High humidity, lots of rain, temperatures in the 90’s, that’s been your Pennsylvania summer this year. Here in Normandy, it’s dry heat and drought, and I envy you your rain. I don’t miss the high humidity, but thinking about it brings back childhood memories of summers on Pottsville’s Greenwood Hill.
On summer mornings, we played at the playground next to the Greenwood Hill Firehouse. We ran around in the heat and pushed each other on the merry-go-round. The more adventuresome among us (I was not one) swung on the “Tarzan swings,” vines hanging from trees on the banks surrounding the playground. Every so often, a child fell and broke an arm.
In the evenings, beneath a canopy of maple trees, we played kick-the-wicky, using the intersection of Edwards Ave. and Fleet Street as our playing field. Do children still play that game? We placed a sturdy branch on two bricks, wide enough apart so that we could run in and kick the stick. The person in the middle scrambled to fetch it. In the meanwhile, we ran from base to base, like in baseball, though less skill and fewer players on the field were required.
In the afternoon, when it was too hot to move, we gathered on each other’s front porch. What did we do? We read. Many children on Edwards Ave. belonged to the Pottsville Free Public Library’s “Summer Reading Club.” At the beginning of summer, we enrolled. We told Mrs. Hass, the children’s librarian, our age and she gave us a booklet where we recorded the books we read.
Each week, a group of us from Greenwood Hill walked to the library, crossing at the dangerous “Boulevard.” We each checked out as many books as we could. Then we carried them home, sat together on a front porch, and read. We shared our books and wrote the titles in our booklets. I can’t say we remembered everything we read, but we became efficient readers.
At the end of summer, those who read the most books (our “front-porch” gang was well represented) were given an award. In a public ceremony at the library, we were presented with a volume of Lang’s Fairy Books. I still have one today.
Those hot and humid summer afternoons made of me a reader for life. I read for pleasure, I read to learn, I read to enlarge my world.
Since the coronavirus has turned the world upside down, books have been my solace. Confined to home, I can open one and travel far and wide. Thanks to the pleasure they give, while reading I forget I can’t physically travel to the United States to be with those I love.
Books also help me to think. At a time like this, when no one on Earth can completely explain what is happening (worldwide quarantines, economies in havoc, soaring unemployment, sickness and death), books become necessities that can lead us towards greater understanding.
I have been reading Robert Paxton’s Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940-1944. The book first appeared in 1972, creating an uproar in France: Paxton’s main thesis is that the French were willing collaborators with Nazi Germany after France’s defeat in 1940. Few Frenchmen were ready to hear that in 1972. Today the book is considered a classic that broke new ground in its field.
Reading it, I am learning in detail what I broadly knew about France during World War II. Paxton is also helping me refine my understanding of concepts like fascism, a word we hear a lot these days.
In his book, Paxton points out that fascism comes in many home-grown forms: Nazi-Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Vichy France, or Salazar’s Portugal. Pockets of fascism have also flourished on American soil. One such place was Camp Nordland in Andover Township, NJ, along the Pennsylvania-New York border. There, in the 1930’s, the German-American Bund promoted Nazi values. On August 18, 1940, it was the site of a joint rally of the Bund and the Ku Klux Klan.
Paxton specifies that there is an “ideal” type of fascism that adapts to a local political climate. This “ideal type” is antiliberal and anticommunist. It is radical in “its willingness to employ force” and in its “contempt for upper-class values.”
Though fascist movements often rely on conservatives to come to power, fascism differs from traditional conservatism in its appeal to “the solitary common man against the organized interests of society.” Leftists, to fascist eyes, are the avantgarde of a social revolution against individualism and property, but such opposition can be easily eliminated by force.
In Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, Paxton delineates the rise of fascist movements in the Europe of the 1930’s. In Germany, President Paul von Hindenburg, a conservative who led the Imperial German Army during WWI, appointed Adolf Hitler Chancellor in 1933 at a time when fascist and conservative elements joined together in fear of a communist revolution. Later in the decade, the Nazis swept aside their former conservative collaborators.
After the stunning defeat of June 1940, Maréchal Pétain, the WWI “Victor of Verdun,” called for an end to hostilities. On June 22nd, he signed an armistice with Nazi Germany. On July 10th, Pétain became the head of Vichy France, a nationalist, anticommunist, antiliberal and antisemitic regime. Though some argue it was not a fascist government, Paxton disagrees and locates the seeds of a home-grown version of French fascism in the hard measures put in place by Vichy and the “national revolution” encouraged by Pétain.
These days, reading the American press online, I frequently come across references to fascism. On July 3rd, while speaking at Mount Rushmore, President Trump brandished the threat of a “new far-left fascism,” yet the “Antifas,” leftist antifascists—who may or may not know the history of the Antifa movement, begun in Germany in the 1920’s, are devoting all their energy to combatting the “fascism” of President Trump.
Yes, that word gets thrown around a lot, and we need to understand what it means. For that, reading is indispensable, and I thank the Pottsville Free Public Library for instilling in me an unquenchable curiosity for books. There will never be time to read them all, but as the world careens into a dangerous future, books can help us stay on course.
