Shin-Kickers From History: Gaston Madru Secretly Films Occupied Paris
Today I stumbled across an unexpected story–or at least a part of a story. Talking to a reporter about her experiences as a war correspondent Sigrid Schultz mentioned “our French colleague Gaston Madru who had been killed by German soldiers when they caught him alone in his car near Leipzig on April 19, 1945. Because I am trying to look at events from the perspective of as many foreign and war correspondents as possible, I immediately looked up Madru and discovered that he was a newsreel cameraman. Before the war, he worked as a stringer for MGM’s News of the Day. During the occupation of Paris,from 1942 to 1944, he surreptitiously filmed the city and its Nazi captors. The images he captured were aired on September 18, 1944, after the liberation of Paris, on this newsreel:
It’s worth watching the whole thing: Madru got some amazing footage. {Reminder: If you subscribe to the blog and are reading this in your email, you need to shift over to your browser to see the video. Just double click on the post title.)
Madru’s bravery was not limited to photography, though that could have gotten him killed if he had been discovered. He also was a member of a Resistance “escape line” that helped downed Allied pilots to escape to safety.
After the liberation of Paris, Madru served as a war correspondent, again working for News of the Day. He was one of 314 civilian reporters who received campaign ribbons at the end of the war “for outstanding and conspicuous service with the armed forces under difficult and hazardous combat conditions.” He was one of eight newsmen to receive the award posthumously, along with Ernie Pyle.
From the Archives: Shin Kickers From History: Margaret Chase Smith
My Own True Love recently reminded me about this post, which originally ran in 2018. It seems like a good time to run it again, for reasons that I think need no explanation.
A blog post about Senator Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1995) could easily consist of nothing more than a collection of the trenchant remarks with which she skewered political opponents, reporters, and occasionally herself:
- Speaking against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s scare tactics: “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny–fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”*
- On her presidential campaign in 1964: “When people keep telling you that you can’t do a thing, you kind of like to try it.”
- In a speech on civil rights: “We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.”
- “Strength, the American way, is not manifested by threats of criminal prosecution or police state methods. Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented.”
- “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism, are all too frequently those who…ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism–the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right of independent thought.”
Known as the Quiet Woman from Maine and the “conscience of the Senate,” Smith was the first woman to be elected to both houses of Congress and to be nominated for president on the floor of a national convention. (She was supported by 27 delegates at the Republic National Convention in 1964.) She is best known for being the first Senator to denounce Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting tactics on the Senate floor.
Like many women who entered politics in the twentieth century, she took what political scientists have described as the “widow’s walk to power,” in which a woman steps into a position of political power after her husband’s death. The presumption is that such women will carry on their husband’s policies. Her husband was elected as the representative to the House from Maine’s Second Congressional District in 1937. When he suffered a serious heart attack several years later, he asked the voters to continue to his policies by electing Smith to replace him–a classic example of the “widow’s walk to power.” She was elected to fill the unexpired term in a special election. Thereafter she was elected in her own right. She served four terms in the House of Representatives, from 1941 to 1949, and then four terms in the Senate, through 1975. She was a staunch Republican, who voted her conscious rather than the party line and made enemies from both ends of the political spectrum.
It takes a special politician to piss off both the Communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy and Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev. We need more like you Maggie.
*Part of a speech known as the “Declaration of Conscience.” McCarthy responded by calling Smith and the six Republican Senators who joined her in speaking out against his tactics “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.”
1620: A Year In Review
Months and months ago I put a place holder in my blog editorial calendar* to write a “year in review” post for 1620, but I didn’t make any notes telling myself why 1620 mattered. That was probably because I assumed I would remember. Which I didn’t, because I tend to think about events in terms of their context rather than pegging them to an exact date. It’s not that I don’t have dates in my head, it’s just that 1620 wasn’t one of them. (I hear my friends who specialize in American history laughing in the distance.)
In fact, a pretty well-known event occurred in 1620: a group of straight-laced and opinionated English dissenters left the Netherlands, where they had taken shelter, set sail for the New World on a ship called the Mayflower, and landed at a place they named Plymouth Rock. Their story has taken a disproportionately large and highly mythologized role in the shorthand version of American history. Working backwards from 1620: The first English settlers arrived in Jamestown in 1607. The French founded Port-Royal in 1604, and began the fur trade in the 1530s. The Spanish established settlements in Latin America as early as 1508, and founded their first North American settlement, St. Augustin in 1565. **
It turns out that the desire for religious freedoms, or at least religious dissent in the technical sense, was a recurring theme in 1620.
The Battle of White Mountain
- One event that I suspect is not on most Americans’ historical radar*** popped up over and over on my historical timeline sources. On November 8, the Catholic League under Johann Graf von Tilly defeated the Palatinate-Bohemian army of the Protestant Union at White Mountain near Prague. I must admit, my first thought was to ignore it, because I generally don’t include individual battles in these posts. (A tinge of historical parochialism on my part may have contributed as well.) On closer inspection, the battle turned out to be a key event in the 30 Years’ War,**** which was certainly did not get a lot of print inches in the world history textbooks of my youth but was not a small event. (Roughly twenty percent of the population of the German states were killed over the course of the war.) The Catholic victory at the Battle of White Mountain allowed the Hapsburg dynasty to claim the crown of Bohemia, which had previously been bestowed on a ruler elected by his fellow princes of Bohemia. The Palatine-Bohemian phase of the Thirty-Years’ War would continue through 1623, but the Battle of White Mountain effectively ended constitutional rule in Bohemia, such as it was, and established an authoritarian government in its place that would last until the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismembered at the end of World War I.
- A series of rebellions against royal authority by the French Calvinist Protestants known as Huguenots began late in 1620. As is often the case, the rebellion was rooted in the loss of previously enjoyed rights. King Henri IV (1553 -1610) had issued the Edict of Nantes in 1589, giving French Protestants civil rights that had previously been denied them, including the freedom to worship in their own way.***** His successor, Louis XIII, and more importantly Louis’s mother, Marie d’Medici, were less tolerant of Protestantism and began unraveling those protections. In December 1620, the Huguenots gathered in La Rochelle and decided to form an independent state within a state, modeled on the Dutch Republic’s successful resistance against Spanish rule. The rebellion did not end well. Neither did the two that followed. The Huguenots were actively persecuted under the rule of Louis XIV and the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685. As a result, thousands of Huguenots workers fled France and established themselves in Protestant cities across Europe that were happy to welcome literate, highly skilled workers.
In short, religious intolerance benefits no one.
*A rather grandiose name for a Scrivener file with a lot of separate documents in which I capture ideas that may or may not become blog posts. Sometimes all I have is a subject, not a story. And as any freelance writer will tell you, that’s a hard sell. Even when the editor you’re pitching is you.
**If you’re interested in looking at the Pilgrims’ story from the perspective of the people who were already living in what is now Massachusetts when they arrived, I recommend this article: https://time.com/5911943/thanksgiving-wampanoag/
***Including mine.
**** Here’s the short version: Reformation vs Counter-Reformation. Here’s a slightly longer version: The Third Year’s War was actually a series of wars, in which Protestant and Catholic princes battled for control of the Holy Roman Empire. The conflict began when the Protestants of Bohemia rebelled against Emperor Ferdinand II, but soon spread throughout the empire and included most of the European powers at one point or another.
*****Henri had himself been a Huguenot prior to converting to Catholicism in order to secure his hold on the crown. He is reported to have justified this by saying “Paris is well worth a mass.” Like Marie Antoinette’s supposed statement “Let them eat cake,” there is little reason to believe he said it/