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Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen

I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.

Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.

Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.

Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.

The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.

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Shopping in Northern Virginia: Photos from 1967, 1971, and 1976

Black-and-white photo: shoppers on escalators in the Hecht Company department store at the Parkington shopping mall, Arlington, Virginia, 1967. Very crowded.

Hecht Company department store at the Parkington shopping mall, Arlington, Virginia, on November 20, 1967.

Black-and-white photo: women shopping for clothes at Hecht Company Department store, Tysons Corner shopping mall, Fairfax, Virginia, 1971. There's a sign with a big hand pointing down labeled 'Hot Spot'.

Hecht Company Department store, Tysons Corner shopping mall, Fairfax, Virginia, on April 22, 1971.

Black-and-white photo: people walking in a parking lot outside of Woodward & Lothrop department store, Tysons Corner Mall, Tysons Corner, Virginia, 1976

Tysons Corner Mall, Tysons Corner, Virginia, on April 12, 1976.

Source: Library of Congress, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2024640738, …/2011646503, and …/2024630362.

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an open spot on a hill. Some trees, snow, bottom part of small mountains visible opposite, gray and white clouds, a little blue

Walking through this wet snow felt a little like trying to walk along a very sandy beach. Walking poles kept me stable and gave muscles in my upper body a workout.

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🇵🇸🇮🇱 Here’s a gruesome report of the dire conditions in northern Gaza at +972 Magazine, “an independent, online, nonprofit” publication “run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists.”

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More Photos from the Season's First Snowy Day

Here are more of the snow pictures I took on November 28.

white snow on ground and branches, white sky, snow falling white snow on ground and branches, white sky, snow falling
white snow on ground and branches, white sky, snow falling white snow on ground and branches, white sky, snow falling
white snow on ground and branches, white sky, snow falling white snow on ground and branches, white sky, snow falling

See also First Snow of Season.

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📽️ Think I’ll start rewatching “Good Night, and Good Luck,” dir. George Clooney (Warner Bros, 2005). Seems all too relevant again.

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Photos: First Snow of the Season

We had our first proper snow of the season here in Mt. Washington Valley today—heavy and wet, but beautiful.

Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods. Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods
Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods
Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods Heavy early snow on the trees and path in the woods
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Color greeting postcard: boy sitting on stool outside with his hands on a big turkey in full plumage. On the other side of the turkey is a stump with a hatchet. Text: 'Thanksgiving Greetings'

1909 Thanksgiving postcard via The New York Public Library. Image ID: 1588318.

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Sometimes it feels like the Cold War was a long cease fire, and now we’ve decided to reprise the 1930s to see what else we can muck up. (Bad historical thinking, I know, but I did say “feels,” so cut me some slack.😤)

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When Russia makes yet another nuclear threat, why is the biggest scaredy cat in the room always a would-be “man’s man” like Joe Rogan? Also, when did doing the right thing cease to be a part of normative masculinity for so many Americans?

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“Act now to stop millions of research papers from disappearing”, editorial in Nature today – “Digital preservation is not keeping up with the growth of scholarly knowledge. Recognizing its causes is the first step to securing records everywhere for future generations.”

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We Need a New Political Translation Dictionary (English–English)

In 1936, Dorothy Thompson observed in her newspaper column that “dictatorships often have quite different interpretations of words from liberal democracies. . . . In the dictionary of democracies,” for example, “peace is a desirably permanent condition of amicable relations with other nations. In the dictionary of dictatorships peace means: a quiet undisturbed period in which to prepare for war . . ."1

The phrase “between nations” excluded asymmetric colonial conflicts, so the difference Thompson painted was quite real. In fact, it was the entire argument of Erich Ludendorff’s 1935 screed Der totale Krieg (Total War). In that book, Ludendorff flipped Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum on its head. Instead of understanding war as the pursuit of political aims by other means, states had to understand war as the driving force behind all politics.2

Regarding “nonaggression” in international relations, Thompson wrote,

liberal democracies mean . . . simply the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. Both Russian and German dictatorships mean by it the substitution of revolution for other weapons. Neither Russia nor Germany considers the fomenting of internal strife in countries which they want to bring under their influence to be aggression.

In our own time, Russia, now a different creature, is playing a similar game inside NATO countries. Observers in these democracies refer to Russia’s current suite of activities as “hybrid warfare,” although their governments often play down these activities. Thompson’s discussion of “war” itself can help to explain why, provided we keep the “between nations” qualification in mind. “For the democracies war is armed conflict between nations, to be avoided as an unmitigated catastrophe. Above all, war is regarded as an abnormal condition. In the Russian dictionary,” on the other hand, “war is either an inevitable byproduct of the struggle of capitalist countries for markets, or the permanent, unremitting and inevitable struggle between classes for power.” The first theory of war came from Lenin’s interpretation of imperialism and the World War (1914–18). The second was the basic dialectical understanding of history as class conflict posited by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century.

In contrast to the USSR’s take on war, “in the Fascist dictionary it is the necessary and normal condition in which heroic nations and personalities reach their highest potential. . . .” Such thinking could be found in the democracies, too, especially in the two decades or so before the First World War. After all, the educated learned Latin everywhere in the west, including the Roman poet Horace’s phrase, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.) During that war, Winfred Own referred to that sentiment as “the old Lie." And many politicians did everything they could to avoid the next war, leading to the catastrophic extreme of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, while the United States pursued an isolationist foreign policy.

Two related terms for Thompson were “honor” and “dishonor.” We do not consciously use them much in twenty-first-century international relations, but Thompson’s explanation is not hard to understand.3

Honor in England means allegiance to accepted standards of conduct. Honor in Germany and Italy means prestige. Dishonor in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary is a crime which one commits against oneself; in the Fascist dictionary it means a crime which is committed against one.

Following this logic, the U.S. dishonored itself when it turned to torture in Iraq. Similarly, our former and next president dishonored our country, our military, and his office by pardoning American war criminals. In the process, he didn’t honor international treaty obligations either. That is because his understanding of honor is more like that of the fascists of the 1930s. Anyone who takes him down a peg has injured him and faces retribution, much like a gang member who can’t afford to lose face. Looking weak is unbearable to this man, whereas conventional rules and fair play are for suckers. The current Russian president follows a similar gangland code, restoring his injured honor by having opponents poisoned or fall out of windows. There might well be a sense of injured honor involved in his attempt to destroy Ukraine.

Thompson’s column underlined something with which we are all too familiar these days. We speak the same language as our enemies. We use the same words. But our common language both obscures and fosters different perceptions of reality that leave us at cross purposes. The Russians talk about “information war."4 And Alex Jones spread disinformation in the United States with a profitable website called InfoWars. Perhaps the problem goes even deeper, and individual words themselves have become players in our fight for the soul and honor of this nation. Maybe we need a comparative political dictionary to bridge the gap or at least bring the conflict into sharper focus.

  1. This and all other quotes by Dorothy Thompson: “Political Dictionary” (March 19, 1936), in Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), 17–20. ↩︎

  2. Erich Ludendorff, Der totaler Krieg (Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935). ↩︎

  3. Good historical background: Geoffrey Best, Honour among Men and Nations: Transformations of an Idea (University of Toronto Press, 1981). ↩︎

  4. Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). ↩︎

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Snow-covered mountain in the background, viewed from a path next to railroad tracks. Power lines crossing sky. Trees and rail crossing sign

Mount Washington from the Power Line Trail, North Conway, NH, this afternoon.

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Japanese-American Internment as 'Evacuation' and 'Relocation'

These photos of Japanese-Americans and a few resident aliens on their way to internment for the duration of World War II are accompanied by captions that avoid the language of imprisonment or confinement. Instead of internment, there is talk of “evacuation” and the War Relocation Authority.

These pictures also suggest what a rupture the location of their internment would represent. It is hard to imagine these urbanites stepping out into the barely settled terrain they were headed to, even if an advanced party of men without dependents was sent out a few weeks in advance to prepare for the others' arrival.

Very young Japanese-American girl wearing long pants, a shirt whose cuffs are visible, an overcoat, low-cut leather laces, and a wool or felt hat with a ribbon. She's sitting on the family's packed belongings and holding a doll that looks enormous in her small arms.

"Los Angeles, California. The evacuation of the Japanese-Americans from West Coast areas under U.S. Army war emergency order. Japanese-American children waiting for a train to take them and their parents to Owens Valley." Photo taken in April 1942 by Russell Lee.

A larger group of Japanese-Americans with their luggage at the train station. Train carriages for passengers are visible. So are cars in the parking lot and military police.

“Los Angeles, California. The evacuation of the Japanese-Americans from West Coast areas under U.S. Army war emergency order. Japanese-Americans and a few alien Japanese waiting for a train which will take them to Owens Valley.” Photo taken in April 1942 by Russell Lee.

Bilingual paper announcement on a notice board that is mounted on an outdoor brick wall. It orders 1,000 men to sign up by Thursday morning for transport on Monday morning. The signup location is a school, which would be open all night. The notice seems to have been updated because it is telling people they need these sign-ups 'tonite'.

“Los Angeles, California. The evacuation of Japanese-Americans from West coast areas under United States Army war emergency order. The Japanese referred to in this sign were an advance group going to Owens Valley for construction work.” Photo taken in April 1942 by Russell Lee.

Rugged terrain far away from the affordances of a modern American city. Men clearing brush and building barracks.

“Manzanar, Calif. Apr. 1942. Construction beginning at the War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry, in Owens Valley. Mt. Whitney, loftiest peak in the United States, appears in the background.” Photo by Clem Albers.

Source: Library of Congress: Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Photograph Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017744879, …/2017744872, …/2017817916, and …/2021647198.

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Snow flurries this afternoon. Windy. Should’ve worn my long johns.

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Considering the $16.1 billion in contracts the federal government has handed to SpaceX since 2003, the interests of SpaceX and the agencies counting on the company to fulfill the nation’s space policy goals are increasingly aligned. “We call it agency capture,” says [Jared] Margolis. “Agencies are not there to protect the public; they’re there to promote the businesses that they regulate, in a lot of ways.”

– “Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover” by Abby Vesoulis, Mother Jones, January/February 2024 issue, American Oligarchy.

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Squaring the Anti-Science, Pro-Technology Circle

I sometimes read on social media about the apparent contradiction between right-wingers' positive attitudes toward tech and their negative attitudes toward a lot of medicine. After all, both are rooted in science. That said, there is a commonality between these two sets of attitudes: the role of regulation. A lot of tech is under- or unregulated, and the supplements that Trump’s favored quacks and talking heads peddle are not regulated either. Medicine and medications, on the other hand, are regulated. And we have mandatory public health measures.

This is not to say that there is anything principled about their dislike of regulation. If the FDA was founded in 1906 with the support of business because expert-based standards and trust would benefit business, that insight seems to be absent from the current discourse. Instead, the quacks, grifters, and monopoly capitalists value their freedom to muck about with society and the environment as they please, secure in the knowledge that they’ll have the might to be right on the so-called open market of goods and ideas, especially after capturing the federal government.

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Good and healthy societies do not require to be ruled by terror. This is not to deny that terror is an enormously effective means of creating a menacing machine. The shrewd exploitations of fear is an ancient means of ruling. But it is also a dangerous way of ruling. For one thing, it cuts the rulers themselves off from reality. In a society where no one can complain, no one knows the depths of resentment ready to flare up once the opportunity comes.

– Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1939), 11.

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Important thread by political historian Seth Coltar that extrapolates from a couple centuries of print culture and civic nationalism to our current moment.

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“Who Goes Nazi?" by Dorothy Thompson, Harper’s Magazine, August 1941 (alternative link). – This short piece by a woman who watched it happen up close in Germany, Austria, and France, a woman who knew “the types,” makes for a fascinating read in our current moment.

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Am futzing around with my blog categories again.

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A threat to the U.S. military’s morale, cohesion, and effectiveness: "‘Profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform’: Pentagon reacts to sex assault allegations against Hegseth", Politico, November 22, 2024. 🪖