrie Chapman Catts (1859-1947), then 54 years old, successor to Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, and later the founder of the League of Women Voters. The two leaders embody two generations of suffragists with very different styles and strategies.
That description may make Suffs sound a little dull. It is anything but. Taub has built a powerful, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking historical drama about the suffrage movement. Paul and Catts are surrounded by a coterie of brilliantly characterized historical suffragists, including a fiery Ida B Wells, each of whom dominates the stage at least once over the course of the show, bringing to life the divisions within the movement. “Why are you fighting me? I’m not the enemy” is a powerful refrain between different members of the movement that Taub returns to again and again. Woodrow Wilson, who is in fact the enemy they are all fighting is pale and unenergetic, by contrast—clearly a deliberate choice.
Suffs ends with both triumph and the recognition of work left undone: making it a perfect show to attend as part of the Semiquincentennial.[4] Definitely worth seeing if it comes your way.
[1] Nope, not going to tell you. Just because we all know how the story ends doesn’t mean I’m willing to spoil surprises along the way. Which makes writing this harder than it would be if I felt free to share delightful moments.
[2] Sixty-five years after the suffrage movement began at the Seneca Falls convention—a fact that Taub skillfully shares with the audience in the opening moments of the show in the form of a speech by long-time suffragist Carrie Chapman Catts. It’s a critical point: the question of waiting for change and not being willing to wait anymore is a theme that Taub returns to over and over again.
[3] I must admit, I was stunned to learn that Paul lived and worked well into my lifetime. Progress in women’s rights remains relatively new, and fragile.
[4] Can anyone spell that right on the first try?
History on Display: Americans and the Holocaust
On a recent trip home to Springfield, Missouri, I had the chance to visit a traveling exhibition titled Americans and the Holocaust at the local public library. Sponsored by the United States Holocaust Museum and the American Library Association, the exhibition is small but powerful. The exhibit includes some well-done general context about the Nazis’ rise to power and the beginnings of World War II, but that is not its focus. Instead, as its title suggests, Americans and the Holocaust considers difficult questions about what Americans could have known about the Holocaust and when, and about the motives and fears that shaped the United States’ unwillingness to do more to save Jews and others who suffered under the Nazi regime.
I was familiar with much of the material because I have spent the last few years reading, writing, and now talking about the issues the exhibit covers. And yet, some of the details were new to me, and some that I was familiar with hit me hard all over again. Here are some of the things that caught my attention in particular:
• In November, 1938, American newspapers ran front page stories and banner headlines about the violence of what became known as Kristallnacht. In a Gallup public opinion poll conducted several weeks later, ninety-four percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. In that same poll, seventy-one percent did not want the United States to admit more Jewish refugees, a position that was clearly reflected in our immigration policies at the time.
• In late 1943, officials in the Treasury Department learned that the State Department had been blocking reports about the mass murder of Jews.[1] Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau went around the State Department and took the information directly to President Roosevelt in January, 1944. Roosevelt then signed an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving some 200,000 refugees.
• More than half of all Americans heard Edward R. Morrow’s broadcast from the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1945. Before that, reporters had told Americans over and over about the brutality of Nazi oppression, against Jews, communists, political dissenters, and others, but many Americans had found it all too easy to disbelieve. Now that was impossible. As Life magazine summed it up, “Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”
• A story I am very familiar with, but think it is important to emphasize whenever possible: After the liberation of Ohdruf, General Eisenhower visited the camp. The visual evidence and verbal testimony of the brutality of the camps made him ill. But he had no doubt of the importance of his visit. “I made the visit deliberately,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall three days later,” in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”
Not an easy story to read. Too important to dismiss.
The exhibition is nearing the end of its second tour of libraries in smaller cities, but you still have six months to track it down. You can read more about the exhibit and see the tour schedule here.
[1] I have unsubstantiated thoughts about how the demographics of the State Department contributed to this.