[History] [Viereck, George Sylvester. (1884 - 1962)] Schwab, Charles M. (1862 - 1939) & Couglin, Charles (1891 - 1973)
Three Letters to George Viereck
Two TLS and one ALS to the poet and Nazi apologist, including one (April 15, 1932) from the American steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, declining to ask any questions of Mr. [Leon] Trotsky, the Marxist revolutionary, founder and leader of the Red Army. Another (October 26, 1938), from the controversial Roman Catholic priest Charles Couglin, stating that he was "very anxious to hear the news you have gleaned from abroad." Coughlin, one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience -up to thirty million listeners tuned to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s - was forced off the air in 1939 after he used his radio program to issue antisemitic commentary and to support some of the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Together with an ALS on Fordham University (NY) letterhead, in an unknown hand.George Sylvester Viereck, second generation German-American whose father was reputedly the illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm I, achieved worldwide fame as a poet in the first decade of the twentieth century. His works included Nineveh and Other Poems (1907). Before and during World War I, George Sylvester Viereck became an outspoken advocate for Germany, publishing a journal called The Fatherland. In the period between the wars, he interviewed Adolph Hitler, and began to express strong pro-Nazi sentiments. In 1934, Viereck harangued 20,000 "Friends of the New Germany" in a swastika-draped Madison Square Garden. When the US entered World War II, Viereck was indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, convicted, and imprisoned from 1942 to 1947. His son Peter Viereck (1916-2006), who wrote angry rebuttals to his father's views and served in the US Army in that war, was himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet (1949) considered a founding influence on the modern American conservative movement. (11478)
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