Ephemera is terribly important; it fills in the cultural gaps left by raw statistics. I am glad there was a group dedicated to preserving as much as they could however they could in such a terrible time.
I think the candy wrapper is my favorite artifact because it is so ephemeral. Like, even for sentimental reasons you're not supposed to save those. And yet there it is, because it was there in the Ghetto; it was part of that strange, terrible world in which people were alive.
The German American Bund, on the other hand, scares the living heck out of me along with the knowledge that after America entered the war and declared opposition to the Nazis, these guys didn't just go "oh well we learned our lesson, no more for us, good bye". The fact that their direct descendants are active and harmful today is chilling.
Agreed: I find all the pre-war American fascist groups scary both because they existed in the first place and because you're right, it's impossible to imagine their members just one-eightied their ideologies as soon as the organizations were forcibly dissolved after Pearl Harbor. Not to mention all the other Americans who might not have wanted to shell out the membership dues for a brown or a silver shirt or who thought that all the marching around and saluting was a little silly, but did not necessarily disagree with their general ideas. Someone must be doing the scholarly work now on the genealogy of our current neo-Klan, neo-Nazi, nativist alt-right white supremacists. I would not find it pleasant reading, but I would want someone to have found the connections, because I cannot imagine the wheel was really reinvented when it came out looking like a swastika both times.
no subject
I think the candy wrapper is my favorite artifact because it is so ephemeral. Like, even for sentimental reasons you're not supposed to save those. And yet there it is, because it was there in the Ghetto; it was part of that strange, terrible world in which people were alive.
The German American Bund, on the other hand, scares the living heck out of me along with the knowledge that after America entered the war and declared opposition to the Nazis, these guys didn't just go "oh well we learned our lesson, no more for us, good bye". The fact that their direct descendants are active and harmful today is chilling.
Agreed: I find all the pre-war American fascist groups scary both because they existed in the first place and because you're right, it's impossible to imagine their members just one-eightied their ideologies as soon as the organizations were forcibly dissolved after Pearl Harbor. Not to mention all the other Americans who might not have wanted to shell out the membership dues for a brown or a silver shirt or who thought that all the marching around and saluting was a little silly, but did not necessarily disagree with their general ideas. Someone must be doing the scholarly work now on the genealogy of our current neo-Klan, neo-Nazi, nativist alt-right white supremacists. I would not find it pleasant reading, but I would want someone to have found the connections, because I cannot imagine the wheel was really reinvented when it came out looking like a swastika both times.