History on Display: Americans and the Holocaust
On a recent trip home to Springfield, Missouri, I had the chance to visit a traveling exhibition titled Americans and the Holocaust at the local public library. Sponsored by the United States Holocaust Museum and the American Library Association, the exhibition is small but powerful. The exhibit includes some well-done general context about the Nazis’ rise to power and the beginnings of World War II, but that is not its focus. Instead, as its title suggests, Americans and the Holocaust considers difficult questions about what Americans could have known about the Holocaust and when, and about the motives and fears that shaped the United States’ unwillingness to do more to save Jews and others who suffered under the Nazi regime.
I was familiar with much of the material because I have spent the last few years reading, writing, and now talking about the issues the exhibit covers. And yet, some of the details were new to me, and some that I was familiar with hit me hard all over again. Here are some of the things that caught my attention in particular:
• In November, 1938, American newspapers ran front page stories and banner headlines about the violence of what became known as Kristallnacht. In a Gallup public opinion poll conducted several weeks later, ninety-four percent of Americans disapproved of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. In that same poll, seventy-one percent did not want the United States to admit more Jewish refugees, a position that was clearly reflected in our immigration policies at the time.
• In late 1943, officials in the Treasury Department learned that the State Department had been blocking reports about the mass murder of Jews.[1] Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau went around the State Department and took the information directly to President Roosevelt in January, 1944. Roosevelt then signed an executive order establishing the War Refugee Board, which is credited with saving some 200,000 refugees.
• More than half of all Americans heard Edward R. Morrow’s broadcast from the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1945. Before that, reporters had told Americans over and over about the brutality of Nazi oppression, against Jews, communists, political dissenters, and others, but many Americans had found it all too easy to disbelieve. Now that was impossible. As Life magazine summed it up, “Last week Americans could no longer doubt stories of Nazi cruelty. For the first time there was irrefutable evidence.”
• A story I am very familiar with, but think it is important to emphasize whenever possible: After the liberation of Ohdruf, General Eisenhower visited the camp. The visual evidence and verbal testimony of the brutality of the camps made him ill. But he had no doubt of the importance of his visit. “I made the visit deliberately,” he wrote to Army Chief of Staff George Marshall three days later,” in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever in the future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”
Not an easy story to read. Too important to dismiss.
The exhibition is nearing the end of its second tour of libraries in smaller cities, but you still have six months to track it down. You can read more about the exhibit and see the tour schedule here.
[1] I have unsubstantiated thoughts about how the demographics of the State Department contributed to this.
Celebrating the Fourth of July
Here in the United States, we’re heading into the July 4th weekend–a holiday that expands or contracts depending on where in the week it falls.
It’s also a holiday where the meaning of what we are celebrating is often lost in the celebration itself.
In the past I’ve used this post to remind all of us of this ideal which stands at the core of who we are:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This year, I’d like to remind you of another quotation from our history, the words written on the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! “
Over the years, we’ve had trouble living up to both ideals. Over the years, some heroic figures have fought to keep them alive.
Molly Pitcher(s?)
See footnote 1 below
In 1876, caught up in the patriotic excitement of the first centennial of the American Revolution, the people of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, raised a stone inscribed “Molly Pitcher” over the previously unmarked grave of a local resident, Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley (ca. 1754–1832). In the years before her death, Hays claimed to have served at the Battle of Monmouth, on June 28, 1778, carrying water to the artillerymen, including her husband, William Hays. When Hays was wounded and unable to continue, she stepped in as an impromptu member of the artillery team. A hundred years after the fact, she looked like a shoo-in for the legendary figure of Molly Pitcher.[1]
One resident of Carlisle, Jeremiah Zeamer, editor of the local newspaper, felt strongly that McCauley should not be so honored. He wrote to Congressman Marlin E. Olmsted that local townswomen remembered McCauley as “a vulgar, very profane, drunken old woman.”[2]
Despite Zeamer’s objections, there is no reason to think McCauley’s account wasn’t true. A similar story appears in the memoir of Joseph Plumb Martin, published in the 1830s under the name Private Yankee Doodle. Writing about the Battle of Monmouth, Martin mentions
one little incident [that] happened during the heat of the cannonade, which I was eyewitness to. . . . A woman whose husband belonged to the artillery and who was then attached to a piece in the engagement, attended with her husband at the piece the whole time. While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage then [sic] carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. Looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else, and continued her occupation.
He does not name this irrepressible artillery woman, and there is no direct evidence linking her with McCauley. (On the other hand, there is no evidence that Martin’s unknown woman wasn’t McCauley, either.) But there is a bawdiness to the story that seems in keeping with Zeamer’s later complaints. Moreover, the fact that the Pennsylvania legislature granted her a pension for her services during the war, which may well have included carrying water to the cannon, lends credence to the story.
But McCauley isn’t the only serious candidate for the title.
Margaret Corbin (1752–1800) is known to have wo-manned an artillery piece on the field at least once.[3] Corbin followed her husband, John, from one military camp to another during the American Revolution. They were both on the field at the Battle of Fort Washington in New York City, on November 16, 1776: John as an artilleryman and Corbin as a water carrier.[4] When enemy gunfire killed her husband, Corbin took his place at the cannon. She didn’t stop until she was wounded by a blast of grapeshot that mangled her shoulder and left breast. After the battle, the British captured Corbin near her cannon; both the British and the Americans treated her as a combatant prisoner of war. Released on parole, she was assigned to the Continental Army’s invalid corps until mustered out of the army in 1783—raising the question of whether she enlisted alongside her husband.[5] After the war, Congress awarded Corbin a wounded soldier’s pension.[6] In 1926, Corbin’s remains were transferred from Highland Falls, New York, to the government cemetery at West Point.
That should have been the end of her story. But confusion about identity is a central part of the Molly Pitcher name and legend. In 2016, workmen disturbed the remains. Examination by a forensic anthropologist revealed the bones to be those of an unknown middle- aged man. Corbin’s bones are nowhere to be found.
In addition to Hays and Corbin, there are accounts of an unnamed woman who fired a cannon at the Battle of Fort Clinton in the Hudson River Valley in October 1777. There may be at least one more Molly Pitcher whose story remains untold.
Excerpted from Women Warriors: An Unexpected History
[1] The first known use of the name is a painting titled Molly Pitcher, the Heroine of Monmouth, by Nathaniel Currier, of Currier and Ives fame, dated 1848, seventy years after the battle.
[2] Not that vulgarity, profanity, and/or drunkenness preclude heroism. Zeamer believed those qualities did, however, preclude being honored with public monuments when so many “Revolutionary heroes who led useful and respected lives” remained obscure.
[3] Known in the camps as “Dirty Kate,” she was no more respectable than McCauley. With the (possible) exception of officers’ wives, the women who followed eighteenth-century armies were rough around the edges, if not all the way to the core.
[4] The nature of eighteenth-century artillery is important to understanding the Molly Pitcher story. In order to be sure no sparks or hot embers remained in the breech, gunners swabbed out muzzle-loading cannons with wet sponges after each round was fired before they loaded the next powder charge—adding fresh powder before extinguishing embers from the previous round was a short path to “kaboom!” A well-organized artillery battery had casks of water nearby for the purpose of wetting the sponges. But not every team was well organized. Armies were taken by surprise. And casks ran dry over the course of hours of battle. Women in the army’s camp often performed the hazardous job of carrying water to the artillery line—in buckets, not pitchers. Firing a cannon was not a one-woman job—it took at least three people. When a gun crew lost a man, it’s a fair assumption that the woman who brought the water knew enough to step into the breach as a rammer or a sponger. (Though she probably didn’t know enough to perform the mathematical calculations required to place a cannonball on target. A difficult skill to pick up on the fly.)
[5] It’s possible. Some women’s names appear on the rosters of local militia.
[6] And a complete set of new clothes! Not a standard benefit for veterans of the time.