With Colonel Edwin Emerson, president of the Friends of Germany, back in New York for two weeks now, the propaganda machine of the local pro-Hitlerites must be humming smoothly. The spring sowing of “Truth About Germany” and “German Youth in a Changing World” and “American Illustrated News” is proceeding apace.
Colonel Emerson, it appears, had left for Berlin January 20 for a quick flying visit and probably to get orders from the Nazi higher-ups. But, like the plans of Bobie Burns’ mice, his too went astray. The Colonel says he took part in a fencing match while in Germany, and a counter-revolutionary fencing foil went through a very tender portion of his anatomy. He was therefore forced to stay in Berlin longer than he had planned.
But now he’s back in his offices in the Whitehall Building, 17 Battery Place, Room 131.
A strange feature of the Colonel’s stay in Berlin was the fact that nobody would even admit he was there. With so influential an American at the Nazi capital it was rather queer that American correspondents would always receive the announcement that the foreign office had never heard of his presence in Germany. He was, nevertheless, staying at an unassuming pension on Unter den Linden.
The Colonel has had a versatile career, to say the least. He was a rough rider with Teddy Roosevelt, a prisoner of war in Turkey during the World War, a founder and guiding light of the Friends of Germany (not to be confused with the Friends of New Germany), and he is at present a correspondent for whatever German newspapers still exist, a disseminator of Nazi literature, and what not.
Emerson was born in Dresden and speaks with a marked German ascent. He earned the title, “Colonel,” by appointment to that rank in the New York State National Guard. When he was a prisoner of war in Turkey, the story goes, he was transferred to Germany and there interned. But he seemed to have unusual freedom for a war prisoner. He wrote for the Continental Times, an English-language pro-German newspaper published in Amsterdam.
After the War Colonel Emerson came back to this country and began writing prolifically. He became correspondent for a number of German newspapers.
He became an ardent Republican and wrote a biography called “Hoover and His Times” for the presidential campaign of 1932. The chief claim to fame of this volume is in the way it is written. Instead of following the usual chronological order in relating Hoover’s life Emerson began with Hoover in the White House and ended up with Hoover’s birth in West Branch, Iowa. The book can still be found in the cut-rate stores selling publishers’ surpluses. Its price, we think, is forty-nine cents.
It is paradoxical that Emerson, the anti-Semite and pro-Nazi, eulogized Hoover’s “humanitarianism” in his biography. Going back on their writings seems to be a habit of Nazi propagandists. There is George Sylvester Viereck, who collaborated in the writing of “My First Two Thousand Years,” a novel relating the story of the wandering Jew. Although not militantly pro-Jewish, the book at least was sympathetic to the Jews.
More than sixty lines are devoted to Emerson in the Who’s Who in America. A number of interesting facts about him can be picked up there: He was born in Dresden in 1869, graduated from Harvard and was foreign correspondent for several American newspapers. In 1905, when he was covering the Russo-Japanese War, he was imprisoned in a Japanese fortress for blockade running, and was in the thick of most of the fighting between then and the World War.
But what is most interesting of all the little items and dates about the man is this:
“Remained in Europe after War, doing relief work; organized League of Oppressed Peoples.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
