by Edward Champion

Simon Winchester (The Bat Segundo Show #527)

In 2007, we aired an infamous program with Simon Winchester, in which he argued with us over the finer points of local history. His new book, The Men Who United the States, shifts the action to a bigger stage, taking on the entire United States. With greater historical stakes, the affable Englishman returns for a conversational rematch six years later. This program features an affably argumentative and cheerfully divergent chat between two wildly energized men united by the common belief that history is always worth returning to.
[MP3, 51 minutes]

[Notes and partial transcript]

Simon Winchester is most recently the author of The Men Who United the States. He previously appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #87.

Author: Simon Winchester

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Subjects Discussed: Becoming an American citizen, the diamond hoax of 1872, revisiting historical locations in contemporary times, driving over Donner Pass during a relentless blizzard, Clarence King, buying a tract of land in Montana, having Huey Lewis as a neighbor, attempts to buy chains from mysterious opportunists, avoiding the term “flyover states,” American Heartbeat, William Gilpin’s claim that the Western Territory of the United States could accommodate two billion people, New Harmony, David Dale Owen, Robert Owen, belief scams, the Hudson-Mohawk Gap, the construction of the Erie Canal, geopolitics, efforts to get at the truth about the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, 99% Invisible, standing up for the forgotten Ellis Chesbrough, The Jungle, leaving out historical figures, surveying and mapping the territory as essential elements of mapping the states, the Warren Map of 1858 as the definitive map of the United States, Roosevelt slicing a map of the States with a crayon to project his image of the U.S. interstate highway system, how American policy makers wavered from the norm, the “Yellow Book” basis for the interstate system, the military connections within the origins of America’s roads, Eisenhower as geographical observer, the UK Ordnance Survey vs. the U.S. Geographical Survey maps, rural electrification, Robert Caro’s LBJ volumes, “the pitiless arithmetic of capitalism” and its influence on areas of the States that didn’t get electricity, Samuel Insull, the real model for Citizen Kane, Roosevelt’s New Deal policies for the farmers, Western Ohio political ironies, Sacagawea, challenging Winchester on the lack of women in >The Men Who United the States, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the slavery debate, Ameila Earhart, risky book titles in an age of Jezebel, men and big ideas, Winchester’s crush on Donna Reed, ideas vs. physical links uniting the States, gender equality, John Wesley Powell’s extraordinary climbing claims, arguing over the legacy of Theodore Dehone Judah, the N Judah line and the 38 Geary, Ted Judah vs. The Big Four, Winchester’s six page love letter to NPR, NPR’s transphobia over Chelsea Manning, NPR on Iran, misreporting Gabrielle Giffords’s death, Democracy Now, This American Life, NPR vs. BBC and CBC, >Winchester’s 1981 thoughts on public radio, Bill Siemering and the origins of “All Things Considered,” the dormant exploratory impulse vs. guys who look at computers, metaphorical nation states, Winchester founding a newspaper, innovation vs. repeating the last two centuries of history. and Winchester’s forthcoming book on the Pacific Ocean.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Winchester: It’s lovely to see you again.

Correspondent: I was saying before. Last time we talked, you weren’t an American citizen.

Winchester: I wasn’t. It was in San Francisco.

Correspondent: Yes, it was.

Winchester: As I recall, I was enormously hungry and a little bit bad tempered.

Correspondent: Oh yeah.

Winchester: But this morning I’m very good.

Correspondent: No, no. You’ve been extraordinarily charming. Anyway, one of your strategies for this book involved revisiting many of the locations and taking in the sights as they are today. You encounter military installations on the Lewis and Clark route. When you visited Diamond Peak in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, the site of the Philip Arnold/John Slack diamond hoax of 1872, you express a certain kind of romantic disappointment that there isn’t a diamond for you to pick up and pluck.

Winchester: (laughs)

Correspondent: And there’s also, of course, your journey by car over Donner Pass, kind of getting a sense of what it was — because you were traveling through a blizzard. So my question first and foremost is: What advantages are there in visiting a place today when there is often no trace whatsoever of the original geography? Was this a peculiar criteria that you applied in selecting the locations you decided to write about for this book? What happened here?

Winchester: I don’t think they were criteria. Let’s go through them one by one. I was following the Lewis and Clark trail and they started, as you probably remember, in St. Charles, just north of St. Louis. And you turn left. You turn westwards and go up to the Missouri. And there isn’t a lot that’s very interesting until you come to this funny place called Knob Noster, which has to be one of the more peculiar town names in America. And I remembered when I got there and read Lewis’s account of being there and finding some sort of snake that gobbles like a turkey or a turkey that make noise.

Correspondent: Gobbles knobs.

Winchester: Yes.

Correspondent: We’re getting naughty very quickly. (laughs)

Winchester: Stop this. And I remembered that years before when I wrote an extremely unsuccessful book about the Midwest that I had been to Knob Noster because it’s the size of this enormous Air Force base. So I wanted to go and see how the Air Force base had changed in the thirty, forty years since I’d last been there. And of course, it has changed in a very important and significant way. The diamond field in Wyoming? Well, this all relates to the career of an extraordinary geologist called Clarence King, who happens to be a great hero of mine. The first ever director of the United States Geological Survey. He made his name by uncovering a fraud, the people you mentioned, which cheated a lot of wealthy San Franciscans — a great proportion of their fortune — by claiming to have found a field full of diamonds. They, of course, salted the diamond. They bought them cheaply in London and then put them in anthills. And so I went down to Diamond Peak, which is an extremely lonely place. And I’m walking along and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just uncover a diamond or an emerald or a sapphire?” But, no, there’s nothing left.

Correspondent: Were there any anthills at all?

Winchester: There were lots of anthills. Oh yes.

Correspondent: Because you didn’t mention that in the book.

Winchester: Well, there were.

Correspondent: I mean, come on. You’ve got to be grateful for second place, right?

Winchester: (laughs) Indeed. Quite. But Diamond Peak was there, just as described. But it started to snow. It started to get very cold and very windy and we were a long way from anywhere and it was starting to get dark. So we thought, “Well, there are no diamonds.” So screw it. I’m going home.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Winchester: Sorry if I didn’t mention the anthills.

Correspondent: I was in suspense.

Winchester: I’m sure you were.

Correspondent: You disappointed me on that point.

Winchester: I’m so sorry. I beg your pardon. And then Donner Pass, well, that was some while ago — not on doing specific research for this book. But I bought a tract of land, which I’ve since sold.

Correspondent: Montana.

Winchester: So foolishly. Yes. On Route 93 in Western Montana. And I was hightailing it back to San Francisco because I had to catch a plane back to Hong Kong, where I was living at the time. And so I was going fast on Route 80. West. And all the radio stations were saying that the Donner Pass is dry and clear, to use the expression. But it clearly wasn’t. Because since I started leaving from Reno and going up the hills, it started to rain. There were flashing lights on the side of the road, saying DONNER PASS CHAINS REQUIRED. And then I got up to where the rain turned to sleet, then to snow, then to driving snow. And then there was a Highway Patrol barrier saying ONLY CHAINS REQUIRED. And, of course, inevitably, this being America, there were a couple of entrepreneurial chaps by the side of the road, saying, “Oh! You want chains? We’ll give you chains. We’ll sell you chains.”

Correspondent: No doubt you were Huey Lewis’s mark.

Winchester: Huey Lewis was next in the piece of land in Montana. He was my next door neighbor.

Correspondent: Yeah. I was stunned.

Winchester: Huey Lewis and the News.

Correspondent: I was wondering if he led you astray. Now I have the timeline absolute here.

Winchester: (laughs) No. But what did happen, which I didn’t put in the book, was that I paid my $75. I had the chains put on. I crossed the Donner Pass. It’s fairly dramatic during a horrible snowstorm. But the point of my telling the story is that the Union Pacific trains were roaring through it at the same time with no problem caused by the snow, illustrating that that was indeed the logical place for the Union Pacific route to go. But then I got over the summit finally. About two in the morning. Started going down the other side towards Sacramento. The snow turned to sleet. Turned to rain. I unbolted my chains, put them in the trunk of the car. Note I say “trunk” now, not “boot.” Because I am an American.

Correspondent: Good on you.

Winchester: Thank you. Drove over the Bay Bridge ultimately to the hotel I stay in, which is a very nice hotel. I’ve always stayed because I’m from Hong Kong. The Mandarin Oriental. San Francisco, California. And the chap at the door says, “Oh, hello. Good morning, Mr. Winchester.” He’s been there for so long. “Do you want these chains?” And I said, “No no no. Just put them aside.” So he took the chains out and labeled them. Every time that I have stayed in the Mandarin, in the twenty years or fifteen years since that moment, always on my bed are Mr. Winchester’s chains.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Winchester: As if I get up to something really unspeakable in my room involving chains.

Correspondent: Wow.

Winchester: Indeed.

Correspondent: This has all sorts of implications.

Winchester: (laughs)

Correspondent: This kind of strays from my original question about using the actual physical presence of Simon Winchester at these locations as a way of writing about them. But it seems to me that you are almost atoning for past peregrination mistakes in previous books. Is that safe to say?

Winchester: Well, one particular book.

Correspondent: Okay. Alright.

Winchester: So nice of you to mention it. Yes, thank you.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Winchester: I am perfectly happy to admit it. This book, The Men Who United the States, is my second attempt to write about the United States in book form. The first was in 1976 when I was based in America, in Washington, for The Guardian, and had this, what I now realize to have been, somewhat naive belief that the essence of America, the quiddity if you like of the country, could be found not in the effete East or the decadent West, but in the imperturbable, solid, rock-ribbed heart of the country. The Midwest. So I took six months’s leave.

Correspondent: Thank you for not using the term “flyover states.”

Winchester: I certainly would never dream. I did once actually. So I’ve got to confess that in case.

Correspondent: Okay. Well, you’ve really become a great American.

Winchester: Well…

Correspondent: A very, very noble one. (laughs)

Winchester: And also I happen to like the Midwest. So I didn’t rent a car. I drove my Volvo, I remember, and spent six months driving on I-35, which goes from International Falls, Minnesota, through Minnesota, Iowa, a bit of Missouri, where the Air Force base was, Kansas, Oklahoma, down through Texas, and finally ends in Laredo, up and down and up and down and wrote this book. The timing was for it to come out during the bicentennial year. 1976. And to be fair to the book, which was called American Heartbeat, it was credibly reviewed. I mean, people were very generous. But not the people who buy books. They were not generous at all and when the royalty statement came in ’77, or at least I couldn’t dignify it with the term “royalty,” it showed that it had sold twelve copies. So it was not a success.

Correspondent: Really?

Winchester: It was a dismal, dismal commercial failure.

Correspondent: Wow.

Winchester: So in a way you’re right to use the word “atonement.” This new book is, let us say, learning from the lessons of that failure. The one thing I was determined to do was to write a book that was in no way similar to the book that I’d written in ’76.

Correspondent: Wow. That’s incredible. Well, I mentioned the Diamond Hoax of 1872. But this is by no means the only fraud that you dig up in this book. There’s Samuel Adams — no relation to the beer, no relation to John Adams’s second cousin — he came close to milking $20,000 from Congress for an expedition he claimed he made in Colorado. William Gilpin claimed that two billion people could easily be accommodated in the Western Territory.

Winchester: Two billion. Please note that.

Correspondent: Yes. Two billion.

Winchester: Not million, but billion!

Correspondent: Yes. Exactly. The folly of New Harmony, with David Dale Owen. Is it safe to say that many of these efforts to unite America required a crazed belief culture or possibly a set of existential blinders with which to achieve ambition?

Winchester: Well, I have to hold you there. Your reference to David Dale Owen and to New Harmony. I actually think New Harmony was a story very creditable in American history. Just very briefly, this is a little town at the confluence of the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers. Initially, it was a utopian settlement built by a group of Suebians, Germans who were being persecuted back home. Very similar to the Pilgrim fathers and all that. They prospered. They sold this little community to the next utopian who came along the line, who was a man called Robert Owen. And he intended to build a community of fiercely intelligent intellectuals who would use it as a base for proselytizing intelligence for teaching. And he lured a number of Philadelphia intellectuals — most notably, a man called William Maclure, who drew the first ever geological map of this country in 1809, I think it was. And they all came down from Philadelphia by way of Pittsburgh on a boat, which was called the Boat Load of Knowledge and joined Robert Owen and set up this little settlement. Now it is true to say that the settlement, like so many utopian settlements, floundered because of schismatic arguments. I think there were ten subcults within about a year.

Correspondent: What amazes me was that one could get on the Boat Load of Knowledge. I mean, that name should have been the big tip off.

Winchester: You would have thought so. The Boat Load of Extreme Pretension.

Correspondent: (laughs)

Winchester: But nonetheless David Dale Owen, who was the son of Robert Owen and who was taught geology by this man Maclure, went on to become a real evangelist for early geology. And I know that geology in this country is ill-regarded. I try and do my best to get people to say that it was a great deal more than Rocks for Jocks. It quite literally underlies everything we can see in this room today. The metal for your tape recorder, the television, the paper, the paint, the wood. Everything comes from the earth as a result of geology. He, David Dale Owen, essentially started the Geological Surveys or triggered them in some way in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota. So the mapping and the discovering of the mineral wealth of these states could all be put down to the efforts of New Harmony. So I would completely repudiate your idea that in any way that that’s a scam. It failed.

Correspondent: A belief scam, I thought.

Winchester: Yes. A belief scam. I couldn’t agree with you more. But in terms of its legacy, it’s a very important place. And it is a shame — and I’m going to sound rather sort of not belligerent here, but I just think that it is a shame that more people don’t know of New Harmony. And it should be a shrine to the early phenomenon of learning in this country. It’s a very important place.

Correspondent: It’s interesting that you’re more pro-New Harmony and not so much Paradise in this book. That’s interesting. Since you had mentioned geology — and as an American, well as a fellow American, geology is not exactly one of my best spots. But I do want to discuss the Eastern American Fall Line and the Hudson-Mohawk Gap. Much of American settlement owes its existence to these two geographical realities. Explorers fell into this natural expansionist rhythm when pushing against this. But I’m wondering to what degree were the explorers aware that they were kind of fulfilling almost a geopolitical destiny here.

Winchester: I can safely say that none of them imagined. It is conceivable that in the construction of the Erie Canal there was a thought given to the geopolitical consequences. But let me just explain. All the people who you’ve talked about or alluded to journeyed into the interior of America from the Eastern settlements by river. And as you sailed and counted after fifty, sixty, ninety miles of paddling, suddenly the waters got rougher. There were waterfalls. There were rapids. Their progress was blocked. So they had to stay there and have a settlement from which they would portage. And those settlements eventually became cities. Richmond, Fredericksburg, Washington D.C., Albany. Then to circumvent those rapids, and to allow those communities to trade with the interior beyond the Appalachians, the settlers had to build primitive canals. So they learned how to build canals. They then, once they realized the economic importance of canals, once they had learned the technology of constructing them, then they started this mania of building them all over the country to connect places where there were minerals or work or whatever with the nearest ports. So that the Middlesex Canal in Southern New Hampshire led to the creation of the expansion of Boston. The important one — and this is where your geopolitical question, I think, comes to the fore — was the one that linked Buffalo to Albany through the Hudson-Mohawk Gap, which all of us at school in England when we were eleven years old had to know the significance of the Hudson-Mohawk Gap in world history. Because once that gap was filled with the canal and once trade could be brought theoretically from Lake Superior, Hudson, Lake Huron, Michigan, to the port Buffalo, taken down the Erie Canal, turn right and go down to New York City, then this allowed New York to prosper in a way that no other American city did at the time and to become a world port. The man who had the idea for the Erie Canal, which is the name of the canal between Buffalo and Albany, was a man called Jesse Hawley. And Jesse Hawley was a highly intelligent farmer in Canindaigua, New York who could not get his wheat down to the bakers in New York because the little canal that existed in the Mohawk Gap charged such extortionate rates that it actually drove him bankrupt. Drove him to debtors’ prison. He sat in a debtors’ prison for many months and, while there, studied European canals. Because he said, “What we really need is something that isn’t extortionately run which is a canal between Buffalo and Albany.” So he wrote the local newspaper called The Genesee Messenger from his cell in the debtors’ prison under the pseudonym “Hercules.” Fourteen extremely well-argued essays saying that if you, the State of New York, build this mighty canal, not only will you give New York City prosperity, but you will change America’s standing in the world. These essays were read by the then Governor of New York State, Governor Clinton, and he said, “This man Hercules, whoever he is,” — he had no idea he was in a debtors’ prison — “is right.” And he got the money through the Legislature. And the Erie Canal was built. And the first person to attend the ceremony of the wedding of the waters, where the Great Lake’s water was dipped into the Atlantic Ocean at the Verrazano Narrows, where the bridge is there — the first person to pour the first water was Jesse Hawley, now free from the debtors’ prison, who had this brilliant idea. So I’m certain that he, and probably he alone, had an idea of the geopolitical importance of the canal.

Correspondent: Got it. Well, while we’re on the subject of canals, I have to bring up the Chicago Sanitary Canal. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to be quite precise. This was an engineering effort in the late 19th century to quite frankly rid the rapidly growing Second City of its escalating shit. Now 99% Invisible, this wonderful radio program, happened to actually do this wonderful show on the canal back in August, and host Roman Mars pointed out how Ellis Chesbrough — this Boston engineer now forgotten to history — was responsible for this canal and he had the audacity to jack up the street level in Chicago up ten feet. It took twenty years. It was amazing. But you didn’t mention Chesbrough at all. And I’m wondering about this. You claim that this guy Isham Randolph was the guy who came up with the Chicago Sanitary Canal. So why didn’t you include Chesbrough? And I’m wondering what research you relied on for the Chicago Sanitary Canal?

Winchester: Well, that is a good question. Principally, the editing process of this book — and I’m not blaming anything on the editor at all. When I turned in the manuscript, which was for 150,000 words — that was the contract — it was 195,000. Because I had found so many ancillary personnel, of whom Chesbrough was clearly one. He didn’t have the idea for the Canal. Isham Randolph was the central figure in the building of this canal. Chesbrough did, yes, that’s why when you go down Wacker Drive, all the underneath, that’s all part of Chesbrough’s achievements, which are laudable, but quite reasonably, I think, we had to strip down — and I remember I was in Bangkok in Thailand — and my editor said, “Look, Simon, this is wonderful. It’s full of wonderful stuff. But we’ve got to eliminate some people. Some ideas.”

Correspondent: (laughs) We’ve got to assassinate a few of them.

Winchester: We do. And I make no apologies for it. The book has got to be a manageable length. And you, I dare say, will come up with other people who you can say in an accusatory way, “Why did you leave him out?” Well, I’ll say, “I’m sorry. Life needs to be edited.” And so Isham Randolph to me is the important character. The other one, not so.

Correspondent: Well, what 99% Invisible pointed out was that Chesbrough didn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.

Winchester: (laughs)

Correspondent: And how he was just completely cut out from the great story of the Chicago Sanitary Canal! And I’m wondering. The sense I got, at least from that segment and from a few other things I read, was that actually Chesbrough was the real deal. And you say he’s not. And I’m wondering what books and what scholarship say that Randolph is the guy rather than Chesbrough.

Winchester: Well, the history of the Chicago Canal by a lady who, I think, her last name is Kelly. I don’t have the bibliography in front of me at the moment. [NOTE: Winchester’s bibliography lists Libby Hill’s The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History. This is likely the book he consulted.] And my friend, and the husband of my agent, who has written a book called The Third Coast about the development of modern Chicago. The history of the Armour Meat Company. Upton Sinclair’s book on Chicago, which I’m sure you’ll remember the title.

Correspondent: Yeah. The Jungle.

Winchester: The Jungle. All of these taken together helped me in this late 19th century, early 20th century construction of Chicago. And if they don’t mention Chesbrough, then I don’t mention Chesbrough.

Correspondent: Even though the newspapers of the time mention Chesbrough.

Winchester: I am not going to sit here and justify every omission in this book.

Correspondent: Alright.

Winchester: There are bound to be some people who are going to fall by the wayside. It’s like being cut and ending up on the cutting room floor. I’m in no way defensive about it. I’m simply saying that, in my view, Isham Randolph was the more important figure.

Correspondent: Okay. Well, I was curious how you came to that view.

(Loops for this program provided by sintheeticrecords, proecliptix, leoSMG, boogieman0307, and progressbeats5.)

The Bat Segundo Show #527: Simon Winchester (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

The 2013 National Book Awards: Needs More Wit and Suspense, Enough with the Old Coots

This year’s National Book Awards has added suspense and has shown the way ahead with its winners, but it needs more wit. And it needs to hand out lifetime achievement awards to legends who sing on stage rather than old coots railing against the Internet.

If Wednesday night represented an elegant soothsaying session determining where American literature is heading, then white men who cannot embrace the tenor of our time are being shown the door. I contend that this is a good thing. Dr. Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison radiated such pure joy and effusive class on the dais, with Morrison defiantly refusing her wheelchair and Angelou belting out an inspirational tune, that the hoary and vastly overrated writer E.L. Doctorow easily made the case for his own obsolescence with an indulgent anti-Internet screed that felt like the late Andy Rooney rambling without editorial consultation. “A search engine is not an engine,” said Doctorow. “A bookmark is not a bookmark because an e-book is not a book.” Well, a writer is not a speaker, especially when he cannot hear the hollow rattle in his burned out subwoofer.

Behatted author James McBride beat out Thomas Pynchon and George Saunders to win the Fiction award for The Good Lord Bird, observing how the novel had kept him company as his marriage was dissolving. Of the distinguished competition, McBride said, “They are fine writers. But it sure is nice to be here.”

Cynthia Kadohata claimed the Young People’s Literature award for The Thing About Luck, noting, “I didn’t write a speech because I thought it would be bad luck. I guess it worked out.”

Mary Szybist won the Poetry award for her collection Incarnadine. “Poetry is the place where speaking differently is the most prevalent,” she said just before softly tearing up on stage. She thanked “the mother who made me,” and accepted her award with great grace.

George Packer took the Nonfiction award for The Unwinding, a blistering depiction of the ongoing war against the American middle class. He proved the Flaubert maxim by accepting his laurels with the ease of a relaxed and dedicated man valuing calm before work. He thanked his kids. He thanked his wife for “sharing my life and my work.”

The awards ceremony was not helped by host Mika Brzezinski. Despite her past valiant efforts to destroy Morning Joe scripts containing trivial news, Brzezinski was the height of superfluousness on Wednesday night. She offered tired and groan-inducing gags about the Random House/Penguin merger and was so hopelessly amateurish that she set up the Fiction category before Nonfiction, only to backpedal as the giant screens at Cipriani flashed to an awkward title card.

The newly introduced longlist of ten titles per category, revealed just before the finalists, has added a juddering layer of suspense for book geeks. The National Book Foundation is also to be lauded for working hard in recent years to get the awards televised and live streamed. But something has gone terribly amiss in the host selection department. If the National Book Awards is to reach the American public, we need real wit written by professional comedy writers. We need hosts who will seamlessly run a show. We need people who read.

We also need to hand out lifetime awards to writers who represent a truer link between the past and the future. Maya Angelou was that person. E.L. Doctorow was not.

by Edward Champion

George Saunders (2013 National Book Awards Audio Interview)

George Saunders is nominated for the Fiction Award for Tenth of December. Saunders told me he had never attended the ceremony before and that he has a 17% chance of winning. Since he is a very optimistic guy, I asked him about the future of books. I also presented Saunders with this inquiry: Given how Joyce could construct Dublin from the bricks set down in Ulysses, what city could be constructed from the works of George Saunders?

by Edward Champion

Gene Luen Yang (2013 National Book Awards Audio Interview)

Gene Luen Yang is nominated for the Young People’s Literature Award in this year’s National Book Awards. I ran into Yang on the floor before the National Book Awards and chatted with him for about three minutes about the intersection between comics and literary work.

by Edward Champion

Wendy Lower (The Bat Segundo Show #526)

More than seven decades after World War II, we’re still deeply uncomfortable about the idea that women under the Nazi regime committed barbaric acts. We talk with Holocaust scholar (and National Book Award finalist) Wendy Lower about the realities she confronts in her new book, Hitler’s Furies. How much are the women who were socialized under Nazi policies to blame? Why did the postwar courts allow these women, some of whom massacred children, to return to society without consequence?
[MP3, 58 minutes]

[Notes and partial transcript]

Wendy Lower is most recently the author of Hitler’s Furies, a nonfiction finalist for this year’s National Book Awards, which will be awarded on Wednesday night.

Author: Wendy Lower

Listen: Play in new window | Download

Subjects Discussed: Marriage and genocide, the hausfrau who shot at Jews from the balcony, Liesel Willhaus, Hitler’s “baby machine” speech in 1934, Nazi ideology and gender roles, Volksgemeinschaft, Erna Petri, societal cues and massacring children, the fluidity of women’s personality in 1930s Germany, women in higher education restricted from participation, women who advanced up the social ladder, the League of German Girls, upward mobility among German women existing before the Nazi regime, Michael Wildt, looking at history through mundane everyday activities, Leni Riefenstahl’s rally footage, organized marches as rituals, looking at the motives for people who participated in these marches, concentrating on the half million women in the Eastern territories where communities of violence flourished, the Red Swastika Sisters, women serving as nurses, Annette Schücking, women listening to men boasting of massacres and being forced to comfort them, Nazis socializing by looking down at the inferior to affirm their superiority, Claudia Koonz’s Mothers in the Fatherland, women’s complicity in Nazi crimes, secretaries and bosses organizing massacres together, complicity in the workplace, shooting people from balconies, differing ideas about Vera Wohlauf, Christopher Browning’s claim of men feeling uncomfortable by Wohlauf’s presence because it made them feel shameful, Goldhagen’s ideas of men proud of their acts, genocide as men’s work, Browning’s Ordinary Men, German women using their pregnant condition to reduce their perceived culpability, the question of whether being close to the Miedzyrzec Aktion makes you an accomplice to atrocities, terrorizing by attendance, defining women’s culpability in relation to men, Gertrude Segel and Felix Landau, why it’s taken so long to consider women as part of the Nazi regime, how focusing on killing centers shifts the dialogue away from exploring violence within the general population during the Holocaust, how the German and Austrian courts excluded witness testimony after the war, how many women committing atrocities were allowed to return to regular life, cruelty focused on eroticized forms by the courts, the 500 women vs. the 20,00 men who stood trial after the war, low conviction rates, the Lemberg Trial, appearance stereotypes, the curious case of Johanna Altvater Zelle (aka Fräulein Hanna), how masculine appearances of women “explained” barbaric behavior, the natural Germanic ideal and its role in Nazi crimes (and subsequent exoneration), Nazi cowgirl types, Karl May, Nazi ideas of the wild west, German women telling journalists, scholars, and historians exactly what they wanted to hear (and how scholars have sorted out the truth from the hyperbole), the choices that women had under the Nazi regime, euthanasia programs, duty prevailing over morality, executed women, Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine, resistance figure Maria Kondratenko, women who took advantage of the Nazi idea that women were intellectually inferior, why gender matters in looking at the Holocaust, the Black Misha, how secretaries were responsible for the administrative part of the Holocaust, workplace relationships and Nazi socialization, Nazi consumer culture, German women who were raped, and questioning the narrative of innocence.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

Correspondent: Let’s discuss the idea of genocide as men’s work under the Nazi regime. There was this duty to serve the Reich and anyone who was considered work-shy was sent to a concentration camp, of course, to be reeducated. Men were expected to go out and perform an Aktion, which meant of course massacring Jews. You have this idea of marriage, where a woman had to be fulfilled with domestic work while she was simultaneously subordinate to her husband. But then you have people like Liesel Willhaus. She would often shoot at Jewish slaves working on her villa from her second story balcony for the sport of it. So I’m wondering. To what degree were figures like Willhaus responding to Nazi societal cues and to what degree were they reacting to these gender roles that were associated with work?

Lower: You know, in a speech that Hitler gave in 1934 at one of the rallies, he was very explicit. He said that women are supposed to serve their Reich to propagate the race. As baby machines, as it were. He didn’t use that term. But that’s kind of how we’ve come to understand it. But he also mentioned using the term “fellow combatants,” which I refer to in my book. And I do that deliberately to show that there were two strands of thinking in Nazi ideology vis-à–vis women and gender roles. One was obviously predominantly racial: the drive to expand the German race. But that drive to expand the German race was about survival. And survival was about militarized operations and it was expansion of the living space and building of the empire. So you have women in the role of the expansion of the German population to fulfill these megalomaniac global ambitions of Hitler’s and also serving as fellow combatants. There you see this paradox, where you see the kind of femininity of the hausfrau, of the mother, of the wife. But they also are mobilized in these campaigns. And the uniform culture, for instance, that is very a clear theme in my book, when these young women like Liesel Willhaus aspire to seek careers through the party and better themselves. They’re swept up in this fervor when they’re mobilized to go to the Eastern territories. She was sent to the Ukraine in this case. So there’s social mobility that is possible in the Volksgemeinschaft. But it has both this traditional feminine role as well as this very militaristic revolutionary experiment.

Correspondent: I guess what I’m trying to unravel here — I mean, I looked also to Erna Petri. She comes to the East in June 1942, observing her husband Horst beating and sexually assaulting servants shortly after arriving in Thuringia. By the summer of 1943, she’s already not only an accomplished hausfrau hostess, but she invites six starving Jewish children in and she shoots them in the back of the head. She had heard other Nazis saying that this was the best way to dispose of them. And the thing that fascinates me, and I’m hoping to hear you unravel, is how this kind of societal cue of “This is the best way to shoot a child” — how is that tied into what it was to be a hausfrau hostess or be this woman who, as you put it earlier, Hitler called a baby machine?

Lower: Yeah. The Nazi experiment tested all kinds of boundaries of matrimony, femininity, child rearing. These are all coming out, I think, in these individual cases that I delve into in a way, in which I’m putting faces on this lost generation of women and straightening out these different examples of those who went east. And you’ve focused on the worst cases. And the killer Erna Petri is probably the most extreme case in the book that really is the most shocking. But we see even in her case that she starts out as an ordinary farmgirl, a farmer’s daughter from a town near Erfurt, near Weimar, and attaches herself to a rising star in the SS movement, is then sent east with him to one of these plantations. And they’re kind of lording over this estate. So they have a lot of unsupervised power over the laborers on the estate. And you mentioned Jewish boys who fled the boxcar that was headed to Sobibor in ’43. And she slipped in and out of multiple roles at any given moment. She was both self-aware of being part of this revolution and wanting to assert herself, to prove herself. But then she had been socialized in traditional ways of how one should behave as a hausfrau, as a mother. And these are coming together. There’s a perversion that takes place here of these gender roles that are instrumentalized in the genocide. So you have a lot of tension in this history between racial ideals, gendered stereotypes, and this extreme violence that comes together. In the Eastern territories in particular.

Correspondent: But would you say that a particular gender role encouraged, “Hey, since this is the best way to dispose of a Jewish child, I will quite naturally fall into this because of the state.” I’ll later get into the fascinating postwar trials, in which a lot of these women got away. But I am curious, first and foremost, how many of these roles amalgamated into something where — is it even possible to unravel? It is even possible to isolate what could cause someone in one year to go to this state of being a hausfrau hostess who thinks nothing of shooting a child in the back of the head?

Lower: I think that these transformations were not — it’s a very fluid situation. They’re kind of moving back and forth. And this is after some intense socialization in the ’30s. So Erna Petri is born in 1920. In the 1920s, she was very young. But this was kind of the heyday of the explosion of women’s activity in politics. They gained the vote. So you have the politicization of women. And then boom. She’s coming of age in the ’30s in that kind of atmosphere. But it’s being shaped by this genocidal Nazi regime, which is highly ideological. And she said even in her testimony that the indoctrination of the ’30s was her motive, that she had been taught to hate Jews. And so she’s learning things along the way as well. And there’s a lot of leeway. There’s a lot of room for maneuvering too that we see in her behavior and many women like her, which was exciting for them and empowering. They were acting out. They didn’t assume that this regime was going to come to a screeching halt and be defeated. They just saw career tracks opening up. Bright futures in front of them. And especially someone like Petri and some of the wives of these SS men. They had entered into this new nobility under Himmler. And that was another level of being part of a community. And their actions, of course, because of the emphasis on this racial community. Volksgemeinschaft is a German term. People’s community. One could act out individually, but also understand one’s actions within this society. So later on for instance, not to jump too far ahead, someone like Erna Petri and many male perpetrators who find in their testimony these kinds of defense rationales in the courtroom, I don’t know how deep they went in terms of their own psychology, in which they literally state, “I feel myself.” They use the reflexive case in German. “I don’t feel myself to be guilty.” They don’t appreciate the individual responsibility and culpability because of the pervasiveness of this social experiment, being part of a national revolution and how unity and duty were so heavily stressed more than, say, morality.

Correspondent: Hitler, as you say — this whole “baby machine.” I want to go with this further. Basically, he said that a mother of multiple children was more beneficial to the Nazi regime than a woman lawyer. There were quotas in place preventing women from obtaining these degrees in higher education and political office. You point to upward mobility in this book as one of the big reasons why these women left villages and they saw jobs. Vera Wohlauf, she advanced up the social ladder through this office encounter and by marrying this wealthy merchant. So you didn’t have a lot of choices. But there were ways around this. How much of these ambitions emerged from, say, the League of German Girls, which was the girl answer to the Hitler Youth, and how did disregarding and humiliating Jews in the pre-Kristallnacht period lead to this alternative empowerment for women? It’s extraordinarily strange and I’m just trying to isolate certain aspects of this.

Lower: When I talk about the socialization during the Nazi regime, let me break that down. So, for instance, the League of German Girls was compulsory after the mid-’30s. So anyone — and with the boys as well obviously — after the age of ten, they had to be part of these youth movements. And they predominated and swallowed up all the other activities. I mean, the Nazi Party was really clever, insidiously so, in mobilizing the youth. They didn’t need to shut down the churches as such. They would just hold a lot of party meetings in these youth programs on Sunday morning. So people couldn’t go to church. Or they, of course, infiltrated the entire education system. The textbooks were completely rewritten. So each of these professional groups were somehow restructured along party lines as a one party system. Now in the beginning, thousands of German women — ordinary German women; Jewish women among them — who had been very active politically in the 1920s in the Communist movement, in the Social Democratic Party, the Catholic Center Party, other parties that the Nazis were destroying basically in ’33 as they consolidated their dictatorship — these women, especially the Communists, were sought out, arrested, and many were killed. And German women were also victims of sterilization policies. About 200,000. So within the German female population, already an early part of the ’30s, those who might be resistant to these policies are being weeded out, terrorized, incarcerated, and so forth. And so some like the individuals in my book — Erna Petri, Vera — they’re not part of that. They’ve survived that and they’ve triumphed. And now they’ve got this bright future ahead of them. And they can get out of there. Liesel Willhaus was the daughter of a foreman in a czar land. Worked on a chicken farm. And those who were not the killers in my book — the witnesses and bystanders — were similar demographics. They didn’t have educations beyond grammar school. They had secretarial training or nursing. Obviously nursing training was essential for the war effort. That particular career path was opened up. So this is how the socialization happens and what it means in terms of how women’s lives and their futures shift into these different directions under the regime.

The Bat Segundo Show #526: Wendy Lower (Download MP3)

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