ON TRIAL

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4559, 13 April 1942, Page 6

ON TRIAL

POET AND PROPAGANDIST AMERICAN PROCEEDINGS / Accused of having filed false statements to the State Department when registering as a foreign agent, George Sylvester Viereck is on trial in Washington while the United States is mobilising for total war against the Axis Powers. The judicial action recalls the fierce light which was shed on this brilliant, restless writer during the European war of 1914-1918. His trial is the' sequel to events which began in 1917, when he, an established journalist, poet, author, and propagandist, was ■threatened by the mob with lynching and was expelled from membership of the Authors’ League and the Poetry Society of America. Viereck is a naturalised American citizen, a poet, and author of books with a cosmopolitan circulation. He was born in Munich in 1884, and migrated to New York when he was 11. His grandfather had left Germany in 1848, travelling to San Francisco, where he worked as a journalist and founded the German Theatre in that city. Laura, his daughter and the mother of George Sylvester Viereck, returned to Germany and married her cousin Louis, a son of Edwina Viereck, a famous German actress. Louis, Viereck in turn migrated to America when, as a Socialist member of the Reichstag, his political activities landed him in difficulties. His -son, the subject of this article, followed him a year later. In. New' York Viereck went to a public school, and later to the College of the City of New York, from which he graduated in 1906. At college he was the school poet. He steadily “ flunked or squeezed ” through physics, mathematics, geometry, and the sciences. One examination he passed by writing a scornful sonnet against the subject set. His first job on “ Current Opinion ” was obtained for him by the president of the college, and he stayed with that magazine until he was in his thirties in 1915. Meanwhile, howeVfer, he became editor in 1912 of “ International,” and in 1914 of “Fatherland,” which subsequently was named the “ Atlantic Monthly,” and was published until 1927. “ Fatherland ” was undoubtedly a pro-German magazine. It was in this journal during 1917 that Viereck printed the poem “ William IL, Prince of Peace,” which, containing the line “ For if thou fall a world shall fall,” brought a hornets’ nest of trouble about his head. “TOAD OF TREASON” To his expulsion from the literary societies was added the charge that he had received money from the German Government. Threatening to lynch him, the mob stormed his house in Mount Vernon, New York; but he egcaped, leaving behind his wife, Margaret Edith Hein, (whom he had married two years earlier), and hid himself in a New York hotel. Persecution of himself and his family- continued. It was common for him to be called publicly such things as “ that venom-bloated toad of treason.” Public antagonism was stirred all the more because Viereck was well known as poet and author. Earlier in 1911 he had gone to Berlin as the first exchange lecturer on American poetry at the university there. In 1916 he published the poems “ Songs of Armageddon ”; in 1920 he wrote “ Roosevelt, a Study in Ambivalence.” Sometimes he used the pseudonym “ George Four Corners,” and had at least three literary collaborators. Tire book that roused most comment in recent years was “My First 2000 Years”. (1929). He wrote this in collaboration with Paul Eldridge; its hero was the Wandering Jew. In 1934 “My First 2000 Years ” was confiscated and burned in ’Nazi Germany. But Viereck was not dismayed. “ I always liked the Jews,” he declared. “ The book’s destruction was entirely logical.” He added: “ But what is the fate of a book compared with the fate of a nation ? Although I have defended National Socialist Germany, I do not accept its anti-Semitic doctrine. Why, then, should National Socialist Germany accept my Wandering Jew ? ” In 1930 appeared his “ Glimpses of the Great,” a collection of interviews with such figures as Hitler, Mussolini, Freud, Shaw, and others—-impres-sions which were accepted widely as a clever journalistic interpretation of the “ world spirit ” which was then animating reactionary Europe. Mussolini was quoted as saying: “ Fascism leads mankind out of the blind alleys. It reconciles capitalism and labour in a new synthesis. Capital and labour had grown too strong for the .State. Parliamentary government proved itself a helpless nurse, unable to control those unruly giants until Fascism stepped in. Italy had the choice between Bolshevism and Fascism. It chose Fascism. The State must be strong. Fascism itself is the first servant of the State.”

George Bernard Shaw apparently showed his impatience with this meticulously dressed interviewer, who has been described as “ looking ten years younger than his age, and whose grey eyes seemed small behind heavy horn-rimmed glasses.” The author of “ Geneva ” told Viereck of his prefer-

cnce among his plays for “ Heartbreak House,” and named “ Back to Methuselah ” as his most significant play. But the dramatist added: “All this giving examination marks and prizes to my works is repugnant to me. The only one I concern myself with is the one I am actually at work on.” “ NEW LITERARY IMPETUS ” On the walls of Viereck’s study in his ten-roomed 3500 dollars-a-year apartment hangs a surprising collection of photographs—Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, Goebbels, Freud, and Albert Einstein. The occupant explains their presence by saying: “ All these people I have known and admired.” The egoist in Viereck is a marked characteristic, and he has been given every encouragement to preen himself. One of his more recent volumes of poems, “ My Flesh and Blood—a Lyric Autobiography with Indiscreet Annotations” (1931), called forth an extraordinary amount of favourable criticism. Richard le Gallienne once referred to him as “ a poet of original mind and an exceptionally forcible and magnetic literary gift.” Frank Harris, with his customary flamboyance, described him as “ the most distinguished poet in America.” 01 himself Viereck has said: “ Few poets have met with more instant recognition than I. I have given a new literary impetus to my country.” And he boasted that he was the only American poet whose book of lyric verse had made money for himself and his publishers. Another of Viereck’s prose publications which aroused adverse criticism was “ Spreading Germs of Hate ” (1931). It was published paradoxically, with a foreword by Colonel Ed- ’ ward House. The book was commended as “ a straightforward and objective study of propaganda,” and was received in some quarters as “the most effective history of war propaganda yet written, and one of the most valuable antidotes to war hysteria.” Having edited in 1929 “As They Saw Us ” (Foch, Ludendorff, and other leaders), Viereck published “ The Kaiser on Trial ” in 1937, and “ The Temptation of Jonathan ” in the following year. But perhaps a hint of his recent literary activity was conveyed in his book “ The Strangest Friendship' in History ” (that of Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House) of 1933. Each of the chapters in this pretentious book is introduced by catch sub-headings, of which “ There is no God but Wilson, and House is His only Prophet ” is a blasphemous and sensation-seeking example. One chapter, dealing with the visit of House to Berlin in 1914, includes a passage on “ Half an hour that might have changed the fate of the world.” Viereck insinuated that Colonel House’s talk with the German Kaiser would have changed the world’s fate “ if events had been propitious.” House’s plan for world cooperation would have had definite result “ but for the shot of the Serbian assassin loosing the hounds of hell in Europe.” After* House, instead of meeting the pacific and scholarly Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, had been entertained at a Schrippenfest—a military celebration of the school battalion which was drawn from every regiment in the Prussian army —he, the “ Kentucky colonel,” wrote to President Wilson from Berlin: “ The situation is extraordinary- It is militarism run stark mad. Unless someone acting for you can bring about a different understanding there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it. There is too much hatred, too many jealousies.” “ NOT A PROPAGANDIST ” In a recent cable message from Washington it was stated that Viereck is alleged to have received 40,000 dollars (£A13,340) a year for propaganda activities. In the earlier stages of this war, before America ranged herself beside the democracies, Viereck was accused of spreading proNazi propaganda, but he issued a strong denial of the charge. ‘ I am a poet, a journalist,” he said. “ I have even mixed with politics in a small way. I am not a propagandist.” Back in 1934 he appeared before a group investigating Nazi propaganda. He admitted then that an American publicity firm was paying about 1750 dollars a month for swinging a contract with German interests to the firm,' and that he had received 2000 dollars from the German council in New York for services “concerning the general aspects of public relations.” In 1940 he was registered in Washington as the American correspondent of the “ Munchner Neuste Nachrichten,” a German newspaper. “ P.M.” about that time published a statement that Viereck was recently in the employ of the German Library of Information, his job being to prepare news for “ Facts in Review,” the official Hitler upper-level propaganda organ; to hold himself at all times for consultation on Nazi propaganda problems in the United States, and to interpret the news to favour Germany.” What the poet and propagandist said about Nazi Germany (according to “ P.M.”) was made to seem superficial, harmless, legal, even praiseworthy, to millions of Americans. For* example, in an article written for “ Nation’s Business,” Viereck pointed out that, although he had not suggested that America should imitate the

systems of government of the totalitarian countries, still they had many things America might well adopt, things such as the strength-through-joy movement, athletic facilities, parks, etc. “ Behind the scenes,” the propagandist declared, “ I *do all I can to better relations between Germany and the United States.”