American Pravda: Six Unknown Books Against a Century of Falsehoods

Ron Unz • November 3, 2025 • 16,800 Words Sociologist Edward Alsworth RossAudio Player00:0000:00Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

Unknown Books and How They Transform Our History of World War II

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World War II was the most colossal military conflict in all of human history, and the shaping event of our modern world.

As a consequence, over the last eighty years it has become the subject of hundreds of thousands of books and articles written in English, and an equally vast outpouring of electronic media content based upon these.

But in a long article I published last week, I emphasized that some of the most important books on that topic remain almost entirely unknown today because the information or analysis they provide deviates so sharply from the standard narrative promoted by our mainstream media.

• American Pravda: A Dozen Unknown Books and the World War II History They Reveal
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 27, 2025 • 17,600 Words

The authors of these works were not fringe figures but instead individuals of the greatest mainstream credibility and expertise, and some of their books even became national bestsellers. But because the facts and analysis of events they provided differed so drastically from our standard narrative, their books soon lapsed into obscurity, and are almost totally unknown today, unknown not merely to the general public but even to educated elites and professional historians.

If we take the material contained in these works seriously and incorporate it into our analysis, our entire understanding of World War II is completely transformed.

Over the years I have done exactly that and by connecting those dots, I have reconstructed a history of that conflict differing in many important respects from that of any other account that has come to my attention:

• The True History of World War II
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • June 2, 2025 • 14,300 Words
• American Pravda: Understanding World War II
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 23, 2019 • 20,500 Words

The First World War and the Second World War

Later this month is Veterans Day, a public holiday originally established to mark the end of the First World War, a conflict so enormous that its contemporaries called it "the Great War."

Some modern historians consider the First and Second World Wars as merely the bookend military conflicts of a single Great European Civil War that fell into two distinct phases. An obvious analogy would be the long Peloponnesian War of the early fifth century B.C. in which the rival Spartan and Athenian alliances devastated Classical Greece and whose two different periods of combat were separated by a long peace in the middle.

Seen in this light, the First World War and the extremely harsh and one-sided Treaty of Versailles that ended it merely amounted to the first round of that massive conflict. The ultimate result was the destruction of most of Europe and the eclipse of that continent as the center of the world's political and economic leadership.

So although the human and material losses of the first round were dwarfed by that of the second, if that first round had never been fought or had gone differently, the second might have been averted, thereby saving many tens of millions of lives.

My extensive research has led me to conclude that our standard history of World War II is so extremely distorted that in many respects it amounts to an inverted version of what actually happened. That raises the natural question of whether the same might be true of the First World War.

Based upon all my reading and investigation, I do not think that is the case. I believe that the correct history of the First World War is roughly along the lines of what I had read in all my introductory textbooks decades ago.

Triggered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, two large rival military alliances blundered into a war that neither had actively sought nor expected, and one that turned out to be vastly larger and more disastrous than anyone had ever contemplated, producing unprecedented death and destruction. Most of the political and military leaders assumed that a major European war would last only a few months, but instead it continued for more than five years. The ultimate results included the destruction of four longstanding European political empires, the fateful Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and a bitter peace that set the stage for an even more disastrous sequel two decades later.

Three years ago I described some of the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the war:

Two major historical volumes focusing on exactly that last topic had appeared about a decade ago, just before the hundredth-year anniversary, and they strongly reinforced that same conclusion with exhaustive scholarship. The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark and July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin, together received a very lengthy and favorable front-page treatment in the NYT Book Review by Harold Evans, former editor of the Times of London. I'd read the first of these books a couple of years ago and the second just very recently, and found them both excellent, telling as they did a broadly similar story across their combined 1,100 pages.
McMeekin's very detailed narrative of the exact circumstances and decision-making process during July 1914 greatly emphasizes the extremely important role of unexpected, contingent factors that could so easily have diverted the history from its track. For example, just prior to the assassination in Sarajevo, Britain seemed on the very verge of violent civil war over Irish Home Rule, a conflict so bitter that it was weeks before the Cabinet even considered the developing situation in the Balkans, so if those latter events had occurred just a couple of months later, British military involvement might have been impossible. Similarly, by his strong initial stand against any attack on Serbia, the powerful Hungarian Prime Minister prevented the sort of immediate retaliatory strike that probably would have avoided bringing in other countries, unlike the eventual attack that came more than a month after the assassination; so the determined peace policy of a leading European statesman actually helped trigger the wider war. In all these countries, there were obviously powerful factions that had spent years pressing for war, but there were other powerful factions that felt otherwise, and the circumstances of the outbreak depended largely upon the particular decisions made.
Once the enormous conflict began, assigning the exact measure of guilt for the calamity became a strategic objective during the years that followed, especially on the part of the Allies, with Clark even noting that both the French and the Russians created fraudulent documents that they then inserted into their own diplomatic archives. The scholarly dispute over relative war-guilt has continued unabated for more than a century now, and while neither of these books settles the matter, I do think that they provide a very solid factual basis, explaining exactly who did what and when, thereby allowing each of us to assign the appropriate quantity of guilt to those particular actions.

I am certainly aware that others have presented extremely different accounts of that conflict.

For example, amateur British historians Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor published Hidden History in 2013 and Prolonging the Agony in 2017. These books, especially the first, have become wildly popular in conspiratorial circles and they provide an analysis of the origins and course of the First World War that is radically different from the widely-accepted standard narrative. But although I read both books, I found them almost totally worthless as serious history, amounting to implausible conspiracy-mongering based upon a very thin evidentiary basis. I would hardly recommend them to anyone seriously interested in exploring the true nature of the conflict.

Conspiratorial circles have also heavily embraced the theory that the Zionists brought America into the First World War in exchange for Britain's Balfour Declaration, and even some more mainstream writers have accepted that conclusion. But after carefully considering the available evidence, I concluded that the story was very unlikely to be true, and I instead endorsed the standard historical narrative:

• American Pravda: The Balfour Declaration and 116,000 American Lives
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 20, 2023 • 4,800 Words

The Forgotten Lost Peace of 1916

However, I do not believe that all elements of the standard history of the First World War are accurate or complete.

Just a few years ago I discovered that one of the most crucial turning points of that conflict had been kept almost entirely hidden for more than a century. Events having an immense impact upon world history had been omitted from almost all of our history books.

I had happened to read To End All Wars a very widely-praised book by historian Adam Hochschild on the heavily suppressed British anti-war movement of the First World War, and found it just as excellent as the many reviewers had indicated. However, I was shocked by a single sentence buried deep in that long text:

But near the end of Hochschild's discussion of the year 1916, he emphasized that unlike Britain there was absolutely no corresponding anti-war movement in most other countries, including Germany. As he put it on p. 217:
"Both sides were committed to fight to the bitter end, and by now, two years into the war, if someone in a prominent position on either side so much as advocated peace talks, it was considered close to treason."
On reading this, I did a double-take and almost questioned my sanity. Surely, Hochschild must be aware that exactly at that point in time, the government of Germany had publicly proposed international peace talks without preconditions aimed at ending the war, suggesting that the massive, pointless slaughter be halted, perhaps largely on a status quo ante basis.
The Germans had recently won several huge victories, inflicting enormous losses on the Allies in the Battle of the Somme and also completely knocking Rumania out of the war. So riding high on their military success, they emphasized that they were seeking peace on the basis of their strength rather than from any weakness. Unfortunately, the Allies flatly rejected this peace overture, declaring that the offer proved Germany was close to defeat, so they were determined to hold out for complete victory with major territorial gains.
As a result, many additional millions needlessly died over the next two years, while just a couple of months later in early 1917 Russia's Czarist government collapsed, eventually leading to the Bolshevik seizure of power, a turning-point with fateful, long-term consequences.
I don't recall having ever seen any discussion of that rejected German peace proposal in the cursory treatment of the First World War provided by my basic high school or college textbooks, so I hadn't originally heard of it. But around 2000, I'd begun a software project aimed at digitizing the near-complete archives of many of America's most influential opinion magazines of the past, and along the way I'd been surprised to notice all those late 1916 headlines describing the peace offer, then glanced at a few of the articles and discovered the important history that I'd previously missed. For example, the December 23, 1916 lead article in America's influential Literary Digest carried the headline "Germany's Peace-Proposals" and for several weeks around that date numerous other stories in that periodical, as well as in the Nation, the New Republic, and various other publications had covered the same topic.
But although my introductory textbooks had failed to mention those facts, Hochschild was an award-winning author and historian, someone who had obviously devoted years of diligent research to his book on WWI peace movements. I found it difficult to believe that he was unaware of those crucial events, and I assumed that he would discuss them in the next chapter, but I finished his entire 450 page book seeing absolutely no mention anywhere.
At that point, I decided to confirm my recollections by doing a few casual Google searches on the topic, and found surprisingly little on the Internet. I then consulted the Wikipedia entry on World War I, which ran almost 40,000 words including nearly 500 references, but it only featured a single sentence on the German peace proposal that might have ended the fighting and thereby saved many millions of lives…

If a negotiated peace had ended the wartime slaughter after just a couple of years, the impact upon the history of the world would obviously have been enormous, and not merely because more than half of the many millions of wartime deaths would have been avoided. All the European countries had originally marched off to battle in early August 1914 confident that the conflict would be a short one, probably ending in victory for one side or the other "before the leaves fell." Instead, the accumulated changes in military technology and the evenly-balanced strength of the two rival alliances soon produced a gridlock of trench-warfare, especially in the West, with millions dying while almost no ground was gained or lost. If the fighting had stopped in 1916 without a victory by either side, such heavy losses in a totally pointless conflict surely would have sobered the postwar political leadership of all the major European states, greatly discrediting the brinksmanship that had originally led to the calamity let alone allowing any repeat. Many have pointed to 1914 as the optimistic high-water mark of Western Civilization, and with Europe chastened by the terrible impact of two disastrous years of warfare and millions of unnecessary deaths, that peak might have been sustained indefinitely.
Instead, the consequences of the continuing war were utterly disastrous for all of Europe and much of the world. Many millions more died, and the difficult wartime conditions probably fostered the spread of the deadly Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, which then swept across the world, taking as many as 50 million lives. Russia's crippling defeats in 1917 brought the Bolsheviks to power, leading to a long civil war that killed many millions more, followed by three generations of global conflict over Soviet Communism, certainly accounting for tens of millions of additional civilian deaths. The extremely punitive terms that the Treaty of Versailles imposed upon defeated Imperial Germany in 1919 eventually led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and a second, far worse round of global warfare involving both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, a catastrophe that laid waste to much of Europe and claimed several times as many victims as the Great War itself.
Although the Allies at the time had bitterly denounced what they sometimes called the dangerous "German Peace Offensive" of late 1916, it seemed obvious to me that the world would have been a much better place if it hadn't been rejected.
Just out of curiosity, I queried quite a number of knowledgeable, well-read individuals, asking what they knew of the abortive 1916 German peace proposal and their responses were quite interesting. A mainstream scholar who had written several books on First World War topics was a little surprised at Hochschild's lack of awareness, but noted that academic fashions since the 1960s had shifted in a direction sharply hostile to Imperial Germany, and as a result coverage of those elements of the historical record suggesting otherwise had been greatly minimized over the last half-century or more.
Meanwhile, nearly all of the lay individuals I contacted had never heard of the 1916 effort at peace and were mostly shocked by the story…

The numerous glowing reviews of Hochschild's book by knowledgeable experts and other historians certainly suggested that such ignorance of those momentous 1916 developments was extremely widespread.

The extent to which the seemingly undeniable facts of the 1916 peace proposal have disappeared from public discussion is really quite remarkable, and I gradually discovered that Hochschild was far from alone in providing no hint of the story.
Consider high-profile British-born historian Niall Ferguson of Harvard and Stanford Universities, who had made his early name with his publication of The Pity of War in 1999, a highly heterodox reanalysis of World War I that came to numerous controversial conclusions. Among other positions, Ferguson boldly argued that the British should have stayed out of the conflict, which would then have resulted in a quick and sweeping German victory, leading Germany to establish political and economic hegemony over Continental Europe. But this would have simply resulted in the creation of the EU three generations earlier and avoided the many tens of millions of needless deaths in the two world wars, let alone the global consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Although Ferguson was deliberately provocative in his account, I didn't remember seeing any specific mention of the 1916 peace proposal when I'd read the book a few years ago, and reexamining it now confirmed my recollection, even though his Introduction contains nearly a page of "What If?" scenarios, and he discussed numerous "alternative realities" later in his text. Indeed, just a couple of years earlier he had edited Virtual History, a collection of more than a dozen lengthy essays by professional scholars examining the consequences of history taking a different turn at numerous key junctures, including a German victory in WWI, but once again it totally lacked any suggestion of a possible negotiated peace in 1916.
An even longer volume of a very similar type, appropriately titled What If? appeared in 2001, edited by historian Robert Cowley and it was just as silent. The book ran over 800 pages, of which more than 90 were devoted to seven different alternate scenarios involving World War I, but the possibility of a 1916 peace nowhere appeared, despite surely being one of the most obvious and important "What Ifs."
Comprehensive mainstream histories also seemed quite silent. In 1970 renowned British historian A.J.P. Taylor published English History, 1914-45, which ran almost 900 pages, with nearly a quarter of those were devoted to WWI; but no hint was given of the 1916 German peace proposal, with the very possibility of the Germans accepting a reasonable compromise peace at that point being dismissed in just a few sentences and a footnote. John Keegan's 1999 volume The First World War runs 475 pages and also appears to lack any mention. While I've hardly performed an exhaustive review of all the standard historical texts, I think these two examples seem fairly typical, probably thus explaining Hochschild's complete lack of awareness, with Ferguson and other distinguished authors likely having similar gaps in their knowledge.
The issue also seemed not to come up in more specialized studies, even when it might have played an important role. A couple of years ago I'd read Sean McMeekin's 2017 history The Russian Revolution, an outstanding, meticulous reconstruction of the complex and contingent circumstances that led to the 1917 fall of the Czarist Regime and the subsequent triumph of Lenin's Bolsheviks.
The prologue is devoted to the murder of Grigory Rasputin, the peasant faith-healer who exercised such enormous influence over the Czar and his family that although he held no official position, he probably ranked for many years as the third most powerful figure in the Russian Empire. Moreover, his December 1916 death at the hands of a conspiratorial group that included top members of Russia's elite seems to have been an important factor in destabilizing the regime, leading to its collapse in the February Revolution just a couple of months later.
Rasputin had long had severe misgivings about continuing the costly war against Germany, and this was a crucial motive behind his killing; indeed, fears of the defection of their huge Russian ally led members of British Intelligence to assist the effort. Although plots against Rasputin's life had been circulating for months, he was finally struck down on December 20th, exactly when Germany's very public "peace offensive" was gaining considerable international attention; and although the author doesn't directly connect the two developments, the timing hardly seems likely to have been purely coincidental. So the desperate Allied moves to block any support for the proposed German peace plan may have actually helped trigger the Russian Revolution.
Obviously an early end to the Great War would have been an event of tremendous importance and the 1916 German efforts to secure peace were certainly treated as such in the news reports of the day. But Germany ultimately lost the war and the resulting official narrative blamed Europe's catastrophe upon relentless German militarism, so that German peace proposal became a discordant element, raising troubling questions about the overall storyline. As a consequence, those facts were eventually flushed down the memory-hole for most of the next one hundred years, and if I hadn't glanced at those original 1916 headlines, I certainly never would have discovered them.

I found it absolutely astonishing that one of the most important turning points in modern world history—so widely discussed at the time—had been totally omitted from almost every Western account for more than one hundred years, and had therefore completely disappeared from nearly all public awareness.

Philip Zelikow and The Road Less Traveled

Indeed, I initially discovered that it was extremely difficult to persuade people of the reality of what had actually happened.

While I could point to numerous headlines and articles from 1916 and 1917, many seemed to dismiss those contemporaneous accounts as somehow illusory or misleading, instead trusting in the fact that virtually every history book and article published in the last one hundred years had told an entirely different story.

Fortunately I soon discovered that in 2021, fully 105 years after the dramatic events under discussion, a mainstream historian had finally published a book revealing the true facts to the world. As I explained three years ago in 2022:

…just last year an entire book had been published on the lost chances for peace in 1916, apparently the first and only English-language work ever devoted to that seemingly important topic. Moreover, the author of The Road Less Traveled was Philip Zelikow, best known for having served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and therefore someone entirely in the good graces of the mainstream establishment. Near the end of his Introduction, he explained that he had been working on the project off and on for more than a dozen years.
Although the main text ran well under 300 pages, his account of events seemed thorough and persuasive in its coverage, drawing heavily upon archival records and private diaries to firmly establish the same remarkable story that I had originally glimpsed in those old publications. His exhaustive research had uncovered a great deal of additional material, piecing together an account radically different than what had been presented in many decades of highly misleading treatments. And despite such seemingly controversial "revisionism," his work received glowing endorsements from leading academic scholars and favorable reviews in such influential publications as Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, and Foreign Policy, though since it never caught the attention of my newspapers I'd remained unaware of it.
The story Zelikow tells is a really a fascinating one, especially since it had remained almost entirely hidden from public awareness for more than a century.
Although influential elements including his closest political advisor had wanted America to enter the war on the Allied side, President Woodrow Wilson had been hoping all along that he could mediate an end to the conflict, much like his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt had done in the Russo-Japanese war, with the latter's success crowned by winning the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.
During the first two years of the fighting, neither side had responded favorably to his peace feelers, but by August 1916 circumstances had changed, and although the conflicted British leadership finally decided to continue trying their luck on the battlefield, the similarly-conflicted German government secretly accepted Wilson's offer to preside as mediator at a peace conference. Given the horrific casualties that both sides had already suffered, it was widely believed that once public peace negotiations began, there was little chance that the fighting would ever resume. And with Wilson, most of the German leadership, and much of the British Cabinet ready for peace, the prospects certainly appeared excellent, especially since the Allies were so heavily dependent upon American supplies and financing for survival.
But although all the pieces seemed ready to fall into place, opportunities were repeatedly missed during the more than five months that followed. One important factor was the extreme difficulty of communications since the British had severed Germany's trans-Atlantic telegraph cable at the beginning of the war, meaning that German communications with Wilson or their own ambassador had to take a circuitous route through various neutral countries and Latin America, finally arriving at DC in encoded form days or even weeks later.
Another crucial factor was that Wilson lacked any strong staff that could translate his broad ideas into serious policy proposals. Unlike major European countries, America back then had little bureaucratic infrastructure, with Wilson mostly writing his own speeches and regarding his new Secretary of State, a lawyer who had no diplomatic experience, as merely an intelligent clerk. Instead, his only close advisor was Col. Edward House, a wealthy Texan dilettante who often had eccentric views, and so strongly favored the British that he sometimes seemed to deliberately sabotage the peace effort. As a lifelong academic, Wilson himself had only spent two years as Governor of New Jersey before unexpectedly reaching the White House in 1913, and therefore he had little direct experience in either politics or international diplomacy.
So although the German government responded favorably to his offer of a peace conference in August 1916, Wilson failed to grasp the urgency of their request, and decided to take no action until after the November election. Meanwhile, within Germany, the military advocates of an unrestricted U-boat campaign against the American ships carrying Allied supplies were pressing very hard for their alternate strategy, which was sure to lead to a break in American relations.
After the British had suffered enormous casualties in their attack on the Somme, including losing nearly 20,000 dead on the first day of fighting, their own peace party was strengthened and the government became willing to consider Wilson's offer. A son of Prime Minister H.H. Asquith had died in the battle and another had been wounded, while the German offer to restore occupied Belgium satisfied the most important British condition.
But then at the end of September, War Minister David Lloyd George—who had been a leading advocate of the American peace option—suddenly switched sides, and declared that Britain would never accept a compromise peace and would instead be willing to fight for twenty years if necessary in order to achieve a total military victory, with anything less than a "knockout" being "unthinkable." Zelikow plausibly argues that Lloyd George believed he could replace Asquith as prime minister by using that reversal on peace to gain the support of British hardliners such as Lord Northcliffe's powerful newspaper group, and indeed that was exactly what happened within a couple of months, with the advocates of peace being pushed out of the government.
Despite the shifting positions of the British, Wilson returned to his peace efforts after his November 7th reelection, only to encounter strong opposition from House, his key advisor. Although Britain was already locked in a desperate struggle with Germany and totally dependent upon American supplies, House somehow became convinced that if America pressed too hard for peace, the British would declare war against our own country. Incredible as it might sound to us, House repeatedly argued to Wilson and others that a British army could sweep down from Canada while the Royal Navy would land hundreds of thousands of troops from their Japanese ally on our coasts, together seeking to conquer the United States. Although these bizarre concerns were rejected, they assisted the overwhelmingly pro-British State Department officials in delaying Wilson's plans to launch his peace proposal.
Around this same time, the German ambassador began pleading with the Wilson Administration to act immediately lest the opportunity for peace be lost, and Zelikow entitled this chapter "Peace Is on the Floor Waiting to Be Picked Up!" which was one of the impassioned phrases that envoy had used. Meanwhile, Germany's hard-line military leadership was steadily increasing the pressure on their government to abandon its peace efforts and instead return to the unrestricted submarine warfare that they claimed could quickly win the war.
Growing desperate at the president's endless delays, Germany and its allies eventually issued their own unconditional call for peace talks on December 12th, hoping that step would finally prompt Wilson to act by inviting participants to a peace conference at the Hague and offering himself up as the mediator. The German announcement captured the attention of the world and forced Wilson to respond lest he be eclipsed, and a week later he finally circulated his own peacemaking note, but as Zelikow explains, it constituted a "misfire," lacking as it did any specifics let alone an invitation for the warring parties to attend an actual peace conference. So the Allies firmly rejected the German offer as a "trick" and were able to ignore Wilson's statement since it required them to do nothing. Over the next few weeks, the opportunity for peace faded away, and in late January the Germans announced they would return to unrestrained submarine warfare, leading Wilson to break off relations and move towards war with Germany.
Although influential elements within the American government had sought this result from the beginning, Zelikow persuasively argues that the mistakes, errors, and misunderstandings by Wilson and the others also seeking a negotiated peace were probably more responsible for this outcome than the efforts by the individuals who actually intended it. His harsh historical verdict on the former hardly seems unfair:
In the failure to make peace at the most opportune moment, no one failed, and failed the world, more than President Wilson. His was the most consequential diplomatic failure in the history of the United States.
Thus, one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century probably came in late 1916 with the tragic collapse of a peace effort that initially seemed so likely to succeed, and Zelikow's gripping narrative tells the story of how and why that opportunity slipped away. By all rights, the Lost Peace of 1916 should have become the subject of countless novels, plays, and films, but instead it remains almost totally unknown today, even among the most highly educated.

• American Pravda: Lost Histories of the Great War
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • November 28, 2022 • 8,100 Words

Zelikow's outstanding book may have penetrated into the consciousness of some American academics and perhaps as new histories are written, the facts he revealed may be incorporated into a revised standard narrative, but perhaps not. His story is so astonishing and so contrary to what has been presented for more than a century in all our standard histories that it may be ignored just as every American newspaper and general interest magazine apparently ignored it when it was published. The Amazon sales rank of his work remains pitifully low today, and his book seems almost totally unknown based upon some cursory Google searches.

Even if we restrict our attention to an extremely select group, such as Ivy League graduates who majored in history, I doubt that even one in a hundred are today aware of these remarkable historical events that Zelikow so thoroughly documented.

Imperial Germany, America, and the Hinge of Fate

The story of the Lost Peace of 1916 has remained hidden for more than a century, and the almost total lack of attention provided to Zelikow's excellent book suggests that this unfortunate situation may continue indefinitely.

The obvious reason for that hundred year omission is that the true facts seem so sharply discordant with the established narrative that Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II was a highly aggressive military power. Indeed, our reigning school of historiography claims that Germany bore far more responsibility for the outbreak of the war than any other European power. The demonization of the Germany of 1914 has not been nearly as extreme as the demonization of the Germany of 1939, but it certainly does exist.

However, as I pointed out in a 2019 article, this harsh appraisal of Germany and its leader seems to have almost entirely been an ex post facto construction, contrary to the facts and also quite different than the views of contemporaneous observers:

Moreover, although Allied propaganda routinely portrayed Wilhelm as a relentless warmonger, he had actually avoided involving Germany in a single major military conflict during the first twenty-five years of his reign, while most of the other leading world powers had fought one or more major wars during that same period. Indeed, I recently discovered that only a year before the Guns of August began firing, The New York Times had published a lengthy profile marking the first quarter-century of Wilhelm's reign, lauding him as one of the world's foremost peacemakers:
Now … he is acclaimed everywhere as the greatest factor for peace that our time can show. It was he, we hear, who again and again threw the weight of his dominating personality, backed by the greatest military organisation in the world – an organisation built up by himself – into the balance for peace wherever war clouds gathered over Europe. '('William II, King of Prussia and German Emperor, Kaiser 25 years a ruler, hailed as chief peacemaker,' New York Times, 8 June, 1913)
That brief excerpt from the Times encomium points to another matter than I have never seen mentioned. I devoted much of the early 2000s to digitizing and making available the complete archives of hundreds of America's leading publications of the last 150 years, and when I occasionally glanced at the contents, I gradually noticed something odd. Although the English-language world today invariably refers to Germany's wartime ruler as "Kaiser Wilhelm," that was only very rarely the case prior to the outbreak of war, when he was generally known as "Emperor William." The latter nomenclature is hardly surprising since we always speak of "Frederick the Great" rather than "Friedrich der Grosse."
But it is obviously much easier to mobilize millions of citizens to die in muddy trenches in order to defeat a monstrously alien "Kaiser" than "Good Emperor William," first cousin to the British and Russian monarchs. The NGram viewer in Google Books shows the timing of the change quite clearly, with the Anglophone practice shifting as Britain became increasingly hostile toward Germany, especially after the outbreak of war. But "Emperor William" was only permanently eclipsed by "Kaiser Wilhelm" after Germany once again became a likely enemy in the years immediately preceding World War II.

I suspect that few today, historians included, are aware that in 1913 the New York Times had summed up the quarter-century reign of the German emperor by hailing him as the world's greatest peacemaker. Yet within a couple of years, all our media outlets had denounced that same leader as the world's most bloodthirsty warmonger, a shockingly Orwellian transformation.

Kaiser Wilhelm II was Queen Victoria's favorite grandchild, and she supposedly died in his arms. And in a further irony, his mother had been Victoria's eldest child, so if Britain had traced its royal descent equally through male and female children, her marriage to Prussia's crown prince would have potentially united Europe's two leading Protestant powers, with Wilhelm becoming the joint heir to both countries, representing a near parallel to the 15th century union of Castile and Aragon. But Britain's laws of inheritance instead meant that it was the Francophile Edward VII who succeeded his mother Victoria and his dislike for his nephew Wilhelm worsened the friction that eventually led to war.

Once the European war broke out, the obvious reason that Germany and its leader were soon demonized in the American media was that our country's most influential group were the East Coast WASPs. They were strongly tied to Britain for reasons of ancestry and culture and also very eager to boost their industrial profits by selling the Allies huge quantities of wartime munitions.

Some important American groups were certainly on the other side. Our very numerous German-Americans were obviously quite sympathetic to their ethnic homeland, and the large Irish-American population that dominated the politics of many large cities regarded the British as their sworn enemies. America's heavily immigrant Jewish population deeply hated Britain's Czarist Russian ally, while the more elite German-Jews often had strong business and family ties to the country of their origin. But overall, the pro-British WASPs were much more powerful, and that group included President Wilson and most of the top figures in his administration.

However, there are some interesting scenarios under which America might have aligned itself with Germany in the war. If so, our massive propaganda campaign against that latter country would have been replaced by an equally massive demonization of Britain, our sworn enemy. Under such a situation, every media outlet in America would surely have spent 1914 endlessly commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the burning of the White House by our diabolical British enemies until most of our infuriated citizens demanded that we destroy Buckingham Palace in retaliation.

For example, a few months ago I read a couple of extremely thick books on Franklin Roosevelt's career, and stumbled across a very little-known incident from his time in the Wilson administration that could easily have changed the course of the First World War. As I wrote:

Smith also later briefly recounted a notable incident from FDR's early years in the Wilson Administration whose enormous potential importance the author apparently failed to appreciate.
Smith explained that in 1913 California enacted legislation forbidding its small Japanese minority from owning land, leading Japan to lodge a vigorous protest with Washington, a protest that President Wilson flatly rejected. As a result, tensions between the two countries flared and top American military commanders believed that war was inevitable. This led the Joint Board of the Army and the Navy to unanimously recommend that a powerful naval flotilla be concentrated in the region to intimidate Japan, while two leading New York City newspapers carried sensational stories that the American military was preparing for war.
Such a war might have easily broken out if not for the strong intervention of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a committed anti-militarist who declared that the board had exceeded its authority and prohibited the extremely provocative naval movements that would have precluded any negotiated settlement. Although Daniels won Wilson over to his side, the admirals persisted in their plans and appealed the decision until the president firmly rebuked them, declaring that military commanders must obey their orders rather than challenge them. Wilson even prohibited any future meetings of the military board, and the war scare soon died down.
But suppose that Daniels had not acted so forcefully and war against Japan had indeed broken out in 1913. Given the longstanding Anglo-Japanese Alliance, Britain would probably have been drawn into the conflict, and a 1913 naval war between Britain and America would obviously have had enormous implications for the First World War that began the following year.

None of my standard history books had ever mentioned this important story. I suspect it remains almost entirely unknown today, even among most professional historians, but the obvious implications are dramatic.

America's navy was then the third strongest in the world, but far weaker than that of Britain, with the British and Japanese navies together having more than three times as many capital ships. So if war had broken out in 1913, we probably would have suffered a major naval defeat against the combined British-Japanese forces.

Americans firmly believed that their country had never lost a war, and such a 1913 defeat would surely have left our entire population burning for vengeance. If the First World War had still broken out the following year, we probably would have quickly allied ourselves with Germany, supporting it with our enormous industrial and agricultural resources. Moreover, combination of the German and American battlefleets would have been an easy match for that of Britain, especially given the latter's worldwide commitments, so not only would the outcome of the war have almost certainly been reversed, but the entire conflict probably would have been a rather short one.

Lothrop Stoddard and Present-Day Europe

An outstanding discussion of the prewar and wartime politics of Germany and nearly all the other European states of that era can be found in a relatively short 1917 book that remains almost totally unknown today. As I wrote in late 2022:

Once important events have been finalized and the heroes and villains officially determined, there is a natural tendency to reinterpret the past in the light of what ultimately transpired, thereby establishing a simple narrative that follows straight lines. Put another way, the winners write most of the histories.
For that exact reason, I think that one of the least known but most absolutely valuable books about the Great War was completed in mid-March 1917, just weeks before our own involvement inevitably distorted all subsequent analysis. The author was Lothrop Stoddard, who had earned his Ph.D. in history at Harvard and was then just beginning a career that would soon establish him as one of America's most influential public intellectuals. His book was Present-Day Europe, a scrupulously even-handed survey of the wartime politics and recent history of each individual nation.
The work is not overly long, running less than 75,000 words, and can easily be read in just a day or two, but it provides an enormous wealth of detailed, contemporaneous information, much of which appears to have been left on the cutting-room floor of later historiography, written after the official narrative had already hardened. Moreover, as he explained in his Preface, Stoddard followed a rigid requirement of only quoting the natives of each country in their own chapter, Englishmen on England, Germans on Germany, and so forth, thereby providing an invaluable presentation of the elite and popular sentiments of each nation, something very useful to those of us seeking to reconstruct the situation more than a century later.
Stoddard's book had gone to press just weeks after the final rejection of the German peace offer, and he hardly let a failed diplomatic project well-known to all of his readers dominate his narrative. But although the author was unaware of the extensive backstory, he gave the peace efforts reasonable treatment in the chapters on Britain and Germany, adding interesting details missed by both Zelikow and Hochschild. For example, as early as June 1916 several prominent British political figures of very mainstream views had publicly called for peace negotiations, including in the pages of the Economist, and their declaration had been emphatically endorsed by the editor of that influential publication. But this high-profile ideological rebellion in the elite media was swiftly crushed, with the editor losing his job as a consequence. Stoddard later explained that the uncompromising Allied rejection of all German peace offers had by early 1917 "spurred the entire German people to desperate wrath."
A perfect example of the tremendous value of Stoddard's material comes in his discussion of war aims, which obviously provided the necessary context for the differing national reactions to early peace negotiations, and there was a stark contrast between those of the two opposing camps. The goals of the Germans were relatively mild, with almost no demands for annexations of new territory. By contrast, the French were absolutely committed to the total destruction of Germany as their primary objective, with those sentiments being almost universally held across all political parties. They regarded the unified Germany created in 1870 as simply too powerful a European rival, which therefore had to be fragmented back into multiple, weak states. And not only would France reabsorb the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, but it would also annex much of the Rhineland, territory that had been German for a thousand years. The British were not quite that extreme, but most of their political leadership class strongly believed that Germany needed to be totally crippled as an economic and military competitor.
In the East, the primary war aim of the Russian Empire was the annexation of Constantinople, the capital city and largest metropolis of Germany's Ottoman Empire ally, which would give Russia strategic control of the Bosphorus Straits. Although Serbia had already been defeated and occupied by this date, elements of the Serbian government had originally provoked the war by arranging the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the prospective Austro-Hungarian ruler, with their broader goal being the total destruction of that multi-ethnic state, several of whose major pieces would then become part of a Greater Serbia.
So to a considerable extent, Germany and its allies were actually the "status quo powers," reasonably satisfied with the existing arrangement of borders, a situation totally different from that of their Allied opponents. When one side in a conflict is determined to dismember and destroy the other, an early peace is difficult to arrange. Moreover, the German alliance faced an opposing coalition that was far superior in manpower, economic strength, and potential military resources, so it was fighting what it reasonably regarded as a purely defensive war. Although clear at the time this situation is exactly contrary to what has been implied or even explicitly stated in our basic History 101 textbooks for the last one hundred years.
Obviously, the complete picture was not entirely one-sided, and an important factor behind the outbreak of the war had been German concerns over the rapidly growing population and military power of its enormous Russian neighbor to the east. Indeed, although the very powerful Social Democratic political block in the German parliament was strongly anti-militarist, its members were also intensely hostile to the Czarist regime, which their influential Jewish elements demonized as fiercely anti-Semitic, so the Russian threat was an important factor behind the near-total domestic political unity once war broke out. Meanwhile, important elements of the German military establishment had long favored waging a preventive war aimed at breaking Russian power before it became too overwhelming.
Major German victories during the first couple of years of fighting had led to the occupation of considerable Russian territory, and Jozef Pilsudski, Poland's George Washington figure, had organized an army of 20,000 Poles that fought side-by-side with the Germans. As a consequence, the Germans decided to resurrect an independent Poland as a German client state more than a century after it had disappeared from the map, a geographical change that would greatly weaken Russia while providing a buffer against the latter's future westward expansion.
Although of relatively minor importance, one of Stoddard's most impressive sections is his discussion of the Balkans, home to several bitterly quarrelsome states, whose stories I had never previously seen treated, let alone analyzed in such intelligent detail. These countries had all fought wars against each other in 1912 and then again in 1913, and given the triggering 1914 events in Sarajevo, the Great War that followed might almost be regarded as merely a third consecutive Balkan war that unexpectedly brought in the rest of Europe.
As the author points out, prior to the Ottoman conquest and long occupation, each of the different Balkan peoples had at one time or another ruled a larger regional empire of their own, which they naturally sought to resurrect after Ottoman power receded. But all those previous Balkan empires had overlapped in territory, thus leading to bitter, conflicting claims, and the repeated rounds of new fighting between Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, and Greece, all of which also coveted portions of the neighboring Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, thereby contributing to the severe instability. Totally contrary to my assumptions, Stoddard explained that these individual countries actually had very diverse political and social profiles. For example, Bulgaria's characteristics were entirely different from those of neighboring Romania though I had always lumped them together in my mind.

Although hailing from a prestigious New England family, Stoddard was still in his early 30s when he produced this outstanding work, a relatively unknown writer who had only earned his doctorate in history at Harvard a couple of years earlier. But within three years he would burst upon our national scene like a meteor, quickly becoming one of our most influential writers and public intellectuals. As the author of a series of very successful books, he retained that position throughout most of the 1920s and 1930s, regularly invited to lecture at our nation's military academy and his major articles frequently graced the pages of our most prestigious national publications. But I think the focus of his subsequent writing helps to explain why his very incisive 1917 analysis of the countries of Europe has been so completely flushed down the memory hole.

In recent years, the accusation of being "a white supremacist" has been regularly tossed around and desperately denied by nearly all those so accused. Stoddard has often been named as one of the most notorious examples of an American intellectual falling into that extremely disreputable camp; but I greatly doubt that he would have disputed any such characterization given that the full title of his most famous and influential work was "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy." That huge 1920 bestseller focused upon the emerging challenges that peoples of white European origin faced in maintaining their global control in the aftermath of the terribly destructive First World War, and it made his international reputation.

In today's society, the term "white supremacist" carries severely marginalizing implications, but that was certainly not the case a century ago. Indeed, I suspect that many or most Americans would have proudly embraced that label, including a large fraction of our educational and political elites. During the postwar era, Stoddard soon became one of the foremost intellectual figures associated with those ideas. As I wrote in 2020:

But Stoddard's best-known work certainly remains The Rising Tide of Color, published 100 years ago, which launched his influential career. About a decade ago, I finally got around to reading it, and was greatly surprised that a book so heavily demonized in every description I had encountered actually came across as so level-headed and innocuous. Although most of the leading political figures of that time proclaimed permanent white rule of the world, Stoddard strongly argued that this situation was temporary, soon to evaporate under the pressure of rising non-white nationalism, economic development, and population growth. These rising tides of the peoples of Asia and the Middle East made their eventual independence almost inevitable, and the European powers should therefore voluntarily relinquish their vast colonial empires rather than earn future bitterness by stubbornly seeking to retain them. A "White Supremacist" might certainly advance such arguments, but only one of far greater sophistication than is today implied by that popular media slur.
I recently reread Stoddard's volume and was even more impressed the second time through. In many respects, his sweeping panorama of the future geopolitical landscape brings to mind The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1997 by renowned Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, which then became a huge national bestseller and cultural-touchstone in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Yet although Huntington's text is just two decades old and Stoddard's has reached its first century, I think it is the former that actually now seems much more dated and less applicable to the current alignment of the world and the challenges faced by white European populations.

World War I and its immediate aftermath saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate by Ataturk's secular regime, and the widespread rise of left-wing militant atheism inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. As a natural consequence, nearly all Western thinkers dismissed the power of Islam as a spent force and a fading relic of the past, while Stoddard was almost alone in presciently suggesting its possible worldwide revival in The New World of Islam, published in 1922.

Stoddard also raised serious concerns about the economic challenges that America and Europe might eventually face from a rising China. For example, he approvingly quoted the late Victorian predictions of Prof. Charles E. Pearson:

Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world's markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.

A number of Stoddard's books are available on this website in convenient HTML format for easy reading:

• Present-Day Europe
  Its National States of Mind
  Lothrop Stoddard • 1917 • 74,000 Words

• The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
  Lothrop Stoddard • 1920 • 78,000 Words

• The New World of Islam
  Lothrop Stoddard • 1922 • 95,000 Words

Edward A. Ross, The Changing Chinese, and The Old World in the New

Stoddard's strong belief in China's likely rise into a leading world economic power was hardly unique in that era, nor restricted to those of his own staunchly conservative ideological camp.

Edward A. Ross was one of our greatest early sociologists and a leading progressive public intellectual. After a six-month visit to China, he published The Changing Chinese in 1911, a detailed discussion of the Chinese people and society of his day that came to very similar conclusions. That book was released well over a century ago, but anyone reading it would hardly have been surprised at the remarkable economic trajectory of China over the last few decades, nor that country's tremendous technological progress.

As I explained in a 2013 article, both Stoddard and Ross focused heavily upon explanatory factors that constitute "forbidden ideas" under our modern ideological framework:

Western intellectual life a century ago was quite different from that of today, with contrary doctrines and taboos, and the spirit of that age certainly held sway over its leading figures. Racialism—the notion that different peoples tend to have different innate traits, as largely fashioned by their particular histories—was dominant then, so much so that the notion was almost universally held and applied, sometimes in rather crude fashion, to both European and non-European populations.
With regard to the Chinese, the widespread view was that many of their prominent characteristics had been shaped by thousands of years of history in a generally stable and organized society possessing central political administration, a situation almost unique among the peoples of the world. In effect, despite temporary periods of political fragmentation, East Asia's own Roman Empire had never fallen, and a thousand-year interregnum of barbarism, economic collapse, and technological backwardness had been avoided.
On the less fortunate side, the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China's exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people.

For example, Stoddard wrote:

Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand's breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.

Stoddard backed these riveting phrases with a wide selection of detailed and descriptive quotations from prominent observers, both Western and Chinese. Although Ross was more cautiously empirical in his observations and less literary in his style, his analysis was quite similar, with his book on the Chinese containing over 40 pages describing the grim and gripping details of daily survival, provided under the evocative chapter-heading "The Struggle for Existence in China."

Ross emphasized that these factors led honed the Chinese race over the many centuries, and that despite their immense existing poverty, they were a people of enormous potential ability. As he recounted in his fascinating book:

To forty-three men who, as educators, missionaries and diplomats, have had good opportunity to learn the "feel" of the Chinese mind, I put the question, "Do you find the intellectual capacity of the yellow race equal to that of the white race?" All but five answered "Yes," and one sinologue of varied experience as missionary, university president and legation adviser left me gasping with the statement, "Most of us who have spent twenty-five years or more out here come to feel that the yellow race is the normal human type, while the white race is a 'sport.'"

The widespread devastation inflicted by the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, followed by the economic calamity of Maoism, did delay the predicted rise of China by a generation or two. But except for such unforeseen events, the analysis of China's economic and technological future provided by our leading thinkers such as Stoddard and Ross more than a century ago seems remarkably prescient. This was in very sharp contrast to nearly all the many books about China and the Chinese published much more recently during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Ross was equally candid and empirical in his exploration of various white European groups, especially those immigrating to America in such enormous numbers prior to the First World War.

During my college days of the early 1980s, I'd occasionally glanced at a few sociological texts and dismissed them as jargon-laden and eye-glazingly dull, being almost worthless due to their their extreme emphasis on quantitative minutia often wrapped in a rigid, ideological framework. They seemed a perfect example of missing the forest for the trees.

In one very notable exception, I'd been tremendously impressed by Beyond the Melting Pot, the classic 1963 work by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan that analyzed the characteristics and behavior of the five major ethnic groups listed in its subtitle: "The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City."

In 1913 Ross had published The Old World in the New, a fascinating book written along very similar lines, but describing a wide range of the major white European ethnic groups of his own era, together with a detailed analysis of the immigration policies that had been bringing them to our own country in such unprecedented numbers.

Beginning with a discussion of America's mostly Anglo-Saxon Old Stock settler population, he then described and analyzed the Irish, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians, Slavs, and Eastern European Jews who had arrived in huge numbers during the previous couple of generations. After reading that work, I wondered whether it had inspired the rather similar Glazer and Moynihan book published a half-century later.

Ross was very candid and plain-spoken in his views, and these sometimes got him into ideological hot water, with his long career bracketed by his leading national role in major free speech issues. As a young academic, he had been fired by Stanford University for his political beliefs, a celebrated incident that led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors, while he ended his life serving for a decade as national chairman of the ACLU.

Analyzing the characteristics and behavior of ethnic groups was a touchy subject even a century ago, and in more recent decades it has sometimes become extremely radioactive, with any such discussion of Jewish groups being especially off-limits.

Therefore I was hardly surprised by the reaction of Prof. Joseph Bendersky, a historian specializing in Holocaust Studies. A quarter-century ago he published a weighty volume on antisemitic beliefs in America during the first half of the twentieth century, and as I discussed in a 2019 article, he raked Ross over the coals for his supposed ideological transgressions.

Although I would not question the accuracy of Bendersky's exhaustive archival research, he seems considerably less sure-footed regarding American intellectual history and sometimes allows his personal sentiments to lead him into severe error. For example, his first chapter devotes a couple of pages to E.A. Ross, citing some of his unflattering descriptions of Jews and Jewish behavior, and suggesting he was a fanatic anti-Semite, who dreaded "the coming catastrophe of an America overrun by racially inferior people."
But Ross was actually one of our greatest early sociologists, and his 26 page discussion of Jewish immigrants published in 1913 was scrupulously fair-minded and even-handed, describing both positive and negative characteristics, following similar chapters on Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, and Slavic newcomers. And although Bendersky routinely denounces his own ideological villains as "Social Darwinists," the source he actually cites regarding Ross correctly identified the scholar as one of America's leading critics of Social Darwinism. Indeed, Ross's stature in left-wing circles was so great that he was selected as a member of the Dewey Commission, organized to independently adjudicate the angry conflicting accusations of Stalinists and Trotskyites. And in 1936, a Jewish leftist fulsomely praised Ross's long and distinguished scholarly career in the pages of The New Masses, the weekly periodical of the American Communist Party, only regretting that Ross had never been willing to embrace Marxism.

A major focus of Ross's 1913 book was American immigration policy, and his work later became important intellectual ammunition for the restrictionist advocates of the 1924 Immigration Act that very sharply curtailed the inflow of Europeans.

But even long before that, political battles over reducing the flow of newcomers had raged for decades in Congress. In his book, Ross explained that Jewish groups and Jewish activists had been the most important elements keeping our borders wide open:

America is coming to be hailed as the "promised land," and Zionist dreams are yielding to the conviction that it will be much easier for the keen-witted Russian Jews to prosper here as a free component in a nation of a hundred millions than to grub a living out of the baked hillsides of Palestine. With Mr. Zangwill they exult that: "America has ample room for all the six millions of the Pale; any one of her fifty states could absorb them. And next to being in a country of their own, there could be no better fate for them than to be together in a land of civil and religious liberty, of whose Constitution Christianity forms no part and where their collective votes would practically guarantee them against future persecution."
Hence the endeavor of the Jews to control the immigration policy of the United States. Although theirs is but a seventh of our net immigration, they led the fight on the Immigration Commission's bill. The power of the million Jews in the metropolis lined up the Congressional delegation from New York in solid opposition to the literacy test. The systematic campaign in newspapers and magazines to break down all arguments for restriction and to calm nativist fears is waged by and for one race. Hebrew money is behind the National Liberal Immigration League and its numerous publications. From the paper before the commercial body or the scientific association to the heavy treatise produced with the aid of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the literature that proves the blessings of immigration to all classes in America emanates from subtle Hebrew brains. In order to admit their brethren from the Pale the brightest of the Semites are keeping our doors open to the dullest of the Aryans!

Ross had been a very prominent intellectual figure during the early decades of the twentieth century, but he eventually suffered harsh condemnation at the hands of later writers. As a result, his name totally disappeared from all our standard history textbooks, and he was completely unknown to me until I discovered the vast corpus of his brilliant work during my digitization project of the early 2000s. I strongly suspect that the single candid chapter on Jewish immigrants included in his 1913 book was the main factor that permanently blighted his name and standing.

As an example of that absurdity, the caption on his Wikipedia photo stigmatizes him as an "American sociologist and eugenicist," and while I don't recall that latter doctrine ever mentioned anywhere in his many books, I don't doubt that he was a supporter. But in those days, almost every educated Westerner—left, right, and center—supported eugenics, with staunch progressives such as Ross being especially strong enthusiasts. Indeed, about the only groups opposed to eugenics were extreme religious conservatives, most of whom also opposed the theory of Darwinian evolution on very similar grounds.

And although Ross certainly recognized the reality of racial differences, he was quite empirical and cautious in his analysis, as I explained in a 2020 article:

In 1915 Ross published South of Panama, describing the backwardness and misery he had encountered in so many of the societies of Latin America during his half year of travels and investigation across that region. Although the bulk of the text was descriptive and empirical, at one point he pondered the underlying nature of those problems, wondering whether the causes were primarily cultural, due to the widespread poverty and lack of education, or instead a result of the innate inferiority of the local population, emphasizing that the answer to this crucial question would have an enormous impact upon the continent's future developmental trajectory.
After even-handedly mentioning some of the limited evidence supporting each of these two conflicting theories, he ultimately leaned towards the environmental side, criticizing heredity as "a cheap offhand explanation" of human characteristics that actually often change over time. Today such a discussion would be utterly unimaginable within the confines of our respectable academic or media worlds, and for opposite reasons would also be extremely rare among committed racialists.

Some of Ross's books are available on this website in convenient HTML format for easy consideration:

• The Changing Chinese
  The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China
  E.A. Ross • 1911 • 61,000 Words

• The Old World in the New
  The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People
  E.A. Ross • 1914 • 59,000 Words

• South of Panama
  E.A. Ross • 1917 • 71,000 Words

David Starr Jordan and Unseen Empire

Another almost totally forgotten book published just before the outbreak of the Great War included some striking claims about the Europe of that era.

In sharp contrast, a different book published just over a century earlier might today be seen as a product of the conspiratorial fringe, but it was certainly not viewed that way at the time, given that the author was widely regarded as one of America's leading public intellectuals and the work was favorably discussed in the influential Literary Digest. David Starr Jordan was the founding president of Stanford University, a biological scientist by training who had published at least ninety-odd books, mostly of a scientific nature but also including works of broader public policy.
Unseen Empire, which appeared in 1912, fell into that latter category and argued that although the United States and the major European powers remained nominally sovereign, their heavy, unproductive military spending had gradually bound them into tight coils of debt, leading most of them to quietly become political vassals of a network of powerful financiers, the "unseen empire" of the title. So instead of kings, parliaments, or kaisers, the true rulers of Europe were a set of interconnected and intermarried banking dynasties, almost all of them Jewish: the Sterns and Cassels of Britain, the Foulds and Pereires of France, the Bleichroders of Germany, the Gunzburgs of Russia, the Hirsches of Austria, the Goldschmids of Portugal, the Camondos of Turkey, the Sassoons of the Orient, and above all of them, the Rothschilds of London and Paris.
Although in today's world, such a description might seem insane or at least incendiary, Jordan presented it rather matter-of-factly without rancor, and indeed that particular claim didn't even constitute the main theme of his analysis. The Stanford University president firmly regarded modern warfare as disastrous for a society, but also argued that wars had become so ruinously expensive that they could not last for long. Moreover, since the true financial owners of Europe believed that they were bad for business, no major wars would be permitted to break out.
Obviously, Jordan's predictions were exploded just a couple of years later, but subsequent events did provide some hints that his analysis was not entirely mistaken. For example, according to Stoddard's account, much of Britain's wealthy Jewish elite, often having German roots like the Rothschilds, was widely regarded as being in the peace camp, so much so that in 1916 hard-line publications regularly denounced the country's German-Jewish financiers as undercutting Britain's continuing military resolve. Similarly, Zelikow reports that Paul Warburg, the German-Jewish vice chairman of America's Federal Reserve, was an enthusiastic supporter of Wilson's efforts to pressure Britain into making peace, including discouraging American banks in late 1916 from making the additional loans that Britain required to purchase supplies. In private communications, the strongly pro-British head of the J.P. Morgan banking empire denounced that decision and argued for a public attack on the German-Jewish influence that he believed was behind this peace policy. Similarly, many of Germany's wealthy Jewish financiers were generally in the peace camp. So Jordan's main mistake was probably overestimating the political power of Europe's dominant banking interests.

Jordan died in 1931 and given his enormous intellectual stature, he was honored by a long list of monuments and memorials all around the country, including those at various schools and academic institutions. But during the recent Black Lives Matter protests, the discovery of his longstanding support for eugenics provoked enormous controversy, and his name was purged from many of these. For eighty years generations of students had attended Jordan Middle School in his own city of Palo Alto, but it was now renamed for Frank S. Greene, an obscure black engineer. Thus Jordan eventually suffered the same fate as his fellow progressive Ross though for somewhat different reasons.

Ironically enough, Jordan's 1912 book explaining how Jewish banking families exercised hidden, near total domination over all major European governments was never noticed, apparently lost amidst the vast number of his other published works. But if it had come to light, I'm sure that he would have been purged from all his honors generations earlier.

The Nation of Islam and The Leo Frank Case

In a 2018 article I glancingly alluded to Jordan's fall among a long list of other such prominent victims in our sweeping national ideological purge.

In the last couple of years, American society has been experiencing a lengthy series of bizarre Chinese Cultural Revolution-style protests against long-honored figures of our past, now denounced as "racist symbols," with buildings renamed and leftist mobs attacking public statues. Although monuments associated with the Confederacy have been the primary targets, these attacks have often extended outside the South and even former presidents such as Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley have sometimes become targets, along with the author of the Star-Spangled Banner and the founder of modern gynecology. As an extreme example, the losing black gubernatorial candidate in Georgia had called for the ISIS-like destruction of the gigantic Stone Mountain Memorial, a national monument featured on a 1970 U.S. postage stamp.
Ultra-liberal California has hardly been free of such copy-cat protests, with a handful of obscure memorials to Robert E. Lee or other Confederate figures targeted and removed, along with a statue or two honoring Christopher Columbus. In Palo Alto, a zealously-PC Swedish immigrant launched a successful campaign to rename two of Palo Alto's middle schools because they honored top academic figures of a century ago known to have advocated eugenics, even though exactly similar charges could be leveled against most other prominent American intellectuals of that same era.

But another historical figure remained honored as a heroic martyr, free from any attacks although he should have far more justifiably been the target of such black protests. Moreover, the powerful political organization whose creation he had inspired also never drew any significant black or leftist criticism.

I've discussed this fascinating, almost unknown story on various occasions, most recently in a 2023 article:

Although I had long recognized the power and influence of the ADL, a leading Jewish-activist organization whose officials were so regularly quoted in my newspapers, until rather recently I had only the vaguest notions of its origins. I'm sure I'd heard the story mentioned at some point, but the account had never stuck in my mind.
Then perhaps a year or two ago, I happened to come across some discussion of the ADL's 2013 centenary celebration, in which the leadership reaffirmed the principles of its 1913 founding. The initial impetus had been the vain national effort to save the life of Leo Frank, a young Southern Jew unjustly accused of murder and eventually lynched. In the past, Frank's name and story would have been equally vague in my mind, only half-remembered from my introductory history textbooks as one of the most notable early KKK victims in the fiercely anti-Semitic Deep South of the early twentieth century. However, not long before seeing that piece on the ADL I'd read Albert Lindemann's highly-regarded study The Jew Accused, and his short chapter on the notorious Frank case had completely exploded all my preconceptions.
First, Lindemann demonstrated that there was no evidence of any anti-Semitism behind Frank's arrest and conviction, with Jews constituting a highly-valued element of the affluent Atlanta society of the day, and no references to Frank's Jewish background, negative or otherwise, appearing in the media prior to the trial. Indeed, five of the Grand Jurors who voted to indict Frank for murder were themselves Jewish, and none of them ever voiced regret over their decision. In general, support for Frank seems to have been strongest among Jews from New York and other distant parts of the country and weakest among the Atlanta Jews with best knowledge of the local situation.

The facts presented in Lindemann's account had persuaded me that Frank was guilty. But my verdict was quite tentative and I had the impression that virtually everyone who had closely investigated the Frank case had instead concluded that Frank was innocent. However, I then came across a 2016 book from an unexpected source that completely transformed my understanding of the Frank case and its historical significance.

Mainstream publishers may often reject books that too sharply conflict with reigning dogma and sales of such works are unlikely to justify the extensive research required to produce the manuscript. Furthermore, both authors and publishers may face widespread vilification from a hostile media for taking such positions. For these reasons, those who publish such controversial material will often be acting from deep ideological motives rather than merely seeking professional advancement or monetary gain. As an example, it took a zealous Trotskyite leftist such as Lenni Brenner to brave the risk of ferocious attacks and invest the time and effort to produce his remarkable study of the crucial Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s. And for similar reasons, we should not be totally surprised that the leading book arguing for the guilt of Leo Frank appeared as a volume in the series on the pernicious aspects of Jewish-Black historical relations produced by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam (NOI), nor that the text lacked any identified author.
Anonymous works published by heavily-demonized religious-political movements naturally engender considerable caution, but once I began reading the 500 pages of The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man I was tremendously impressed by the quality of the historical analysis. I think I have only very rarely encountered a research monograph on a controversial historical event that provided such an enormous wealth of carefully-argued analysis backed by such copious evidence. The authors seemed to display complete mastery of the major secondary literature of the last one hundred years while drawing very heavily upon the various primary sources, including court records, personal correspondence, and contemporaneous publications, with the overwhelming majority of the 1200 footnotes referencing newspaper and magazine articles of that era. The case they made for Frank's guilt seemed absolutely overwhelming.
The basic outline of events is not disputed. In 1913 Georgia, a 13-year-old pencil company worker named Mary Phagan was last seen alive visiting the office of factory manager Leo Frank on a Saturday morning to collect her weekly paycheck, while her raped and murdered body was found in the basement early the next morning and Frank eventually arrested for the crime. As the wealthy young president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith, Frank ranked as one of the most prominent Jewish men in the South, and great resources were deployed in his legal defense, but after the longest and most expensive trial in state history, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death.
The facts of the case against Frank eventually became a remarkable tangle of complex and often conflicting evidence and eyewitness testimony, with sworn statements regularly being retracted and then counter-retracted. But the crucial point that the NOI authors emphasize for properly deciphering this confusing situation is the enormous scale of the financial resources that were deployed on Frank's behalf, both prior to the trial and afterward, with virtually all of the funds coming from Jewish sources. Currency conversions are hardly precise, but relative to the American family incomes of the time, the total expenditures by Frank supporters may have been as high as $25 million in present-day dollars, quite possibly more than any other homicide defense in American history before or after, and an almost unimaginable sum for the impoverished Deep South of that period. Years later, a leading donor privately admitted that much of this money was spent on perjury and similar falsifications, something which is very readily apparent to anyone who closely studies the case. When we consider this vast ocean of pro-Frank funding and the sordid means for which it was often deployed, the details of the case become far less mysterious. There exists a mountain of demonstrably fabricated evidence and false testimony in favor of Frank, and no sign of anything similar on the other side.
The police initially suspected the black night watchman who found the girl's body, and he was quickly arrested and harshly interrogated. Soon afterward, a bloody shirt was found at his home, and Frank made several statements that seemed to implicate his employee in the crime. At one point, this black suspect may have come close to being summarily lynched by a mob, which would have closed the case. But he stuck to his story of innocence with remarkable composure, in sharp contrast to Frank's extremely nervous and suspicious behavior, and the police soon shifted their scrutiny toward the latter, culminating in his arrest. All researchers now recognize that the night watchman was entirely innocent, and the evidence against him planted.
The case against Frank steadily mounted. He was the last man known to have seen the young victim and he repeatedly changed important aspects of his story. Numerous former female employees reported his long history of sexually aggressive behavior toward them, especially directed towards the murdered girl herself. At the time of the murder, Frank claimed to have been working alone in his office, but a witness who went there reported he had been nowhere to be found. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence implicated Frank.
A black Frank family servant soon came forward with sworn testimony that Frank had confessed the murder to his wife on the morning after the killing, and this claim seemed supported by the latter's strange refusal to visit her husband in jail for the first two weeks after the day of his arrest.
Two separate firms of experienced private detectives were hired by Frank's lavishly-funded partisans, and the agents of both eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that Frank was guilty as charged.
As the investigation moved forward, a major break occurred as a certain Jim Conley, Frank's black janitor, came forward and confessed to having been Frank's accomplice in concealing the crime. At the trial he testified that Frank had regularly enlisted him as a lookout during his numerous sexual liaisons with his female employees, and after murdering Phagan, Frank had then offered him a huge sum of money to help remove and hide the body in the basement so that the crime could be pinned upon someone else. But with the legal noose tightening around Frank, Conley had begun to fear that he might be made the new scapegoat, and went to the authorities in order to save his own neck. Despite Conley's damning accusations, Frank repeatedly refused to confront him in the presence of the police, which was widely seen as further proof of Frank's guilt.
By the time of the trial itself, all sides were agreed that the murderer was either Frank, the wealthy Jewish businessman, or Conley, the semi-literate black janitor with a first-grade education and a long history of public drunkenness and petty crime. Frank's lawyers exploited this comparison to the fullest, emphasizing Frank's Jewish background as evidence for his innocence and indulging in the crudest sort of racial invective against his black accuser, whom they claimed was obviously the true rapist and murderer due to his bestial nature.
Those attorneys were the best that money could buy and the lead counsel was known as the one of the most skilled courtroom interrogators in the South. But although he subjected Conley to a grueling sixteen hours of intense cross-examination over three days, the latter never wavered in the major details of his extremely vivid story, which deeply impressed the local media and the jury. Meanwhile, Frank refused to take the stand at his own trial, thereby avoiding any public cross-examination of his often changing account.
Two notes written in crude black English had been discovered alongside Phagan's body, and everyone soon agreed that these were written by the murderer in hopes of misdirecting suspicion. So they were either written by a semi-literate black such as Conley or by an educated white attempting to imitate that style, and to my mind, the spelling and choice of words strongly suggests the latter, thereby implicating Frank.
Taking a broader overview, the theory advanced by Frank's legion of posthumous advocates seems to defy rationality. These journalists and scholars uniformly argue that Conley, a semi-literate black menial, had brutally raped and murdered a young white girl, and the legal authorities soon became aware of this fact, but conspired to set him free by supporting a complex and risky scheme to instead frame an innocent white businessman. Can we really believe that the police officials and prosecutors of a city in the Old South would have violated their oath of office in order to knowingly protect a black rapist and killer from legal punishment and thereby turn him loose upon their city streets, presumably to prey on future young white girls? This implausible reconstruction is particularly bizarre in that nearly all its advocates across the decades have been the staunchest of Jewish liberals, who have endlessly condemned the horrific racism of the Southern authorities of that era, but then unaccountably chose to make a special exception in this one particular case.
In many respects, the more important part of the Frank case began after his conviction and death sentence when many of America's wealthiest and most influential Jewish leaders began mobilizing to save him from the hangman. They soon established the ADL as a new vehicle for that purpose and succeeded in making the Frank murder case one of the most famous in American history to that date.
Although his role was largely concealed at the time, the most important new backer whom Frank attracted was Albert Lasker of Chicago, the unchallenged monarch of American consumer advertising, which constituted the life's blood of all of our mainstream newspapers and magazines. Not only did he ultimately provide the lion's share of the funds for Frank's defense, but he focused his energies upon shaping the media coverage surrounding the case. Given his dominant business influence in that sector, we should not be surprised that a huge wave of unremitting pro-Frank propaganda soon began appearing across the country in both local and national publications, extending to most of America's most popular and highly-regarded media outlets, with scarcely a single word told on the other side of the story. This even included all of Atlanta's own leading newspapers, which suddenly reversed their previous positions and became convinced of Frank's innocence.
Lasker also enlisted other powerful Jewish figures in the Frank cause, including New York Times owner Adolph Ochs, American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall, and leading Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff. The Times, in particular, began devoting enormous coverage to this previously-obscure Georgia murder case, and many of its articles were widely republished elsewhere. The NOI authors highlight this extraordinary national media attention: "The Black janitor whose testimony became central to Leo Frank's conviction became the most quoted Black person in American history up to that time. More of his words appeared in print in the New York Times than those of W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington—combined."
Back a century ago just as today, our media creates our reality, and with Frank's innocence being proclaimed nationwide in near-unanimous fashion, a long list of prominent public figures were soon persuaded to demand a new trial for the convicted murderer, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jane Addams.
Ironically enough, Lasker himself plunged into this crusade despite apparently having very mixed personal feelings about the man whose cause he was championing. His later biography reveals that upon his first personal meeting with Frank, he perceived him as "a pervert" and a "disgusting" individual, so much so that he even hoped that after he managed to free Frank, the latter would quickly perish in some accident. Furthermore, in his private correspondence he freely admitted that a large fraction of the massive funding that he and numerous other wealthy Jews from across the country were providing had been spent on perjured testimony and there are also strong hints that he explored bribing various judges. Given these facts, Lasker and Frank's other major backers were clearly guilty of serious felonies, and could have received lengthy prison terms for their illegal conduct.
With the New York Times and the rest of the liberal Northern media now providing such heavy coverage of the case, Frank's defense team was forced to abandon the racially-inflammatory rhetoric aimed at his black accuser which had previously been the centerpiece of their trial strategy. Instead, they began concocting a tale of rampant local anti-Semitism, previously unnoticed by all observers, and adopted it as a major grounds for their appeal of the verdict.
The unprincipled legal methods pursued by Frank's backers is illustrated by a single example. Georgia law normally required that a defendant be present in court to hear the reading of the verdict, but given the popular emotions in the case, the judge suggested that this provision be waived, and the prosecution assented only if the defense lawyers promised not to use this small irregularity as grounds for appeal. But after Frank was convicted, AJC President Marshall and his other backers orchestrated numerous unsuccessful state and federal appeals on exactly this minor technicality, merely hiring other lawyers to file the motions.
For almost two years, the nearly limitless funds deployed by Frank's supporters covered the costs of thirteen separate appeals on the state and federal levels, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, while the national media was used to endlessly vilify Georgia's system of justice in the harshest possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction, and during this period outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy Jews who were spending such enormous sums to subvert the local criminal justice system.
One of the very few journalists willing to oppose Frank's position was Georgia publisher Tom Watson, a populist firebrand, and in an editorial he reasonably declared "We cannot have…one law for the Jew, and another for the Gentile" while he also later lamented that "It is a bad state of affairs when the idea gets abroad that the law is too weak to punish a man who has plenty of money." A former Georgia governor indignantly inquired "Are we to understand that anybody except a Jew can be punished for a crime." The clear facts indicate that there was indeed a massive miscarriage of justice in Frank's case, but virtually all of it occurred in Frank's favor.
All appeals were ultimately rejected and Frank's execution date for the rape and murder of the young girl finally drew near. But just days before he was scheduled to leave office, Georgia's outgoing governor commuted Frank's sentence, provoking an enormous storm of popular protest, especially since he was the business partner of Frank's chief defense lawyer, an obvious conflict of interest. Given the vast funds that Frank's national supporters had been deploying on his behalf and the widespread past admissions of bribery in the case, there are obviously dark suspicions about what had prompted such a remarkably unpopular decision, which soon forced the former governor to exile himself from the state. A few weeks later, a group of Georgia citizens stormed Frank's prison farm, abducting and hanging him, with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in American history.
Naturally, Frank's killing was roundly denounced in the national media that had long promoted his cause. But even in those quarters, there may have been a significant difference between public and private sentiments. No newspaper in the country had more strongly championed Frank's innocence than the New York Times of Adolph Ochs. Yet according to the personal diary of one of the Times editors, Ochs privately despised Frank, and perhaps even greeted his lynching with a sense of relief. No effort was ever made by Frank's wealthy supporters to bring any of the lynching party to justice…
The NOI authors devote nearly all of their lengthy book to a careful analysis of the Frank case provided in suitably dispassionate form, but a sense of their justifiable outrage does occasionally poke through. In the years prior to Frank's killing, many thousands of black men throughout the South had been lynched, often based on a slender thread of suspicion, with few of these incidents receiving more than a few sentences of coverage in a local newspaper, and large numbers of whites had also perished under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Frank had received benefit of the longest trial in modern Southern history, backed by the finest trial lawyers that money could buy, and based on overwhelming evidence had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. But when Frank's legal verdict was carried out by extra-judicial means, he immediately became the most famous lynching victim in American history, perhaps even attracting more media attention than all those thousands of other cases combined. Jewish money and Jewish media established him as a Jewish martyr who thereby effectively usurped the victimhood of the enormous number of innocent blacks who were killed both before and after him, none of whom were ever even recognized as individuals.
As Prof. Shahak has effectively demonstrated, traditional Talmudic Judaism regarded all non-Jews as being sub-human, with their lives possessing no value. Given that Frank's backers were followers of Reform Judaism, it seems quite unlikely that they accepted this doctrine or were even aware of its existence. But religious traditions of a thousand years standing can easily become embedded within a culture, and such unrecognized cultural sentiments may have easily shaped their reaction to Frank's legal predicament.
Influential historical accounts of the Frank case and its aftermath have contained lurid tales of the rampant public anti-Semitism visited upon Atlanta's Jewish community in the wake of the trial, even claiming that a substantial portion of the population was forced to flee as a consequence. However, a careful examination of the primary source evidence, including the contemporaneous newspaper coverage, provides absolutely no evidence of this, and it appears to be entirely fictional.
The NOI authors note that prior to Frank's trial American history had been virtually devoid of any evidence of significant anti-Semitism, with the previous most notable incident being the case of an extremely wealthy Jewish financier who was refused service at a fancy resort hotel. But by totally distorting the Frank case and focusing such massive national media coverage on his plight, Jewish leaders around the country succeeded in fabricating a powerful ideological narrative despite its lack of reality, perhaps intending the story to serve as a bonding experience to foster Jewish community cohesion.
As a further example of the widely promoted but apparently fraudulent history, the Jewish writers who have overwhelmingly dominated accounts of the Frank case have frequently claimed that it sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan soon afterward, with the group of citizens responsible for Frank's 1915 lynching supposedly serving as the inspiration for William Simmons' reestablishment of that organization a couple of years later. But there seems no evidence for this. Indeed, Simmons strongly emphasized the philo-Semitic nature of his new organization, which attracted considerable Jewish membership.
The primary factor behind the rebirth of the KKK was almost certainly the 1917 release of D.W. Griffith's overwhelmingly popular landmark film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan of the Reconstruction Era. Given that the American film industry was so overwhelmingly Jewish at the time and the film's financial backers and leading Southern distributors came from that same background, it could be plausibly argued that the Jewish contribution to the creation of the 1920s Klan was a very crucial one, while the revenue from the film's distribution throughout the South actually financed Samuel Goldwyn's creation of MGM, Hollywood's leading studio.
In their introduction, the NOI authors make the fascinating point that the larger historical meaning of the Frank case in American racial history has been entirely lost. Prior to that trial, it was unprecedented for Southern courts to allow black testimony against a white man, let alone against a wealthy man being tried on serious charges; but the horrific nature of the crime and Conley's role as the sole witness required a break from that longstanding tradition. Thus, the authors not unreasonably argued that the Frank case may have been as important to the history of black progress in America as such landmark legal verdicts as Plessy v. Ferguson or Brown v. Board. But since almost the entire historical narrative has been produced by fervent Jewish advocates, these facts have been completely obscured and the case willfully misrepresented as an example of anti-Semitic persecution and public murder.
Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank's Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man's conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.
Now suppose that all the facts of this famous case were exactly unchanged except that Frank had been a white Gentile. Surely the trial would be ranked as one of the greatest racial turning points in American history, perhaps even overshadowing Brown v. Board because of the extent of popular sentiment, and it would have been given a central place in all our modern textbooks. Meanwhile, Frank, his lawyers, and his heavy financial backers would probably be cast as among the vilest racial villains in all of American history for their repeated attempts to foment the lynching of various innocent blacks so that a wealthy white rapist and murderer could walk free. But because Frank was Jewish rather than Christian, this remarkable history has been completely inverted for over one hundred years by our Jewish-dominated media and historiography.
These are the important consequences that derive from control of the narrative and the flow of information, which allows murderers to be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. The ADL was founded just over a century ago with the central goal of preventing a Jewish rapist and killer from being held legally accountable for his crimes, and over the decades, it eventually metastasized into a secret political police force not entirely dissimilar from the widely despised East German Stasi, but with its central goal seeming to be the maintenance of overwhelming Jewish control in a society that is 98% non-Jewish.

• American Pravda: The Leo Frank Case and the Origins of the ADL
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 27, 2023 • 5,300 Words

My original 2018 article on this topic attracted considerable readership and more than 750 comments, greatly boosting sales of the NOI book. Perhaps partly as a consequence, a few months later Amazon purged that scholarly text on the Leo Frank case that had so impressed me, ironically doing so during Black History Month. However, it is still available for sale on the NOI website.

The Hidden History Contained in Unknown Books

Philip Zelikow is an academic historian as solidly situated within our political establishment as anyone in America. But after more than a dozen years of effort he published his very deeply researched 2016 book revealing that one of the greatest turning points in the First World War—and indeed in all of modern world history—had been kept totally concealed from the entire Western world for more than a century. The story he told was so tragic that he characterized it as "the most consequential diplomatic failure in the history of the United States."

In sharp contrast, the anonymous authors of the books published by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam are obviously located at the polar opposite end of the American spectrum in many different respects. But a few years earlier, they had published a 2016 book that was equally deeply researched and that totally overturned the almost universally accepted century-old narrative of one of the most infamous crimes of early twentieth century America, a story regularly highlighted in our introductory history textbooks.

Yet neither of these very important books seems to have attracted any significant attention, and today they both probably remain almost unknown. Zelikow's book was ignored by nearly every widely read American media outlet and its current Amazon sales rank is pitifully low, while once the NOI book began gaining some traction on Amazon, it was immediately banned, and has only remained available on NOI's own small website.

Indeed, although Zelikow's thesis received some glowing establishment endorsements, I suspect that the NOI theory has actually achieved considerably greater popular penetration via social media posts, although those have almost never cited the book and often present its information in a confused and garbled manner.

The story that Zelikow tells should have been the subject of countless movies and plays, but not a single one has ever been produced, while the NOI book totally debunks a story that has become the subject of Hollywood films, television series, and high-profile stage plays. So whether written by fully respectable academic scholars or by authors on the extreme political fringe, these books and the explosive facts they reveal still remain almost totally unknown, having probably only very slightly registered in the public consciousness.

Meanwhile, in the early years of the twentieth century Lothrop Stoddard, Edward A. Ross, and David Starr Jordan all ranked among our most highly regarded and influential public intellectuals. Each man was situated at an entirely different point across the multidimensional American ideological spectrum, and the books they published provided very important analyses of the era. But a hundred years later, all of these authors have been purged from respectability or even demonized, and their books have been forgotten and today remain almost totally unknown.

If these six books, whether published in the last decade or more than a century ago, became less unknown, our understanding of the world and the history of the last one hundred years would be drastically transformed.

https://www.unz.com/