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George Sylvester Viereck

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George Sylvester Viereck
Portrait of Viereck, by Underwood & Underwood, 1922
Portrait of Viereck, by Underwood & Underwood, 1922
BornGeorge Sylvester Viereck
(1884-12-31)December 31, 1884
Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria German Empire
DiedMarch 18, 1962(1962-03-18) (aged 77)
Holyoke, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation
  • Journalist
  • novelist
  • essayist
  • pro-German propagandist
NationalityAmerican
GenrePoetry
Spouse
Margaret Hein
​
(m. 1915)​
Children2, including Peter Viereck

George Sylvester Viereck (December 31, 1884 – March 18, 1962) was an American poet and journalist. After enjoying early success for his poetry, novels, and journalistic work, he achieved notoriety in the United States as a pro-German propagandist, and eventually as an agent operating on behalf of Nazi Germany.[1] During World War II, he was convicted of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and served nearly four years in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.[2]

Biography

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Early life and education

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George Sylvester Viereck was born in Munich on 31 December 1884.[1] His father, Louis Viereck, had been born in Berlin in 1851 to the unmarried actress Edwina Viereck. It was rumored that Louis was the son of Kaiser William I, but then Louis von Prillwitz, from the Prince Augustus lineage in Prussia, acknowledged Louis as his son.[1] Louis joined the Socialist Party in 1870, and eight years later was banished from Berlin under Otto von Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. In 1881, he became editor of a socialist periodical in Munich. In 1884, he was elected to the Reichstag, but was imprisoned in 1886 for attending Socialist Party meetings. He left the Party upon his release from prison.[1]

George's mother, Laura Viereck, was born in San Francisco to William Viereck, a younger brother of Edwina Viereck. William was an unsuccessful revolutionary who had fled the German States like other Forty-Eighters and operated a German theatre in San Francisco. After William's death in 1865, his wife returned to Germany with their children. In 1881, Laura married her first cousin Louis.[1]

Louis emigrated to the United States in 1896, and Laura followed some months later with the eleven-year-old George, who preferred going by his middle name "Sylvester".[3] As an adolescent, Sylvester was already writing poetry. His heroes were Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Oscar Wilde. His 1907 novel The House of the Vampire was heavily influenced by Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.[4] By 1901, Louis had become an American citizen.[1] While still in college in 1904, young Viereck published his first poetry collection after obtaining the help of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn.[5] Viereck graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1906.

Early career and World War I

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The next year, Viereck's collection Nineveh and Other Poems (1907) won him national fame. A number of his poems were written in the style of the Uranian male love poetry of the time.[6] The Saturday Evening Post called Viereck "the most widely-discussed young literary man in the United States today".[7]

In 1910, Viereck published a best-selling book of journalism, Confessions of a Barbarian, after it had appeared serially in the weekly magazine The Mirror.[8] In that same year, he co-founded and edited a literary and arts journal called The International.[9] Among its contributors was his close friend, American poet Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff, as well as British occultist and poet Aleister Crowley.

In the years leading up to 1911 when his father returned to Germany to spend the remainder of his life,[1] Viereck had himself become a Germanophile. He lectured on American poetry at the University of Berlin in 1911.[10] He edited a German-sponsored weekly magazine, The Fatherland, with a claimed circulation of 80,000.[11] The magazine was later renamed Viereck's American Weekly.[12] For his advocacy of German militarism, and American pacifism, during World War I, Viereck was expelled from several social clubs and fraternal organizations, and had a falling out with Wagstaff.[13][14][15]

After a German torpedo sank the Lusitania, Viereck released a statement in support of the attack.[16] He once left a briefcase of German government documents on a train in Manhattan. A federal agent, who was tailing Viereck, quickly snatched the briefcase. Some of the documents were leaked to the New York World. When published, they revealed a long list of American citizens—including Viereck—who had received payment from the German government to sway public opinion in its favor. They also described German sabotage plans.[17] Theodore Roosevelt (whom Viereck's father had helped to elect president) wrote him an angry letter encouraging him to leave the U.S. and go back to Germany.[18] In August 1918, a lynch mob stormed Viereck's house in Mount Vernon, forcing him to seek refuge in a New York City hotel.[19] His pro-German loyalties during the Great War tarnished his reputation as a respected American author. In 1919, he was expelled from the Poetry Society of America.[20]

International success

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In the 1920s, Viereck sought to revive his career as a writer and public figure. In 1923, he published a book of popular science entitled Rejuvenation: How Steinach Makes People Young. It drew the attention of Sigmund Freud,[21] who wrote Viereck asking if he would write a similar book about psychoanalysis. Viereck traveled to Vienna to interview Freud, and then went to Munich to interview Adolf Hitler.[22] During the mid-1920s, Viereck went on several additional tours of Europe, interviewing Marshal Foch, Georges Clemenceau, George Bernard Shaw, Oswald Spengler, Benito Mussolini, Queen Elisabeth of the Belgians, Henry Ford, Albert Moll, Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Einstein,[23] and Sigmund Freud.[24] He first met Adolf Hitler through this interview series, describing him as a "human explosive."[25]

Viereck developed a friendship with Nikola Tesla.[26] Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife. He dedicated his poem "Fragments of Olympian Gossip" to Viereck, a work in which Tesla ridiculed the scientific establishment of the day.

Support for Hitler

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Viereck became a well-known supporter of the Nazi movement. In 1933, he traveled to Berlin to meet with Hitler, who was now Chancellor of Germany. In 1934, Viereck gave a speech to twenty thousand "Friends of the New Germany" at New York's Madison Square Garden, in which he compared Hitler to Franklin D. Roosevelt and told his audience to sympathize with Nazism without being anti-Semites. His Jewish friends denounced him as "George Swastika Viereck", but he continued to promote Nazism.[27]

In 1940, Viereck launched a scheme in which he "paid members of Congress to take propaganda from the Hitler government — he'd literally get it from the German embassy — and deliver it in Congress in floor speeches. Then he'd use their offices' franking privileges to get thousands, in some cases millions, of reprints of this Nazi propaganda. He would mail it out, at taxpayer expense, all over the United States."[28] The key members of Congress working with Viereck in this scheme were Sen. Ernest Lundeen,[29] Rep. Hamilton Fish,[30] and Rep. Jacob Thorkelson.[31]

In October 1941, Viereck was indicted in the U.S. for a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act when he set up his publishing house, Flanders Hall, in Scotch Plains, New Jersey.[32] In 1942, he was convicted of failing to register with the United States Department of State as a Nazi agent and sentenced to 2 to 6 years in prison.[33] In 1943, his conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court. Later that year, however, Viereck was convicted on six counts and sentenced to one to 5 years in prison. Viereck, who returned to prison on July 31, 1943, spent 3 years and 10 months in the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was released on parole on May 17, 1947.[34]

Postwar

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Viereck's chronicle of life in prison, Men Into Beasts, was published as a paperback originally by Fawcett Publications in 1952. The book is a memoir of discomfort, loss of dignity, and brutality in prison. The front matter and backcover text focus on the situational homosexuality and male rape described in the book (witnessed, not experienced, by Viereck).

On March 18, 1962, George Sylvester Viereck died at Mount Holyoke Hospital in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He was 77.[35]

Family

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In 1915, Viereck married Margaret Edith Hein.[1] They had two sons, George and Peter. George was killed in action during the Second World War. Their other son, Peter, became a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, historian, and conservative political theorist. A 2005 New Yorker article discusses how Peter Viereck both rejected and was shaped by the ideologies of his father.[36]

Reception

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The poem "Slaves" published in the 1924 collection The Three Sphinxes and Other Poems inspired the title of the 1968 psychothriller Twisted Nerve, and is quoted several times in the film:

A twisted nerve, a ganglion gone awry,
Predestinates the sinner and the saint.

Viereck's The House of the Vampire (1907) was not well-received by critics.[37] In 1909, Edgar Allan Woolf loosely based his stage play, The Vampire, on Viereck's novel.[38]

Bibliography

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Articles

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Miscellany

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Foreign editions

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References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h Keller, Phyllis (Summer 1971). "George Sylvester Viereck: The Psychology of a German-American Militant". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 2 (1): 59–108. doi:10.2307/202443. JSTOR 202443.
  2. ^ "Viereck, George Sylvester - Biography". ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa. Retrieved March 9, 2025.
  3. ^ Maddow, Rachel (2023). Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism (1st ed.). New York: Crown. p. xvii. ISBN 978-0-593-44451-1.
  4. ^ Maddow 2023, p. xvii.
  5. ^ Keller, Phyllis (1979). States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War, Harvard University Press.
  6. ^ Mader, D. H. (2005). "The Greek Mirror: Uranians and their use of Greece", in Verstraete and Provencal, (ed.) Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity, Psychology Press, p. 384.
  7. ^ Reiss, Tom (2005). The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life. New York: Random House. p. 285. ISBN 978-1400062652.
  8. ^ Viereck, George Sylvester (1910). "Preface". Confessions of a Barbarian. New York: Moffat, Yard & Company. p. vii.
  9. ^ "George Sylvester Viereck and The International". THE SHELF: Preserving Harvard's Library Collections. March 9, 2018.
  10. ^ Gertz, Elmer (1978). The Odyssey of a Barbarian: The Biography of George Sylvester Viereck, Prometheus Books, p. 99.
  11. ^ Jeffery, Keith (January 26, 2016). 1916: A Global History. New York: Bloomsbury USA.
  12. ^ Maddow 2023, p. xx.
  13. ^ "Viereck Expelled by Author's League", The New York Times, July 26, 1918.
  14. ^ "N.Y.A.C Expels Viereck", The New York Times, August 16, 1918.
  15. ^ "Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff". ViereckProject. 2014. Archived from the original on March 13, 2014. Retrieved March 13, 2014.
  16. ^ Maddow 2023, pp. xix–xx.
  17. ^ Maddow 2023, pp. xx–xxi.
  18. ^ Maddow 2023, p. xxi.
  19. ^ "George Viereck, propagandist for Germany in WW1 and WW2". American National Biography Online. Archived from the original on December 17, 2013.
  20. ^ Monroe, Harriet (1919). "The Viereck Incident", Poetry, Vol. 13, No. 5, pp. 265–267. JSTOR 20572006
  21. ^ Gertz (1978), p. 238.
  22. ^ Johnson, Niel M. (1972). George Sylvester Viereck: German-American Propagandist, University of Illinois Press.
  23. ^ Reiss 2005, pp. 286–287.
  24. ^ Maddow 2023, p. xxiii.
  25. ^ Maddow 2023, p. xxiv.
  26. ^ Cheney, Margaret & Robert Uth (2001). Tesla: Master of Lightning. Barnes & Noble Books, p. 137.
  27. ^ Reiss 2005, pp. 288–289.
  28. ^ "Nazis, Seditionists, and Gay Vampire Porn: Rachel Maddow Reveals Her New Podcast 'Ultra'". Rolling Stone. October 3, 2022. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
  29. ^ "Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra. Episode 4: A Bad Angle". MSNBC. October 24, 2022. Retrieved December 11, 2022.
  30. ^ "Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra. Episode 5: Shut It Down". MSNBC. October 24, 2022. Retrieved December 11, 2022.
  31. ^ "Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra. Episode 6: Bedlam". MSNBC. November 7, 2022. Retrieved November 13, 2022.
  32. ^ Johnson, Niel M. (1968). "George Sylvester Viereck: Poet and Propagandist". Books at Iowa. 9: 22–36. doi:10.17077/0006-7474.1312. ISSN 0006-7474. Archived from the original on May 30, 2015.
  33. ^ Carlson, John Roy (1943). Under Cover. Philadelphia: The Blakiston Company.
  34. ^ "Collection: George Sylvester Viereck papers | Archives at Yale". archives.yale.edu. Retrieved August 4, 2023.
  35. ^ "George Sylvester Viereck, 77, Pro-German Propagandist, Dies". The New York Times. March 20, 1962.
  36. ^ Reiss, Tom (October 24, 2005). "The First Conservative: How Peter Viereck Inspired – and Lost – a Movement", The New Yorker.
  37. ^ Maddow 2023, p. xviii.
  38. ^ Saint-Amour, Paul K. (2003). The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Cornell University Press. p. 131. ISBN 978-0801440779.
  39. ^ "Viereck, George S". The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved November 13, 2022.

Further reading

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