Dancing to Jazz on Fascist Airwaves

The article is devoted to the assessment of the results of the Bolshevik modernization of Russia in the 20-30s of the 20th century in its military-technological, personnel and political aspects on the example of the struggle of Soviet Russia with Nazi Germany in the first years of World War II and the Great Patriotic War. The relevance of the topic is due to the contradictions in the assessments of the Bolshevik transformations of the 20-30s. In historiography and in the public mind, disputes about the role of these transformations for victory in the Second World War and WWII are not abating. This is especially true of the first years of the Second World War, which led the USSR to disaster. This problem was analyzed by an outstanding theoretician, leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and a figure of the Russian intellectual emigration V.M. Chernov. As historical sources, the article considers a number of such interesting documents as the letter of V.M. Chernov to I. V. Stalin in 1942 and issues of the emigre magazine “For Freedom!ˮ published in the USA. Using these sources as an example, the position of V.M. Chernov on the successes and failures of the Bolshevik reform of Russia and the related victories and defeats of the Red Army in the early years of the War. It is proved that the failures of the USSR in the first years of the War were the result of a number of political and personnel problems, some of which were caused by the accelerated "assault" nature of the Bolshevik modernization of the 1920s and 1930s.

Studies of the relations between the Tripartite powers have primarily been concentrated on the relations of Nazi Germany with Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. This article, based on original documents from the Italian archives, offers an original insight on the Italian perspective about the naval relations between Italy and Japan before and during the early years of the Second World War. It analyses the strategic motivation that led Fascist Italy to seek naval cooperation with Japan and how their relationship evolved during the period between the Ethiopian War (1935–6) to the end of the Axis campaign in North Africa in 1943.

Historians and musicologists have described jazz diplomacy predominantly as a political and cultural practice with transnational reverberations that was launched by the US State Department during the early years of the Cold War. In her pioneering study of American jazz diplomacy, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Penny Von Eschen, for instance, details how the US government started to employ jazz as a diplomatic instrument in 1956 when it funded Dizzy Gillespie’s tour to the Middle East. Over a period of more than two decades, the State Department sent many of the most famous American jazz musicians abroad, often to the trouble spots of the Cold War. Encouraged by the success of Gillespie’s tour, the State Department sent Benny Goodman to Southeast Asia in 1957 and funded Dave Brubeck’s 1958 performances in Poland and the Middle East. In the following years, the growing list of American jazz ambassadors included Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, and Charles Mingus among others. US jazz diplomacy’s primary aim was to promote American culture in countries “where communism has a foothold,” as Adam Clayton Powell put it.1

Reviewed by: Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 by Benjamin Uchiyama Ethan Mark (bio) Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945. By Benjamin Uchiyama. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2019. xii, 280 pages. $99.99, cloth; $31.99, paper; $80.00, E-book. Over the last several decades, the study of prewar Japan has come a long way. A growing scholarly focus on the workings of culture, power, and empire has prompted a healthy skepticism toward the binaries, boundaries, and constants that informed earlier, exceptionalist understandings of Japan's state and society. As heavily loaded political and moral territory, however, wartime Japan has remained particularly challenging terrain for such reappraisals. The tenacious idea of the cultural experience of the period as somehow essentially different and separate from what came before or after—the war years, in common parlance, as a "dark valley," or what [End Page 236] Donald Keene, speaking of wartime literature, once called "the Barren Years"—has often resulted in a narrative and epistemological segregation that has reinforced such assumptions. Penetrating into this conceptual and chronological breach, Benjamin Uchiyama's Japan's Carnival War: Mass Culture on the Home Front, 1937–1945 performs a valuable service by putting a spotlight on wartime mass culture that illuminates its distinctive qualities and nuances while also staying alert to transwar continuities. Above all, Uchiyama is concerned to highlight the war's ambiguous mix of violence, sacrifice, discipline, and obedience with pleasure, consumption, irreverence, and even wild abandon; and how these seemingly contradictory aspects did not exist in mutual isolation, but as part of a singular—and sometimes synergistic—wartime package. In painting this unusual picture of the Japanese home front, Uchiyama draws upon two conceptual frames. The first is that of "total war system theory" pioneered by historian Yamanouchi Yasushi in the 1990s, which "avoids normative assumptions implicitly inherent in much scholarship of the Second World War by provocatively arguing that all the major belligerent parties of that conflict shared the experience of war mobilization" (p. 9) and "reminds us that total war was an affair of both state and society." Uchiyama maintains that total war system theory is much more helpful for thinking comparatively about wartime Japan and the Japanese home front than the recent revival of the "fascist" label, which is overburdened with political baggage, a lack of engagement with total war as a transnational modern phenomenon, and an instinctively narrow comparison of wartime Japan with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy with little attention to the "liberal" democratic home fronts of wartime America and Britain. (p. 10) Nevertheless, Uchiyama argues that cultural mobilization is an area where total war system theory comes up short, reproducing a conventional, "triumphal narrative of the state overpowering the people to do its bidding" (p. 10). In contrast, he argues, "when we look closely at war mobilization in Japan, one sees less a 'system' than a haphazard process" (p. 12). Seeking to write a cultural history of wartime Japan and total war that accounts for such complexity in practice "without erasing the very real repression and extraordinary violence of total war or degenerating into a simplistic tale of popular 'resistance'" (pp. 13–14), Uchiyama finds a solution in the ambiguous "third space" (p. 19) defined by structuralist literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin's classic notion of the "carnivalesque." Bakhtin's carnival emphasizes individual and group consciousness as an irrepressible, unstable field of ideological plurality, play, and discordance, thriving from the bottom up to some extent regardless of—or even synergistically in direct relation [End Page 237] to—top-down attempts at social repression and demands for harmony or uniformity, while never actually posing a direct threat to the system. "Carnival shakes up but does not destroy the official order of things. Thus carnivalized cultural constructs and attitudes were always ambivalent and always contradictory," argues Uchiyama (p. 17). "The key is to think of wartime in terms of carnivalesque duality, between official and unofficial, and the sacred and profane" (p. 14). In doing so, he usefully calls for extending the late Miriam Silverberg's innovative, dualistic characterization of the Japanese masses of the prewar period as...

Italian Politics and Culture from Fascism to Postwar Democracy in the Life and Work of Uguccione Ranieri di Sorbello (1906–1969)

By 1917, after three years of war, the belligerents’ societies were beginning to fracture. In Russia two revolutions took the divided state out of the world war and into civil war (see Maps 31 and 49). In France, invaded and demoralised by successive failed offensives, a similar domestic crisis gripped the nation in 1917. The political consensus of the early years of the war, the so-called ‘sacred union’ (union sacree) collapsed. Mutinies in her army, strikes in her industrial cities, a rapid turnover of ministries and calls for a negotiated peace were signs of war-weariness in the nation. Unlike backward Russia, France’s modern society was able to weather the strains of ‘total war’ and emerge strengthened for the final fight to the finish with Germany.

Adrian Mitchell's celebrated couplet defines a minority response, at least as far as English poets who claim an interest in jazz are concerned. They may not agree with Philip Larkin's even more celebrated anathematizing of the three Ps (Parker, Pound, and Picasso) but on the whole their devotion is given to the so-called traditional styles and masters, and for most of them 'modern jazz' is a contradiction in terms. The music of New Orleans and Chicago, of Armstrong, Beiderbecke, Condon, Ellington, Ory, and Waller, this is what jazz means for those predominantly middle-class, universityeducated poets who, during the I940s and I950s, proclaimed their devotion in prose and verse. I want to offer some suggestions as to why this should be so, but before I do it will be as well to say something about the reputation of jazz in pre-war England. The year to begin with is 1919. Before then there had been talk of 'ragtime', but I do not think that anyone had much sense of what that word really meant, and since they had little more to go on than Irving Berlin's 'Alexander's Ragtime Band' this is not very surprising. What does seem to be true is that during the war years, 1914-18, army officers home on leave or due to be sent out to the Western Front included among their diversions regular attendance at dinner-dances; at such dinner-dances, interspersed with the newly-fashionable and 'shocking' tango, and other, rather more acceptable, dance-music, there would be an occasional bow in the direction of'ragtime'. This seems to have meant up-tempo numbers with a fairly solid four-to-the-bar rhythm which, considering that most orchestras were largely composed of violinists, must have sounded pretty excruciating.1 Then, in i919, the Original Dixieland Jazz (or Jass) Band came to England. 'Untuneful Harmonists playing Peppery Melodies', as they rather oddly styled themselves, they produced what has been called a 'phenomenal

Strategy for Victory: The Development of British Tactical Air Power, 1919-1943examines the nature of the inter-Service crisis between the British Army and the RAF over the provision of effective air support for the army in the Second World War. Material for this book is drawn primarily from the rich collection of documents at the National Archives (UK) and other British archives. The author makes a highly original point that Britain's independent RAF was in fact a disguised blessing for the Army and that the air force's independence was in part a key reason why a successful solution to the army's air support problems was found. The analysis traces why the British army went to war in 1939 without adequate air support and how an effective system of support was organized by the RAF. As such, it is the first scholarly survey of the origins and development of British air support doctrine and practice during the early years of the Second World War. The provision of direct air support was of central importance to the success enjoyed by Anglo-American armies during the latter half of the Second World War. First in North Africa, and later in Italy and North-West Europe, American, British and Empire armies fought most if not all of their battles with the knowledge that they enjoyed unassailable air superiority throughout the battle area. This advantage, however, was the product of a long and bitter dispute between the British Army and the Royal Air Force that began at the end of the First World War and continued virtually unabated until it was resolved in late 1942 and early 1943 when the 2nd Tactical Air Force was created. Battlefield experience and, in particular, success in North Africa, combined with the hard work, wisdom and perseverance of Air Marshals Sir Arthur Tedder and Arthur Coningham, the active co-operation of General Bernard Montgomery, and the political authority of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, produced a uniquely British system that afforded the most comprehensive, effective and flexible air support provided by any air force during the war. The book is divided into two equal parts of five chapters. Part one surveys how the British Army went to war in 1939 without adequate air support, and part two explains how an effective system of air support was organized by the middle years of the war. The analysis traces Britain's earliest experience with aircraft in the Great War 1914-1918, the inter-war period of doctrinal development and inter-Service rivalry, and the major campaigns in France and the Middle East during the first half of the Second World War when the weaknesses in Army-RAF co-operation were first exposed and eventually resolved. As such, it is the first scholarly survey of the origin and development of British air support doctrine and practice during the early years of the Second World War.

The Names Heard Long Ago: How the Golden Age of Hungarian Soccer Shaped the Modern Game

IN THE LAST DAYS Of August, 1945, certain events of historical interest took place almost unnoticed in the extraordinary atmosphere created by the genesis of atomic warfare and the collapse of the Japanese empire. Among these events was the capitulation of Truk in the East Caroline Islands. This Japanese fortress had hindered the forces of the United States during the early years of the war in the Pacific, and, even in the last two years of fighting it continued to be something of a menace. Truk has become a fairly familiar name in recent years, but its past is cloudy and obscure. After two centuries under Spanish control, centuries of almost complete neglect, Truk was sold to Germany in 1899.' During the first year of World War I, Japanese forces landed at Truk where they remained in possession.2 The area was renounced by Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. On December 17, 192o, Japanese occupation was confirmed when the Council of the League of Nations declared Japan to be the mandatory power in the former Pacific Ocean island possessions of Germany, north of the equator.' Prior to Japanese occupation, little was known about Truk beyond the fact that it was a complex atoll of over a hundred coral and volcanic islands, surrounded by a great reef, and that it was situated between 70 and 8o N. Lat., and between 1510o and 1520o E. Long. After the landings by Japanese imperial forces in 1914, the area became more and more difficult to enter. By 1930 it was almost entirely sealed off from the commerce and the curiosity of other nations. In reports to the League of Nations, Japan repeatedly asserted that the entire Japanese garrison had been withdrawn after the war in accordance with treaty requirements, the last troops having embarked in April, 1922. Thereafter, the Japanese government declared, the mandate islands remained com-

Like in other parts of Europe, jazz had its place in Italy because there was a need for evasion, for entertainment, and for something new after the dark years of the First World War. Jazz, both as a musical genre and as an American export that brought lifestyle changes, had a significant impact on Italian society in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Many channels and transnational agents contributed not only to the diffusion of jazz, but also to its adaptation to a national context. The Fascist state tried to prevent the population from listening to rhythms and songs that came from abroad, and from the middle of the 1920s increasingly defined jazz with racist meanings until racism turned into anti-Semitism in 1938.

Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. So sensitive was the project in its early years that even President Truman was not informed of its existence. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages—documents of unparalleled importance for our understanding of the history and politics of the Stalin era and the early Cold War years. Hidden away in a former girls’ school in the late 1940s, Venona Project cryptanalysts, linguists, and mathematicians attempted to decode more than twenty-five thousand intercepted Soviet intelligence telegrams. When they cracked the unbreakable Soviet code, a breakthrough leading eventually to the decryption of nearly three thousand of the messages, analysts uncovered information of powerful significance: the first indication of Julius Rosenberg’s espionage efforts; references to the espionage activities of Alger Hiss; startling proof of Soviet infiltration of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb; evidence that spies had reached the highest levels of the U.S. State and Treasury Departments; indications that more than three hundred Americans had assisted in the Soviet theft of American industrial, scientific, military, and diplomatic secrets; and confirmation that the Communist party of the United States was consciously and willingly involved in Soviet espionage against America. Drawing not only on the Venona papers but also on newly opened Russian and U. S. archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr provide in this book the clearest, most rigorously documented analysis ever written on Soviet espionage and the Americans who abetted it in the early Cold War years.

This chapter shows how the war years witnessed a dramatic intensification of the ongoing tension between the integrative and disaggregating social potential of the mass media. On the one hand, the overall trend towards a more ‘common culture’ saw its apogee during the early years of the war as popular demand for film, radio, and the press soared. On the other hand, after 1942/3 the socially divisive potential of the media once again came to the fore in terms of content as well as the radical shifts in the wider societal context and how the media were consumed by audiences. Whereas the early war years witnessed an unprecedented social integration of audiences, after 1942 patterns of leisure and media consumption reflected the multiplying signs of social disintegration on the German home front.

Charles Frederick Gunther, who would eventually endow the Chicago History Museum with much of its Civil War Collection and become a leader in Chicago politics at the turn of the twentieth century, descended from a family which moved from Wurttemberg, Germany to Pennsylvania and then eventually to Peru, UHnois.(Figure 1) He had tried several occupations prior to the outbreak of the Civil War - clerking in a retail store, working for an druggist, cashiering at a bank, and peddling ice for the Bohlen, Wilson and Company firm in Memphis, Tennessee. He was a young man of twenty-four searching for adventure and his niche in upwardly mobile society when the South seceded and he was trapped in Memphis. Fearing that Confederate authorities would impress him into the army or the local populace would suspect his northern sentiments and brand him a traitor, he accepted a job as purchasing agent and purser aboard the Rose Douglas, a steam packet commanded by Captain James L. McGinnis, an old and experienced steam boater who had served as a pilot, owner and master of ships plying the Mississippi River. The principle task of the Rose Douglas for the years 1861 and 1862 was to assist the Confederacy's effort to ferry men, material, and provisions up and down the Mississippi, White, and Arkansas Rivers for Confederate authorities in the Trans-Mississippi Department. These were the two years that Gunther chronicles in his war time diaries and which tell this, his story, of the life of a Yankee working for the South. The first two years of the War Between the States were exciting ones for Charles Gunther. He not only met and assisted Confederate leaders in the states bordering the Mississippi River, but he became an eyewitness to history, facing dangers from the Union Navy, suffering under the same privations as the local river folk when food and medicine became scarce, contracting malaria from the swamps and lowlands of the Mississippi Delta, and seeing northern troops eventually strangle the South and its commerce with overwhelmingly superior naval and land forces. All of these historical trends were meticulously recorded in two small, five by seven inch diaries, recently uncovered, that described his day-to-day experiences during this period of his captivity. (Figure 2) These daily journals were crammed full of his private thoughts, hopes, aspirations, and fears hidden from the eyes of even his fellow river men and his southern friends he met in numerous river ports lest they reveal his true northern sympathies and brand him as a traitor to the cause. When he could finally enter his true thoughts on December 28, 1862, the relief in his words was evident. To our great joy we are once more in the land of freedom - am bound for home now (Peru, Illinois) - sure very much unexpected - but thank God I am free to again speak my opinion.1 Charles Gunther's diaries seem at first to be openly pro Confederate. But when the researcher reads between the lines, it becomes evident he is merely afraid his personal entries will be seen by southern authorities and spell his doom. Once this duplicity is understood, the diaries provide a unique perspective of a northerner trapped in southern service that shares an intimate portrait of life on the rivers during the crucial early years of the Civil War when the fate of the Trans-Mississippi theatre and perhaps the whole nation was decided. In his own words, these are the impressions that defined this man and his understanding of the war that it still being fought today. This is Charles Gunther's story. As Gunther begins his diary in January 1861, his personal situation seems grim and directionless. His ice company, due to the seasonal nature of the business, just laid him off. He is forced to take a few menial labor jobs chopping wood, slaughtering hogs, and shucking corn. Travelling through Arkansas and back to Memphis looking for work, playing poker, and discussing Illinois issues with his good friend Asa Hoffman, an old acquaintance from Peru, Illinois, consume much of his time. …

Nobel Peace Laureates, Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch: Two Women of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom Harriet Hyman Alonso In November, 1895, Alfred Nobel, wealthy inventor and entrepreneur, signed his last will and testament. In it, he stipulated that the major part of his estate be converted into a fund and invested, the interest to be used for prizes in five areas he wished to promote, one of which was peace.1 Nobel's interest in the peace cause centered around his passionate friendship with Baroness Bertha von Suttner, the founder of the Austrian Peace Society.2 Nobel envisioned the prize as a tribute to the woman or man who did the most for obtaining peace in Europe. Little did he imagine that it would become one of the most pretigious and lucrative awards in the world.3 In the spring of 1992, eighteen peace historians gathered at the Nobel Institute in Norway to probe the question, "How has the Nobel Peace Prize been accepted in the laureates' own nations?" My assignment was to enlighten the group on the two women from the United States who won the prize: Jane Addams (1931) and Emily Greene Balch (1946).4 Each received the honor for her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Addams was already a well-known Progressive Era reformer when she was named a Nobel laureate and is well placed in U.S. history. Emily Greene Balch, however, was and still is virtually unknown in the land of her birth. Why, I wondered, was this so? Both women came from similar backgrounds, lived through the same eras, and embraced many of the same causes. They worked together in WILPF and other organizations to ward off U.S. participation in World War I, faced similar harassment during the Red Scare of the 1920s, and worked together in the international search for world peace during the interwar years. After Addams died in 1935, Balch continued working with WILPF until her death in 1961. Three factors may explain the inconsistency in the two women's reputations: 1) Addams is best known for her work in the settlement house movement, an extension of the domestic sphere and traditionally occupied by women, whereas Balch chose peace activism as a career, thereby entering the world of international affairs, a sphere traditionally closed to women. Addams's social work, in other words, did not generally threaten © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 2 (Summer) 1995 Harriet Hyman Alonso 7 the status quo, whereas Batch's peace work did. 2) Addams did not criticize the nation's capitalist ideology while Balch openly declared herself a socialist, allying with political groups which U.S. policy makers disfavored. Throughout her career, Balch challenged the basic economic principles of capitalism. 3) Addams received the prize during a time of relative peace while Balch received it during the early Cold War years. The public's view at the time was that Addams's work mirrored government policy, whereas Balch's reflected clearcut opposition. A comparison of these women's lives and careers offers more insight into the matter. The Early Years Jane Addams and Emily Greene Balch had much in common during their early years. Their upbringing and education led to a similar desire to end poverty and war. The two women were born just six years apart to upper middle-class parents—Addams on September 6,1860, and Balch on January 8,1867.5 Both women had industrious, politically Uberal fathers and traditional Victorian-era mothers. Addams's father, John Huy Addams, a prosperous Illinois miller and banker, was heavily involved in community affairs. An opponent of slavery, he met and befriended many influential figures, among them, Abraham Lincoln. Balch's father, Francis Vergnies Balch, a graduate of Harvard University, volunteered to fight in the Civil War, and served as secretary to the abolitionist U.S. senator, Charles Sumner. Returning to Boston, he devoted the remainder of his life to practicing law. Addams's mother, Sarah Weber Addams, concentrated on her role as wife and mother, and died when Jane was only two years old. Five years...