During our forensic investigation into the Progressive Era we came upon an interesting year. The extraordinary events of the year 1913 unveil a year so profound in its influence that we contend there was no other year in the twentieth century more responsible for our modern-day condition. It was while discussing the Wilson administration (1912 – 1920), that we first noticed Wilson’s extraordinary list of accomplishments while in his first full year in office. Even more intriguing was how each of these founding fathers of Progressivism, Wilson included, all wrote books, not only during the president’s first term, but in his first year, all using the word ‘new’ in their titles. Even the subject matter of each book was the same, all of them carrying the same moral message, promoting as their leader Theodore Roosevelt, and as their scheme, a more centralized, scientifically technical, progressive government built on the two pillars of Progressivism: Efficiency and Preparedness. 

Herein, we describe the extraordinary events of the year 1913. We detail the institutions, foundations, and organizations established by these same progressives, along with the philosophies, ideologies and concepts they helped impress into the minds of America through their literature, social status, and political importance in one of the most radical reforms of the human being in recorded world history.   

Woodrow Wilson inaugurated as President of the United States on the 4^th of March and the rest is history. Wilson’s time as president opened the flood gates to all kinds of policy that today still stand as obvious representatives of those institutions most destructive to our Western world. Wilson himself considered a father of Progressivism, and was closely advised by preeminent Progressive leaders like Louis Dembitz Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and Walter Lippmann. Listed below are the many examples of the radical social reforms made – just in Wilson’s first twelve months in office.

The Federal Reserve founded. This private organization, based on usury and speculation, lending money to the Unites States at interest, may be the most profoundly responsible for our modern day enslavement. Created two days before Christmas in 1913 as an answer to financial panics, the Federal Reserve has done little in the over one hundred years since its creation to ameliorate financial crashes from occurring on the regular. The Great Depression itself occurring only a decade and a half after the Fed’s founding. 

Every generation since has suffered, and the abhorrently high national debts of all Western countries can look to the centralization of the banking industry as the main culprit. The Fed, created under deep secrecy, involving all of the usual suspects including the man who some even call its architect, Louis Dembitz Brandeis.  

Which reminds us to mention how the new world order can be seen in the very architecture of the Federal Reserve building itself.  The Eccles Building was constructed, as were many government buildings in the 1930s under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the Restrained, or Starved, or Strained Neoclassical style preferred by all totalitarian leaders of the twentieth century including: Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, FDR and Woodrow Wilson. A style in which all ornamentation, imagination, and beauty was removed, the sheer stone resembling the coldness of later brutalism, dominant and intimidating, the gargantuanism of government.

Harry S. Truman, U.S. State Department

Robert  F. Kennedy, U.S. Justice Department

“Valentine’s business thrived because he had the courage to implement part of the ‘Social Program’ that he and Frankfurter had outlined on the living room floor of the House of Truth when they had ‘discovered the center of the universe.'” Brad Snyder, The House of Truth

The New Spirit. also know as the International Exhibition of Modern Art, begins with the 1913 Armory Show. Promoted as part of a larger movement known, not so coincidentally as, The New Spirit, obscures traditional early American art style by infusing new, experimental styles of European avant-garde, Fauvism, Cubism, Impressionism, and abstract expressionism. We see very clearly the first attempt at altering the image of the human figure. The Changing Images of Man. This the introduction of modern art to America. Guests included on the three-city tour were contemporary legends of the art world: Cezanne, Duchamp, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Surat, and Vincent Van Gogh.

The shows were organized by the American Association of Painters and Sculptors and one of the founding members of the AAPS just so happens to be Gutzon Borglum, a frequent guest at the House of Truth, where he designed Mt. Rushmore on the dining room table.

Marcel Duchamp’s, Nude Descending a Staircase, created a stir merely from its title, showing something resembling the shape of a human body, somewhere between cubist and futurist, the figure leaves no indication as to its gender, or whether it is even human.  This painting and several others caused controversy, the imagery of Nude Descending Staircase, when looking closely, show the dynamic fragmentation of the human figure, the knees bent, the body leaning back, the only discernible body parts hidden behind cylinder and abstraction, as the androgynous futuristic figure progressively descends rather than ascends a set of stairs.

“What contributed to the interest provoked by the canvas was its title. One just doesn’t do a nude woman coming down the stairs … it seemed scandalous.” Marcel Duchamp in a late interview seems to point to the figure being female however admits that the name was what may have had everyone interested.

The Armory Shows proved to be scandalous as America was not accustomed to the radical new European modernist art movement. Henri Matisse’s distortion of the human form facing much backlash, and provide yet another example of the soft social science techniques being applied to American society. Their stated mission even was to “lead the public taste in art, rather than follow it.” Sounding much like the agenda of the Metaphysical Club’s infusion of philosophy a decade earlier.

Borglum’s own artistic themes centered of course around heroic images of US nationalism and the aesthetic variation of Bull Moose patriotism. Interesting to note that this infusion of Expressionist art just ahead of its infiltration of Hollywood through the film noir genre – as discussed in our previous article, Hidden in the Shadow of the Sun.  The delay between the two, almost as if they were waiting for the technology of the motion picture to catch up before they could apply it upon society.  The dynamic effect of art in motion far more powerful than the expressionists traditional ability to just paint a still picture.

Borglum was a very active member of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, raised in Howard Lodge #35, New York City, on June 10, 1904, and serving as its Worshipful Master 1910–11.

In 1915, he was appointed Grand Representative of the Grand Lodge of Denmark near the Grand Lodge of New York. He received his Scottish Rite Degrees in the New York City Consistory on October 25, 1907. He was close personal friends of Theodore Roosevelt, a fellow well-known Mason, and very active during the 1912 US presidential election campaign as an organizer and member of the Bull Moose Party.

“The scholar and research professor emeritus H. Wayne Morgan considers the ‘conflict between modern and traditional art’ in the early twentieth century to be ‘one of the best known episodes in American cultural history.’ The International Exhibition of Modern Art, the most important art exhibition ever held in the United States, served as the catalyst for this controversy.'”

“The origins of the show lie in the emergence of progressive groups and independent exhibitions in the early twentieth century (with significant French precedents), which challenged the aesthetic ideals, exclusionary policies, and authority of the National Academy of Design, while expanding exhibition and sales opportunities, enhancing public knowledge, and enlarging audiences for contemporary art.” Avis Berman, As National as the National Biscuit Company; The Academy, the Critics, and the Armory Show, Rave Reviews American Art and Its Critics, 1826-1925. New York National Academy of Design, pg. 131

The Blue Nude, Henri Matisse

Imposition of a federal income tax on February 3 by the US government signals the first time a permanent, collective system of taxation is applied in the United States.

Federal Trade Commission founded. While the first speech on the House floor advocating its creation was in February of 1912, and the Act itself was created officially in 1914, the obvious leg work primarily accomplished in the time in between. The FTC an authority on interstate trade set alight by the 1911 decision to break Standard Oil’s monopoly. The conclusions drawn some one hundred years later are clear, these organizations doing very little to curtail wrongdoing while the challenges and issues have only grown more and more profound. The FTC obviously doing very little to prevent monopolization, or Morganization, as we see Standard Oil’s dominance continue unabated, even aided in enlarging their already massive fortune by the ruling, becoming even more absolute only under new titles like: Exxon, Mobil, Esso, and BP. Louis Brandeis also very involved in the creation of the Federal Trade Commission.

Henry Ford installs the moving-chassis assembly line in October of 1913, sparking the era of mass production and the automobile era all at once.  Otherwise known as progressive assembly, the introduction of the assembly line was a revolutionary improvement over the previous semi-automated production line system. Assembly lines for the first time, created an enormous advantage for the employer, the non-stop conveyance system diminished the workforce to a mathematical equation, each detail of the process perfected, allowing the employer to set the pace, minimize labour, and maximize profits. The Highland Park Factory in Michigan shrinking the manufacture time of an automobile from more than 12 hours to less than 2. The first significant joining of man and machine, a connecting of the human hand with the control arm, like two fingers nearly touching, reminiscent of, The Creation of Adam.

This not without significance from another entirely different perspective, in that,  A Brave New World, was set in the year 632 a.f. (after Ford). Ford considered God, and the roll out of the first automobile, marked as the very first day of their utopian calendar. Ford also referring to himself as Freud when speaking of psychological matters.  

The Rockefeller Foundation goes public on March 14, 1913, following the acceptance of its charter. This one 501C, not-for-profit the most responsible Foundation of our enslavement, formed from another private, yet very public sounding, General Education Board. Inspired by an initial $100 million donation from John D. Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Foundation funding the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Inquiry, the Cybernetics Revolution, Alfred Kinsey’s sex research, the Princeton Radio Research Project, and our entire Western education, agricultural, and medical industries. Rockefeller today stands, along side The Federal Reserve, and the “sage advisor to all”, Louis Brandeis, as possible public enemy number one. Rockefeller involvement so omniscient in our lives today, and their many interlocking affiliations so well documented throughout the century by hundreds of researchers, little needs to be said of their involvement in the Dawn of The New Age.

The first Suffrage March on March 3, 1913. One day before Wilson’s inauguration, the Suffragette movement officially gets under way.

The following authors were close friends, confidantes, and even housemates. All are considered ‘fathers of the Progressive movement’. All were accused of being radical reformers of society. All wrote key progressive manifestos while at the House of Truth, and the books were all were published at nearly the exact same time. They all vowed an allegiance to Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, a strong federal government, centered around preparedness and efficiency, to be run by the scientific expert. Undoubtedly, much of the authoring, organizing and coordination of their books, and the founding of The New Republic, would have happened while all cohabitating at the House of Truth.   

The New Nationalism was a campaign slogan and a collection of Roosevelt speeches published in 1910 inspired from Herbert Croly’s, The Promise of American Life, published in 1909.  These Roosevelt speeches serve as the catalyst for much of what develops in 1913, the House of Truth itself created to support Roosevelt’s Bull Moose campaign, and it is here, in these speeches, we see the first indications that America was preparing for war.

Using the introduction of Taylorism as a catalyst, the American private sector joins forces with the federal government, through their mutual interest in efficiency and preparedness.  Through the soft, facilitating hands of Bernard Baruch, we see the creation of the War Industries Board, the literal manufacture of a new corporatism, the first sightings of the American mass production industry, 20th Century American foreign policy, and the founding of American Fascism.

Roosevelt admitting in his speech, “combinations in industry … cannot be repealed … effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of public welfare.” 

Many then, as do now, point to Croly’s Promises as overtly advocating for Fascism and totalitarian government. Croly while living on Connecticut Avenue, just two minutes from Lippmann & Co., then followed up his tome manifesto by releasing Progressive Democracy in the year 1914.  It seems from this home in the Dupont neighbourhood of Northwest Washington was where the entire idea of Progressivism in America was dreamed up. 

James Harvey Robinson

Thorstein Veblen

Hugo Munsterberg publishes Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 1913. Munsterberg was an assistant to Wilhelm Wundt, the “father of experimental psychology”, and the first to establish a psychological laboratory at Leipzig University the same year William James did the same at Harvard. Leipzig became a hotbed for the burgeonoing field of what Wundt called physiological psychology. Famous Russian behaviourists, Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov studied under Wundt.

The list of men who studied under, or received their Ph.D from Wundt and then proceeded to establish experimental psychological laboratories of their own at all the major American universities is a long one and include some of the most recognizable names in, not only psychology, but philosophy and common education.

The following list includes all of the Wundtian disciples and the universities where they established psychological laboratories and periodicals, in a coordinated effort to legitimize another soft science. Not insignificantly, these men held the very first doctorates ever given to Americans:

Granville Stanley Hall (the father of developmental psychology, adolescent psychology) at Johns Hopkins and Clark University; James McKeen Cattell at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University; Walter Dill Scott at Northwestern University; Charles Hubbard Judd at Yale, New York University, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Chicago; James Earl Russell at the University of Colorado and the Teacher’s College at Columbia University; James Mark Baldwin at the University of Toronto and Princeton Universities; Edward Bratford Titchener (Wundt’s English interpretor), at Cornell; William Lowe at Illinois University; Olin Templin at Kansas University; Harry Kirke Wolfe at the University of Nebraska; Andrew C Armstrong at Wesleyan University; Frank Angell at Cornell and Stanford; Edward Wheeler Scripture at Columbia University; Lightner Witner (the founder of the psychological clinic) at the University of Pennsylvania; George T.W. Patrick at the University of Iowa; Harlow Stearns Gale at the University of Minnesota; George Malcolm Stratton at the University of California Berkeley; and August Kirschmann at University of Toronto.

Munsterberg and his book, like the others before, serve as catalysts for an entire movement. Munsterberg met William James while in Paris, at the First International Conference on Physiological Psychology in 1889. James invited Munsterberg to accept a three year lecture contract at Harvard and would eventually hire the German to lead his new psychology laboratory. Munsterberg would stay much longer than anticipated and was very successful during his Harvard years, becoming the president of the American Psychological Association, president of the American Philosophical Association, a member of the Washington Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Munsterberg would also become influential internationally as the organizer and vice-president of the International Congress of Arts and Sciences at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, vice-president of the International Psychological Congress in Paris in 1900, and vice-president of the International Philosophical Congress at Heidelberg in 1907.  

His book, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, published in 1913 is considered today as the very beginnings of industrial psychology. Munsterberg wrote to Frederick Winslow Taylor:

“Our aim is to sketch the outlines of a new science, which is to intermediate between the modern laboratory psychology and the problem of economics … the psychological experiment is systematically to be placed at the service of commerce and industry” pg. 3.

Munsterberg bringing together the two disciplines of Wundtian structuralism and James’ functionalism influencing the work of Edward Thorndike, one of the early pioneers of behaviourism who would then in turn inspire the work of a generation including: John B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner. Watson describing psychology as an, “experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.” And Skinner a widely cited social engineer famous for the Skinner Box, his zoological approach to humans and involvement in the Changing Image of Man Study. All of these men today considered the most influential psychologists and thinkers of the 20th Century.

Charles Beard

The New Statesman, a Fabian socialist rag was also created in the year 1913. And as we now know, the Fabians, especially Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw ever present at the Inter-Allied Labor Socialist meetings that directly led to the Covenant of the League of Nations. Shaw also present in the Weimar circles. And their work funding the Taylor Society as well as inspiring the entire Progressive movement.

Sidney Webb’s, Industrial Democracy, published in 1902, serving as a catalyst for the Progressive movement in both the UK and the US. Fabian socialism became the British Labor Party and is still very influential in the radical social reformation we see today. A very similar message being evoked today just as then, under similar conditions of war, social justice, and a belief in expertness. For those unfamiliar, the Fabian logo a wolf in sheep’s clothing and their motto, ‘molding the world closer to our hearts desire.’ A strategy they deliver through slow, methodical social change, rather than a more brutal, inhumane, military conquest.

Graham Wallas

The New Democracy, published in 1912, was Walter Weyl’s reinterpretation of what democracy means. Weyl very involved in the founding of The New Republic, and according to House of Truth biographer Brad Snyder, was the “third founding editor and principal political writer … a trained economist, freelance journalist.” Snyder calls, The New Democracy, “another important work of progressive political philosophy”.

Weyl’s book advocated for, as did all of their progressive books, a more centralized federal government, less attention on the rights of the individual, experimentation of the Constitution, and more government attention and money be paid towards social equality, social justice, and a reliance on the social science expert. The New Democracy, it should come as no surprise to anyone by now, was written in support of the 1912 presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt. The Bull Moose.

The New Republic founded in 1914 by Lippmann, Croly, Frankfurter, Weyl, Alvin Saunders Johnson, along with a four year promise of funding from Dorothy Paine Whitney and her husband, Willard Straight, a JP Morgan representative. Along with guidance from Billings Learned Hand and others connected to Harvard Law School. Their collective dream of scientific liberalism, “a liberalism centered in humanitarian and moral passion and one based in an ethos of scientific analysis”. Frankfurter very involved in the planning stages and:

“was listed as a trustee on the magazines first statement of ownership, attended meetings, and later wrote many signed and unsigned editorials on political and legal issues.” The House of Truth, Brad Snyder, pg. 91.

Croly described the magazine as “radically progressive”.

While officially created in the year 1914, The New Republic’s foundational framework was obviously constructed while they were all living at the House of Truth starting as early as 1911.  The key inhabitants are the key founding editors. Both the House of Truth and The New Republic are considered widely even today, as being extremely influential in changing the character and definition of liberalism from an interest in individual rights, towards a more centralized, scientifically controlled society.

The New Freedom, published in 1913, was a collated series of speeches Woodrow Wilson admits in the foreword to have never written. Both William Bayard Hale and Louis Brandeis, and Walter Lippmann were well-known speechwriters for Wilson. Within the pages of The New Freedom, ‘Wilson’ warns that “the old order changeth”, while setting a new course for the West, “we are in the presence of a new organization of society”. For the forensic historian, The New Freedom offers one of the most important historical admissions ever, shared below.

From the, not so coincidental publications of progressively minded books, all from the primary leaders of Progressivism to the constant promotion of a large, centralized government and a scientifically managed society. From the many admissions to it all being an experiment, to the connections to the oldest secret societies in America show conclusively, that whether it be a new spirit, a new democracy, a new republic, a new nationalism, a new jurisprudence, a new psychology, a new education, or a new freedom. The New Age was dawning on America.  

When one takes a deeper look, as we at Bulletproof have, its not hard to see the coordinated effort. It doesn’t take much convincing to say that the year 1913, like a photograph, captured a unique and important moment in history. A snapshot showing a deliberate infiltration of all aspects of Western society, those same aspects described some sixty years later, in The Changing Images of Man Study: mystical, cosmological, sociological, pedagogical or psychological, editorial, political and magical. This latest information, when put together with what our previous research has been uncovering, sure paints an impressive mosaic. An aggressively radical social reform movement, all delivered with a religious fervor and a promise to never look back.

You can follow the author at bulletproofpub.com; at The History of Propaganda and Diego Garcia on youtube; and at Bulletproof Publishers on facebook.

Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger and ‘The Weimar by the Sea’

Built in 1927 the Villa Aurora was originally a demonstration home located at 520 Paseo Miramar in Pacific Palisades. With its panoramic views of Santa Monica Bay, the home was a demonstration home meant to showcase the latest technologies: a gas range, an electric refrigerator, a dishwasher, and a garage door opener. It was one of the very first homes built in the area and today the ‘Weimar by the Sea’ is well hidden, somewhat lost even among the multitude of similarly looking Spanish Villas. In 1943 the home was sold to Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger for a ridiculous, even for that time, $9,000 due to an alleged foreclosure on the property. Both Lion and Marta were instrumental in assisting the emigration of their friend and Lion’s protege, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was met upon his arrival at San Pedro, Port of Los Angeles by Marta Feuchtwanger. Marta also finding Brecht a place to live.

Lion overlooking the Pacific Palisades before development.

The Feuchtwanger’s lavish home, with its Mediterranean vistas, became a mecca for European writers, artists, and musicians of all types during the war years. Feuchtwanger’s books, The Wandering Jew(1933), and Jud Suss(1934), were adapted into British sponsored movies by Maurice Elvey and Lothar Mendes respectively. Jud Suss released in America under the title, Power. Both movies starring Conrad Veidt, well established as a leading man within Weimar culture before leaving Europe. In 1941 Veidt would also move to Los Angeles to help persuade American involvement in the Second World War. Veidt’s most famous Hollywood role was as Major Heinrich Strasser in Casablanca(1943). One of the most loved treasures of American cinema, nothing more than a propaganda film. In, Different from the Others (1919), a melodrama co-written by Richard Oswald and ‘the German Alfred Kinsey’, Magnus Hirschfeld. Different from the Others is looked upon by historians as the first ever feature length film aimed at a specifically gay audience and was funded by Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science.

Feuchtwanger acquired a large collection of the various editions and translations of the works of Flavius Josephus spanning 400 years of printing. Feuchtwanger wrote a trilogy covering the life of Favius Josephus, a Jewish historian of the first century telling of the fall of the Second Temple: Josephus (1932), The Jew of Rome (1935), and The Day will Come (1942). He also had an extensive collection of first editions and secondary works from the French Revolution by Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet and Helvetius. His collection also includes the first editions of many of the fellow exiles work including Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Ludwig Marcuse, Alfred Doblin, Bruno Frank, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Werfel, and Arnold Zweig.

Following Lion’s death his wife willed his library collection and personal papers to the University of Southern California, within the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, housed within the Special Collections of the Doheny Memorial Library. Their ‘castle by the sea’ was eventually sold to the German government and is today controlled and managed by the Villa Aurora Thomas Mann House (VATMH) consortium. Following the death of Marta, their home was repurposed as a study center and is now home of the Villa Aurora Foundation for European American Relations where they offer fellowships and a residency program promoting “transatlantic exchange”. A portion of the Feuchtwanger collection still lives at the Villa Aurora, on permanent loan from the University of California. Marta remained a very influential Los Angeles heiress living at the Villa Aurora for nearly thirty years after her husbands death and continued to promote her husbands work throughout this time.

Students of University of Southern California looking through primary sources.

The Thomas Mann House

Thomas Mann moved to Pacific Palisades in the spring of 1941 and lived at 740 Amalfi Drive, within a hundred meters of Aldous Huxley and his wife at 701 Amalfi Drive. Regular entries within the Thomas Mann diaries tell of regular “visits to the Huxley’s for dinner and tea as well as return invitations from the Manns.” The two couples “met while walking the streets of the nearby hills where the Manns’ future house was being built high up on San Remo Drive, or on the beach in Santa Monica.” When Huxley left for Llano del Rio, their domestic helped was offered and accepted by the Manns.

Mann was closely associated with Rabbi Sonderling at the First Unitarian Church and the Society for Jewish Culture – Fairfax Temple. Mann was invited to speak several times and Sonderling publicly praised Mann’s tetralogy, Joseph and his Brothers.
“By 1941, when the US entered the war, more than 6,000 German Jews had made it to Los Angeles, making the city the second-largest center of German-speaking Jews in America. An important hub and supporting organization for Jewish art and culture in Los Angeles was the Fairfax Temple and its Rabbi, Jacob Sonderling.” AVTMH

Thomas Mann was a frequent guest at the Villa Aurora and the Feuchtwanger’s were generous hosts and organized readings in Lion’s study. Thomas Mann was the guest of honor and moderator during the German speaking meetings, whereas Charlie Chaplin moderated the English readings. The Mann House was also a “focus of German émigré life in Southern California.” AVTMH

Thomas Mann broadcasting German Listeners!

NBC Studios photograph via The Thomas Mann House

Mann’s first speeches were broadcast from Princeton where the Princeton Radio Research Project had been underway since 1937 led by fellow émigré Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and around the time Theodor Adorno left the Project for Los Angeles. Lazarsfeld and the Little Annie Project, or the Stanton-Lazarsfeld Program Analyzer was a tool to record the listening habits of radio listeners. This also the same location from where The War of the Worlds was infamously broadcast in 1938 and Stanton an eventual chair at the Rand Corporation.

“What happened in Germany convinced me more and more of the value of Zionism for the Jew.” Thomas Mann.

The Home of Salka and Bertold Viertel

“Los Angeles was as crowded with artists as the renaissance time. It was a sort of harmonic convergence of superstar European intellectuals who found themselves in this environment suddenly not really by their choice, but here they were, and it was Salka Viertel that was what you might think of as the glue that kept this community together.” Donna Rifkind, Remembering the Exiles: Salka Viertel

The Viertel’s were prominent in the early Weimar scene. As early as 1920 Berthold worked with UFA, the German film industry equivalent to Hollywood. Both Berthold and Salka members of the intelligentsia in Weimar. Berthold involved in the early silent era of film in Germany prior to coming to America. His, Joyless Street (1925), Uneasy Money (1926) are works of the New Objectivity film movement neue sachlichkeit. Films in this genre had story lines focused on what were social taboos of the time like abortion, prostitution, homosexuality and addictive personality disorder. This movement fell with that of the Weimar Republic.

The Viertel home was an immensely important gathering place for landing emigres, famously hosting the 70th birthday of Heinrich Mann.

Salka Viertel (Salomea Sara Steuermann), was born into a political salon. She grew up in a small town on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian border in Galicia. Her parents were non observant and her father was a wealthy lawyer and the first Jewish mayor of the city in which she was born.  Salka became a prominent actress in German-speaking theatre, and was cast in several starring roles under famous Austrian director Max Reinhardt, born Maximilian Goldmann. Salka toured all the European capitals including Munich, Vienna, Berlin, and Dusseldorf, playing in the many Reinhardt owned Deutsches Theatres across Europe. It is here she met both F.W. Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch. Both actors in Reinhardt’s ensemble.

“Salka’s brother studied with Arnold Schoenberg and as a solo pianist he premiered the composer’s Pierrot lunaire.” (The Shlvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Woman)

Berthold Viertel

Eva Herrmann

Eva Herrmann, an exiled painter and illustrator moved to Los Angeles in 1940 and would live within walking distance of both Huxley and Mann. Hermann promoted through her art George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley and Bertolt Brecht and contributed the front cover art for the German, Russian, and English versions of Feuchtwanger’s 1939 novel, Exil. Hermmann, a close friend of the Manns, first joined them in exile in Sanary sur Mer. She would later move not far up the Pacific Coast Highway to Santa Barbara, known colloquially as ‘the American Riviera’, where her home too would become a important gathering place for many German-speaking emigres.

The Weimar culture that was being abolished in Germany for its alleged degeneracies just so happens to be the same type of ‘art’ that Hollywood began producing upon their arrival.

Bertholt Brecht

A famous poet and playwright, Bertholt Brecht worked with Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis. The two launched their collaboration of Hangmen Also Die! in May of 1942 while on the beach reading The Los Angeles Times’ description of the assassination of Hitler’s hangman, Reinhard Heyrich. For Brecht, the collaboration with Lang was an opportunity to break into the Hollywood scene. The two would take considerable artistic liberty with the actual historical events portrayed in Hangmen Also Die! And like many of the films from this era, are today largely looked upon as propaganda films. By July, Brecht had declared the movie a “dismal fabrication” (Weimar on the Pacific, Erhard Bahr, pg. 135.) Brecht would continue working on the script through September of that year with John Wexley out of the United Artists studio on Las Palmas street in Hollywood, Wexley, an American writer of several film noir crime dramas and the author of the very first anti-Nazi film, Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. 

Hanns Eisler

Arriving in Los Angeles from New York in 1942, where he was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research, Eisler would also work with Brecht on many projects in which Brecht authored the poetry or screen play and Eisler contributed the musical score. The Eislers were able to purchase a home on Amalfi near Huxley and Mann due to Hanns’ musical composition on, Hangmen Also Die! Eisler contributed to at least nine feature films while in Los Angeles and “the Eisler’s house became a popular meeting place among European emigres. Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Kortner, Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, and the Manns became frequent guests. Eisler, like Mann, ‘acted as mediator between quarreling personalities.’ Brecht and Mann infamous combatants at these gatherings. And as early as 1943 Eisler was under FBI surveillance and was called, “the Karl Marx of music.” AVTMH 

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Frankfurt School leaders Max Horkheimer and Theodor Ludwig Weisengrund Adorno were also living in the hills of Los Angeles, having both landed first at Columbia University in New York. Horkheimer established the University in Exile at Columbia through negotiations with Abbott Lawrence Lowell, while Adorno worked at Princeton under another Rockefeller émigré Paul Felix Lazarsfeld. Both Horkheimer and Adorno were major figures in the political salon activities and it is their critical theory that proved to be so effective as a dialectic to Western life. They were to use modernism as an entering wedge to create a “societal rupture”, removing Americans from their moorings and anchored tradition as a result. Like Herbert Croly’s, The Promise of American Life was the manifesto for the Progressive movement, or how Huxley’s A Brave New World, Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy were used to inspire the Human Potential movement and more, The Dialectic of Enlightenment we see being used as a blueprint.

Their critical theory laying the groundwork for all critical theorists to follow. Their book a manifesto. Horkheimer the early director of the Frankfurt School and Adorno a leading figure and eventual director when he returned to Germany. Horkheimer set up The University in Exile, in conjunction with Progressive founding fathers, Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson. Adorno working at Princeton, where Lazarsfeld in his aformentioned study of radio listening habits first coined the terms, ‘narcotizing dysfunction’, the ‘two step’ and the ‘hypodermic needle flow of communication models’ describing perfectly the mainstream media of today.

Horkheimer and his wife Rose were witnesses at The Mann’s citizenship confirmation. Horkheimer lived “three minutes walking distance from the Mann’s home while finishing The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) together with his fellow Frankfurt exile Theodor Adorno, who lived a 10-minute drive away.” AVTMH Instagram

Robert K. Merton, born Meyer Robert Schkolnick;

Prior to film noir, “the moviegoer [was] accustomed to certain conventions: a logical development of action, a clear distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters, sharp motives, scenes more showy then authentically violent, a beautiful heroine and an honest hero” (Borde and Chaumenton) In film noir however, the moviegoer was confronted with a world that did not conform to his expectations: there were “likeable killers and corrupt cops. Good and evil go hand in hand to the point of being indistinguishable. Robbers become ordinary guys … The victim seems as guilty as the hitman who is just doing his job.” (Border and Chaumeton 25). It was the moviegoer’s task to sort out this confusion – a task similar to that of the observer of epic theater. But while epic theater forced its spectators to make decisions as outside observers, film noir had the moviegoers emotionally involved in the action and inspired “that state of tension instilled in the spectator when the psychological reference points are removed. The aim of film noir was to create a specific alienation.”

(Towards a Definition of Film Noir, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, pg. 24,25)

For the film noir era, “the most marked and persistent influence … is surely that of German Expressionism. American horror films owe a huge amount to Caligarism.”

“The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it [the motion picture] seeks to purvey entertainment.” Edward Bernays, Propaganda, pg. 156.

Conclusion

“Los Angeles was as crowded with artists as the renaissance time. It was a sort of harmonic convergence of superstar European intellectuals who found themselves in this environment suddenly not really by their choice, but here they were, and it was Salka Viertel that was what you might think of as the glue that kept this community together.” Donna Rifkind, Remembering the Exiles: Salka Viertel

As a result of public outrage at the corrupted storylines, The Hays Code was created as an attempt to regulate the content or subject matter of Hollywood movies. Named after William Harrison Hays Sr., the director of the newly appointed Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).  Previously unseen and even unknown concepts like sexual innuendo, sexual perversion, romantic and sexual relationships between white and black people (miscegenation), willful offense to any nation, race, or creed, mild profanity, illegal trafficking of drugs, promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, abortion, intense violence, and homosexuality were rampant and shocking, all of these topics have become normalized today.

“Special care” was to be used when broaching subjects like: international relations, arson, the use of firearms, theft, robbery, safe-cracking, technique of murder, torture, hangings, sedition, marriage consummation, cruelty to children, deliberate seduction of girls, excessive or lustful kissing and so on. This period coinciding precisely with the influx of German-speaking emigres. But not only that, they were generally practitioners of these behaviours themselves. Many within the Exile circle were bisexual. Huxley’s wife and even Huxley himself seem to have been willing participants.

William Harrison Hays Sr.

Hollywood was always of questionable moral standards and today, as we trace back these less desirable qualities of society, we find their origins go directly back to the film noir era of the early twentieth century. Hollywood itself was meant to degrade Western life from the very beginning and despite all of the efforts to curb degeneracy and depravity from entering Hollywood movies, we see this explicit behaviour increase with the release of movies like: The Moon Is Blue, The Man With The Golden Arm, and Anatomy of a Murder, One Summer of Happiness, Summer with Monika, Suddenly Last Summer, Psycho, Some Like It Hot, Victim, A Taste of Honey, and The Leather Boys. All of these movies challenging existing taboos and traditional gender roles while confronting homophobia, infidelity and adultery. Many of the lead characters in film noir were homosexuals, had addictions, appeared androgynous or were troubled in some way. The movies nudged once controversial topics into the acceptable lexicon through our empathy for the protagonist.

It was a collective assault on the mind, body, and spirit of every American. When we talk about the demoralization of America, this is how it was done. When we talk about them removing our moorings and anchors this is how it was done. The removal of morality through the film noir genre was first made popular in Berlin in the interwar period and then emigrated to Hollywood. The Weimar culture began immediately following the signing of the Versailles Treaty and flourished under the Weimar Republic. They came to America already established in their roles. They were officially intelligentsia. Promoting dalliances, or one-night sexual encounters. It was a “buggers paradise” and even a cursory look into the Weimar and German expressionism we see all kinds of similarities to our Western world today, reminding us through its imagery of movies like Eyes Wide Shut, the rise of MTV culture, sadomasochism, and even bestiality.

Germany was crushed under the Versailles Treaty and German culture and its people quickly fell into chaos due to hyperinflation, starvation and Western occupation. A fifteen-year French occupation of German coal reserves and a reparation package the equivalent of trillions today, meant to be impossible to honour – was written by the Allies.  The Treaty authored vindictively, most likely through the Dulles brothers, was what British economist John Maynard Keynes called a Carthaginian peace. An agreement meant to cripple. A Debellatio.

From this background sprung the Weimar Republic and it is during this time Berlin becomes a cesspool of sexual depravity and excess. Brothels were everywhere and prostitutes numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The tawdry and salacious theatre and plays common at the time inspired various nicknames for Berlin: The Shangra-La by the Spree, The Edge City and Babylon Berlin. We today in the West witness so many similarities to this era of the Weimar, its hard not to make certain connections and wonder if the now even more brutal list of horror and neo-noir movies being released for public consumption aren’t just an extension of this movement, further engraining messages of immorality, absurdity and chaos into the minds of America well over one hundred years after it all began.