Echoes of William L. Shirer

In the late-1970s and early-1980s, growing up in Elmhurst, Queens, I’d often go to the bookcase in our 10th-floor apartment’s living room. It had an “unabridged” dictionary, to which I’d immediately walk over if I were home and came across an unfamiliar word, a habit that yielded benefits when I took the SAT. The case had books I ignored, such as Angel of Appalachia, but one I opened frequently was William L. Shirer’s 1960 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I read in disjointed order.

Shirer’s book had many words and phrases that stuck with me. Some were chapter titles: “Anschluss: The Rape of Austria” may have introduced me to the German name of a pivotal event in my family’s history. “Sitzkrieg in the West” was about the lull (“phony war” or here “sitting war”) that followed the blitzkrieg. “Goetterdaemmerung: The Last Days of the Third Reich” introduced me to the “twilight of the gods,” though I only later knew this was a reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung. I’d missed Shirer’s earlier mention of the opera, and on reading that “Hitler, his mission as world conqueror having failed, was determined to go down, like Wotan at Valhalla, in a holocaust of blood—not only the enemy’s but that of his own people,” I didn’t know who Wotan was. Things took more time to look up back then.

One memorable phrase, curiously, was about the U.S., not Germany. Shirer, who was born in Chicago in 1904 and grew up in Iowa, went to Europe to work as a journalist. In recounting his foreign experiences in the mid-to-late 1920s, when Weimar Republic Germany was vibrant economically and culturally with little sign of a political crisis or Nazi ascendance, Shirer memorably described the country he’d left behind: “I was stationed in Paris and occasionally in London at that time, and fascinating though those capitals were to a young American happy to have escaped from the incredible smugness and emptiness of the Calvin Coolidge era, they paled a little when one came to Berlin and Munich.”

That “incredible smugness” reference struck me as a teen, though I knew little of Coolidge and couldn’t place the political context of the author’s disaffection from him or the U.S. of the 1920s. A few years later, I read Paul Johnson’s unreliable history Modern Times, which glorified Warren Harding and Coolidge, the former’s scandals notwithstanding, as exemplars of conservative governance. I later came across H.L. Mencken’s disdain for Coolidge as a lazy ignoramus who was, for Mencken, still preferable to the Democratic presidents before and after him: “Counting out Harding as a cipher only, Dr. Coolidge was preceded by one World Saver and followed by two more. What enlightened American, having to choose between any of them and another Coolidge, would hesitate for an instant? There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance.”

Shirer’s dismissal of the America he’d left came to mind in the weeks following Donald Trump’s electoral victory. Just as I’ve little patience for comparisons of Trump to Hitler, I don’t think a likening of Trump to Coolidge would be particularly compelling. But “incredible smugness and emptiness” is a phrase that resonates with me in considering the U.S. of the mid-2020s. A century after Shirer happily escaped to European capitals—the 1920s versions of which he’d look back on fondly decades later, after Europe had descended into dictatorship and war—the intellectual laziness and willful ignorance that Shirer decried is still prominently part of our national culture. Trump’s re-election couldn’t have occurred otherwise.

Shirer, who died in 1993, published his autobiography 20th Century Journey in three volumes: The Start, 1904–1930 (1976); The Nightmare Years, 1930–1940 (1984); and A Native’s Return, 1945–1988 (1990). In the first volume, he recalled the elation he and other 1920s college graduates felt at taking opportunities outside America: “to get away from Prohibition, fundamentalism, puritanism, Coolidgeism, Babbittry, ballyhoo, the booster antics of Rotary and the Chamber of Commerce—all the cant of the bourgeois who dominated our land and made it, we thought, such a mindless, shoddy place to live in.”

A factor shaping this attitude was Shirer’s early reading of Mencken. “We had grown up in our college years, despite the efforts of our teachers to keep our minds off current literature, on the novels of Sinclair Lewis, Main Street and Babbitt, and the thundering of H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury against the homo boobiens of the American hinterland. They had rubbed in what we knew all too well from our young lives: the cultural poverty of the Midwest small town; the tyrannical pressures to conform to a narrow, conservative, puritan norm; the hollowness of the smalltown booster Babbitt businessmen; the worship of business and profits by our sanctimonious churchy Christians.” He fondly recalled an exchange of letters with the Sage of Baltimore.

However, Shirer also noted about Mencken and other cultural critics: “For all their blasts against its idiocies, Lewis and Mencken and [Theodore] Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson and Carl Sandburg, my literary idols, loved the country, thrived on it, and seemed to be having a pretty good time. You could feel that, beneath the barbs. Though a lot of writers, artists and students were rushing off to Paris, these giants, all but Mencken from the Midwest, were staying put, mining the rich material that lay at hand. For better or worse, they reminded you, it was the only country you had.”

—Kenneth Silber is author of In DeWitt’s Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal. Follow him on Bluesky