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Overview
A renowned journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer chronicles his own life story—in a personal history that parallels the greater historical events for which he served as a witness. In the first of a three-volume series, Shirer tells of his early life, growing up in Cedar Rapids, and later serving as a new reporter in Paris. In this surprisingly intimate account, Shirer details his youthful challenges, setbacks, rebellions, and insights into the world around him. He offers personal accounts of his friendships with notable people including Isadora Duncan, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis.
This fascinating personal account also provides an illuminating look into a lost pre-World War II era—and is notable as much for its historical value as for its autobiographical detail. Ideal for anyone fascinated by this period in history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780795334214 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | RosettaBooks |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Series: | Twentieth Century Journey , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 492 |
| Sales rank: | 527,670 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FROM MAIN STREET TO THE LEFT BANK, 1925
One bright June morning in 1925, a few days after graduation from college, I drove with my uncle out the Lincoln Highway from our town in Iowa headed for Chicago and for points farther east that I had never seen. I planned to make it that summer to Washington and New York and finally, after London — I could not quite believe it — to Paris.
From Main Street to the Left Bank! A lot of college graduates, scornful of the inanities of the Coolidge era, "The Era of Wonderful Nonsense," as Scott Fitzgerald called it, were doing it, if only, as in my case, for a couple of summer months. Paris loomed as paradise, the City of Light and Enlightenment, the Center of Civilization, after our growing up in the American wasteland. We wanted to get away from Prohibition, fundamentalism, puritanism, Coolidgeism, Babbittry, ballyhoo, the booster antics of Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce — all the cant of the bourgeois who dominated our land and made it, we thought, such a mindless, shoddy place to live in.
We had grown up in our college years, despite the efforts of our teachers to keep our minds off current literature, on the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt, and the thundering of H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury against the homo boobiens of the American hinterland. They had rubbed in what we knew all too well from our young lives: the cultural poverty of the Midwest small town; the tyrannical pressures to conform to a narrow, conservative, puritan norm; the hollowness of the small- town booster Babbitt businessmen; the worship of business and profits and financial success by our sanctimonious and churchy Christians.
A few months before — fabulous day! — I had received from the great Mencken a letter he had obviously typed himself thanking me for an item I had sent him for his "Americana" column.
Dear Mr. Shirer:
Thanks very much for the clipping. I believe that Dr. Pinto has started a movement that will sweep the country. Christian people everywhere will be hot for it, once they hear of it. I am trying to set it going in the south.
Sincerely yours, H. L. Mencken
I no longer remember who Dr. Pinto was or the nature of his movement, though it must have been idiotic. Perhaps it was he I had seen quoted in the local Gazette as telling the Rotary in nearby Waterloo that "Rotary is a manifestation of the divine."
Such hocus-pocus was not confined, of course, to our Corn Belt. One read in the Mercury, in the radical weeklies, and even in the daily press of "manifestations" from coast to coast of the divinity in business and businessmen. There were the indefatigable divine Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, addressing conventions of businessmen on "Religion in Business," and the promotion pamphlet put out by the Metropolitan Casualty Insurance Company, with an introduction by Dr. Cadman, entitled "Moses, Persuader of Men," which declared that "Moses was one of the greatest salesmen and real-estate promoters that ever lived ... a Dominant, Fearless and Successful Personality in one of the most magnificent selling campaigns that history has ever placed on its pages."
Jesus Christ, in this respect, was celebrated as even a greater salesman. That summer Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows was climbing to the top of the best-seller list. Even in our town, where reading books was not very much indulged in (there was no time for it, our busy businessmen said), the book was selling well and being read, and hailed even in some of the Protestant pulpits. The man nobody knew turned out to be Jesus, "the founder of modern business ... a great executive ... whose parables were the most powerful advertisements of all time ... He would be a national advertiser today ..."
He picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world ... Nowhere is there such a startling example of executive success as the way in which that organization was brought together.
These idiotic ramblings were hailed by the country as gospel. After all, at the very moment of my leaving that summer the great "Monkey Trial" was getting under way in Dayton, Tennessee. It seemed too absurd to be real, but there it was, spread all over the front pages as I made my way east. John Thomas Scopes, a twenty-four-year-old highschool biology teacher, was being tried for violation of the Tennessee anti-evolution law that made it unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Scopes, following a state-approved textbook, Hunter's Civic Biology, had taught the latter, giving his highschool students a brief outline of the Darwinian theory of the origin of species. For this he was arrested and put on trial. Later it would be learned that Scopes, half in jest, had agreed with some of the bright young townsmen over soda pop at Robinson's drugstore to allow himself to be the subject of a test case.
Overnight it became a celebrated trial, a battle of Christian fundamentalism against modern science, with William Jennings Bryan, thrice the Democratic candidate for President and once Secretary of State, as chief prosecutor, and Clarence Darrow, the knotty, agnostic criminal lawyer from Chicago, who had defended anarchists, trade-union leaders, and more recently Leopold and Loeb in the famous murder case, heading the defense. Hundreds of reporters from the metropolitan papers descended on the hillbilly town, steaming under the summer sun, to recount every word of the two great antagonists. Their dispatches were splashed over the front pages, not only in America but abroad, where the trial was regarded as the latest aberration of the primitive Yankees. By the time I got to England and France, just after the case was finished, people asked in amazement how such a spectacle was possible in the enlightened Republic of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
The climax of the trial came when Darrow put Bryan on the stand as an authority on the Bible, provoking a scene that the staid New York Times called the most amazing courtroom drama in Anglo-Saxon history. Under Darrow's sharp, sarcastic questioning Bryan declared his belief in the literal truth of the Biblical story of Creation. The world, he said, had been created in 4004 B.C. and the Flood had occurred around 2348 B.C.
"Don't you know," asked Darrow, "that there are any number of civilizations — China, Egypt — that are traced back to more than five thousand years?"
"I'm not satisfied by any evidence I have seen," Bryan replied.
"You have never in all your life made any attempt to find out about the other peoples of the earth — how old their civilizations are, how long they have existed on the earth — have you?" Darrow persisted.
"No, sir. I have been so well satisfied with the Christian religion that I have spent no time trying to find arguments against it. I have all the information I want to live by and to die by."
Asked about the religions of Confucius and Buddha, Bryan retorted, "I think they are very inferior ... The Christian religion has satisfied me, and I have never felt it necessary to look up some competing religion."
Darrow was relentless.
"Mr. Bryan, do you believe that the first woman was Eve?"
"Yes."
"Do you believe she was literally made out of Adam's rib?"
"I do."
"Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?"
"No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her."
"Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?"
"I believe what the Bible says."
It was a trying day for the perspiring Bryan in the Tennessee heat on the courthouse lawn to which the trial had been moved that day to accommodate the multitude, and he was the object of much derision in most of the big-city press the next day, though the fundamentalists in the state and elsewhere in the South — and no doubt in the North — were reported pleased by the stout defense of their beliefs by the Champion. Scopes was found guilty and fined a hundred dollars, and less than a week later Bryan was dead from exhaustion. Darrow had hoped to appeal right up to the United States Supreme Court, but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Dayton court on a technicality, thus preventing appeal. At the same time it upheld the anti- evolution law, which remained on the statute books for decades.
It was in such an atmosphere of bigotry and banality that I took leave of my country that bright summer. I was fed up with it. I yearned for some place, if only for a few weeks, that was more civilized, where a man could drink a glass of wine or a stein of beer without breaking the law, where you could believe and say what you wanted to about religion or anything else without being put upon, where inanity had not become a way of life, and where a writer or an artist or a philosopher, or merely a dreamer, was considered just as good as, if not better than, the bustling businessman. Where, too, you could lead your own life, do as you pleased, get drunk or make love, without Mrs. Grundy or the police or the preacher or the teacher breathing down your neck.
It would be rather far from the truth, though, to give the impression that at twenty-one, just out of a small Midwest college, having grown up the last twelve years in an Iowa town of forty-five thousand in the center of the Corn Belt, I had become so alienated that I thought of myself as permanently fleeing the tawdry land for the civilized haunts of Europe. Probably I was, in many ways, a pretty typical small-town Iowa boy. Though America seemed to have become a rather foolish place in the time of Harding and Coolidge, both Presidents so dreadfully mediocre and so popular and esteemed, I intended, nevertheless, to return and take my chances in it. I had rebelled against much, disliked more, yet on the whole my growing up in an Iowa town in a fatherless family that was financially rather strapped had been a happy one. I had had to work hard to augment our meager income and get on in school, but there was a lot of play and fun, too. Never had I felt a moment of boredom, which was supposed to be chronic in the Midwest Main Street towns. There were moments of outrage, to be sure, of discouragement and sadness and even, occasionally, melancholy. But also of joy, exhilaration, hope, love — and always a zest for life, such as it was. I had learned long before twenty-one that it was never easy, usually baffling, often incredible but sometimes wondrous, not only in America but elsewhere, not only now but always, since the beginning.
For all their blasts against its idiocies, Lewis and Mencken and Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg, my literary idols, loved the country, thrived on it, and seemed to be having a pretty good time. You could feel that, beneath the barbs. Though a lot of writers, artists and students were rushing off to Paris, these giants, all but Mencken from the Midwest, were staying put, mining the rich material that lay at hand. For better or worse, they reminded you, it was the only country you had.
* * *
To be sure, in the back of my mind that last year in college was a vague idea that I might be able to prolong my stay in Paris. But it was very nebulous and I did not take it seriously. I had the choice of two jobs already offered, one at the college, the other at the nearby University of Iowa, and I intended to return to one of them — and also to the college girl I was engaged to and hoped shortly to marry. Anyway, I didn't have the money to stay on in Paris. I had borrowed a hundred dollars from the president of the college and, the day before, wheedled the loan of another hundred from my rather reluctant uncle. But two hundred dollars couldn't keep me in Europe more than the couple of months I had planned.
Still, there was a crazy thought in the dim recesses of my consciousness that would not quite die. A classmate had told me of a friend of his by the name of Bill Bridges, who, after finishing at Franklin College in Indiana, had got a job on one of the American newspapers in Paris. That would be a way of staying on, and I couldn't quite get it out of my mind. One spring evening I mentioned it to my mother, who did not much like it. A few evenings later she called in a distant "uncle" named Franchere, from some French branch of the family, who ran a declining department store in town, The Fair, in which we had a little almost worthless stock. He had served in some capacity, perhaps in the Y.M.C.A., in France during the war and, I believe, had grown up in Paris. He still spoke with a trace of a French accent. He took a dim view of my dream. The climate in Paris, he said, was terrible. It rained all the time; the houses were dank and cold, being largely unheated in the winter, when the sun seldom shone. An Iowa boy could scarcely hope to survive in the place. You were bound to come down with tuberculosis, as he had before he came to the promised land. Besides, he added, there were the temptations of the gay city. When my mother, who was rather innocent, asked what they might be, he replied, very embarrassedly and apologizing for his "frankness," that the women were "loose" and that, as a matter of plain fact, the city licensed legal "houses" — "maisons," he said (that was as far as he would describe them) — which abounded in every street. I found this information rather intriguing, but my mother, tolerant though she was, recoiled from it in horror.
Probably she considered the matter closed, and I thought it wise not to bring it up again. It was only a dream, after all. Bill Bridges had written my friend that there were thousands of students and hundreds of genuine newspapermen applying for jobs in Paris and that not more than two or three made it each summer. So the chances were really nil, though it would do no harm to apply when I got to Paris. I also intended to sound out the city editors of the World and the Times for a job when I passed through New York, just in case. But I had no illusions that a youngster with my limited experience of a couple of summers during college on a small-town daily could break in at once on those two great metropolitan newspapers — or on the ones in Paris either. So I accepted as settled my return to a job in Iowa and to the girl I had promised to marry. My mother seemed confident that the young coed, if not the job, would fetch me back. She had become extremely fond of her. She was a lovely girl, dark blond, with dancing green eyes, a straight nose, a full and rather sensuous mouth, a trim figure, and a saucy manner and mind. For over a year I had been in love with her. A few months before, I had given her my fraternity pin, after the custom of the campus, as a token of our engagement. I hated to leave her and to be so far away, even for two months. But as June came, and four years of college were wound up in the sentimental exercises of commencement and the farewells to campus and friends, I grew more and more excited at the anticipation of the summer's journey to places that for so long had seemed out of reach. I had the money in hand for the expenses in Europe. I had a contract with a marine agent in Montreal to work my way on a cattle boat from that port to Manchester, England, with a free trip back on a returning boat, without cattle to tend, at the end of the summer. On the way I would stop over in Washington and New York, attend a conference of college newspaper editors at Woodstock, New York, to which I had been invited (all expenses paid), and while away a few days with some distant relatives at Canton, New York, up the St. Lawrence River from Montreal.
* * *
I said goodbye to my mother and to my sister, who had been teaching school in a nearby town since graduating from our college three years before. My mother had continued to be uneasy about the venture but she had not opposed it. She had a remarkable tolerance for us children and what she considered our wild schemes and our unruly ways. Though her life had been terribly circumscribed — widowed twelve years before by the sudden death of my father at the age of forty-two in Chicago, with three young children to bring up — she had attained a wisdom which I did not fully appreciate until years later. Left with little more than a small life-insurance payment and the house in Chicago, she had never complained about her problems. By some miracle, for she said she never understood "finances," she had seen us through school, leaving us with complete freedom to grow as we might. My younger brother still had two years to go, and already was not sure he wanted to finish at our college. As rebellious as I, he found it intellectually rather arid. I had bid him goodbye a week before when he went off to Stone City to spend the summer working in a stone quarry nearby, where Grant Wood, who had not yet burst upon the country with his paintings, was talking about setting up an artists' colony.
The parting over, my uncle and I drove past the campus, where I picked up some old pipes and a bottle of bootleg "hootch" I had left in the office of the Cosmos, the weekly college paper I had edited that last year. Smoking on the campus was strictly forbidden and secreting bootleg whiskey on the premises in those Prohibition days was not only breaking the law of the land but would have brought instant dismissal had one been caught.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Start, 1904–1930"
by .
Copyright © 2014 William L. Shirer.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction,
Book One From Main Street to the Left Bank, 1925,
Book Two Chicago, 1904–1913,
Book Three Growing Up in Iowa, 1913–1925,
Book Four Growing Up in Paris, 1925–1927,
Book Five Foreign Correspondent, 1927–1930,
Book Six Roving Correspondent, 1928–1930,