Leading from the Middle

Caption: The Memorial of the Mass Murder of Jews in Rumbula Forest, Latvia, 1941.

In my reading of popular fiction from the 1890s through the 1930s, it’s not unusual to run into stereotypical slurs and insinuations against Blacks, Jews, Asians, Italians, Germans, the Irish, etc.
Usually these are minor denigrations – a descriptive word or two, tossed off in passing like salt or pepper to add some seasoning to the story, a touch of local color or as an in-joke for readers in the dominant group.
Stereotyping was (and is) a sleazy and lazy way to wink at the reader – WE – you and I gentle reader - are of course better than these foreigners!
The author winks and nods upon our sharing his prejudices; in so doing, he co-conspires with us in our claimed superiority.
I’ve cringed with a few of my favorite authors, PG Wodehouse and Edgar Wallace. While their characters (like the kind-hearted Bertie Wooster) rarely if ever make racist remarks, both authors from time-to time sprinkle racial aspersions in the scene-setting background.
But, an 1899 item takes the cake as the vilest I have come across in a popular magazine, the Ludgate.
The Ludgate, its editor claimed, had the largest circulation of any three-penny magazine in the UK with each edition reaching about 100,000 readers. Like its famous competitor, the Strand, the Ludgate offered a mix of fiction, poetry, articles on royals and empire, and illustrations to be enjoyed by UK families.
The quote appears in an 1899 story, “The Trap at Belvedere Mansions” by Reginald Bacchus and C. Ranger Gull.
“A knock at the door interrupted his reflections, and a gentleman, whose voice proclaimed him a German no less loudly than his features a Jew, and whose age may have been twenty-eight, entered ….
Mr. Francis Birnbaum was a pale, undersized little man with an eager and crafty expression. The tailor, in the City, who made clothes for the little mean man, knowing his type, always sent home parcels addressed, "Captain Birnbaum."
Be that as it may, no moustache or single eye-glass could disguise the fact of Mr. Birnbaum's parentage. His soft, yellowish nose and greedy, sensual lips proclaimed him unerringly for what he was, the dirty little continental Jew, of a mixed breed.”
Some 40 years later in my birth year in my native land of Latvia 25,000 Jews – men, women and children - were trucked into a forest and murdered by German police and local collaborators.
This was not an isolated massacre; it was repeated all over Europe against Jews, Gypsies, the disabled, and anyone else who was somehow suspect and deemed "inferior".
My point is that ignoring hate encourages its growth. To my knowledge no one wrote to the Ludgate decrying the disgusting language.
Had someone written, they’d have been mocked by many but maybe a few would have thought twice.
At least, a few might pragmatically ask (like Shakespeare’s Shylock) “Do Jews not read?” And, to ask, what’s the purpose of this hateful language?
And, perhaps, just perhaps to condemn the magazine for its gratuitous promotion of hate.
More recently and relevantly, we of the elites on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are of course better than those despised “deplorables” or anyone with a different world view from the media’s orthodoxy.
Or, are we?

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And, don’t forget Lubans' book on democratic workplaces, Leading from the Middle

© Copyright text by John Lubans 2022

 

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