#Immigrant Pittsburgh

[offsidenewsco]

"Hockey is built on the movement of people — immigration is in its DNA. Players cross borders for opportunity. Families do, too. The difference is in who gets to be seen as worthy of the risk."

Read Silvia Leija-Rosas' op-ed on the #NHL and immigration here.

[asgabaser]

I know

You wanted me to stay

But I can't ignore the crazy visions

Of me in the north

And I heard that there's a special place

Where boys and girls can see the icebergs

Every single day

I'm having wicked dreams

Of leaving Pittsburgh's scene

Oh, St. John's, Newfoundland

I swear it's calling me

Won't make my mama proud

It's gonna cause a scene

She sees her first-born child

I know she's gonna scream

"God, what have you done?!

"You're a good Yinzer girl

"And you live on The Rock"

Oh, mama

I'm just having fun

On the ice in my toque

It's where I belong

Up at the

Duke of Duckworth

I'm gonna keep on drinking at the

Duke of Duckworth

I'm gonna keep on skating on

Quidi Vidi Lake

I'm gonna keep on drinking at the

Duke of Duckworth

Duke of Duckworth

[loudlylovingreview]

Joseph Bathanti: Steady Daylight

Today in Heaven, my father turned 105.Finally working steady daylighthe’s got it knocked:8 to 4, double-time-and-a-half –no asbestos, no shoveling slag on the open hearth; no depending from a boom crane, 6 degrees, in sleet; no boss –13 weeks vacation annually Kingdom Come.The Union up here takes zero shit.Home well before dark,traffic mellow, blue sky, nothing but green signals;plenty of time,…

[diggingforitalianroots]

Louis Franci and the story of the Ship Hotel

Postcard of the Ship Hotel (personal collection). Likely this is in the 1950s. Sorry for the degraded nature of the image.

In 1930, 33-year-old Louis “Lou” Franci and 37-year-old Emilio Rosso were living in the Turtle Creek Valley. They were not only neighbors on Humbert Street, with the Rosso family living in house 69 and the Francis in house 68, but were both Italian immigrants. The census from that time shows an Italian enclave in the area: of the nine families in Patton Township’s Mellon Plan, a jurisdiction in Turtle Creek, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (PA), eight of them had Italian heritage. [1] Louis Franci and his wife, Jennie Baccarini, both Italian immigrants themselves, definitely felt at home.

Originally posted on the WordPress version of this blog on Jul. 24, 2019

Emilio lived with his 25-year-old wife, Adelina, his 5-year-old daughter, Clara, and 1-year-old son, Raymond. As for Louis, he lived with his 29-year-old wife, Jennie, 8-year-old daughter Lena, 6-year-old son Frank, 3-year-old daughter Alma, and seven-month-old daughter Ellen. While Jennie had come over to America in 1900 or 1901, as a baby carried in her mother’s arms, the story went that Louis was, a stowaway on a ship bound for America and joined by an unnamed friend. [2] However, this story is completely false, which should be explained in later posts on this blog. As for Emilio, he was an Italian immigrant and a World War I veteran who fought in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive and Battle of St. Michel in 1917.

Both Emilio and Louis had one thing in common: they were building contractors or more simply they were construction managers. In 1930, a hunting buddy of Louis, Dominick/Dominico Rustici, who was, like Louis and Emilio, an immigrant from Northern Italy, listed two people as witnesses for a naturalization document. [3] One of these men was Emilio, who was described as a general contractor from Wilmerding, PA, with his last name spelled incorrectly as Rasso by an unnamed immigration official. In later years, Rustici was a lodger with the Baccarini family, who likely treated him like a family friend since he listed John Baccarini, the father of Jennie, on his draft card as a person who would know where he lived.

Emilio and Louis would soon work on a project that would stand for years as a tourist attraction and symbolic of their achievement. Family lore had claimed for years that Louis was in charge of building the entire ship, but this is obviously an exaggeration. Dutch-born Herbert Paulson, had the idea for what would become the Bedford, PA landmark, the S.S. Grand View Point Hotel or Ship Hotel for short, and he would be its captain from the 1930s until the 1970s. Census information shows his progression into this role. In 1920, he was listed as a married employer in a boarding house, in 1930 he was listed a married storekeeper with a grocery store and in 1940 he was listed as a hotel keeper. [4] By 1940, he had been living in the Ship Hotel from 1932 onward, with his wife, Mary, and German-born children, two of whom (Walter and Erna) worked as clerks. Two other clerks, Cecilia Davis and Etta Pellis, were also listed as living with them.

In order to provide some more context, it is worth talking about the architect of the Ship Hotel, Alfred Sinnhuber. He was born in or around Berlin, Germany, arriving in the U.S. in 1903. He often called himself a “building designer” or architect and lived in Turtle Creek, but he had a job at the Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh. [5] He was at one point a “checker” and at another worked on the lathe, even as he was married to Elsa Marie Kristen and his children joined him in the plant. Working in the Westinghouse plant was the norm for those living in Pittsburgh and its suburbs, with Louis and Emilio likely working there at some point as well.

1931 would be a fateful year where 57-year-old Herbert and 56-year-old Albert would work with Emilio and Louis to build the Ship Hotel. [6] As the story goes, Herbert invited Emilio and Louis on a hunting trip, proposing to these two men the idea of expanding his existing hotel into the Ship Hotel. As local historian Brian Butko notes, Herbert has chosen these two men, who lived near the Westinghouse plant where he (and they likely) worked, assuming that folks living in Turtle Creek Valley “knew all about building on steep hillsides.” As Albert designed the new hotel and reportedly supervised the construction, Emilio and Louis were the construction managers. As for Herbert, who was a tool and die maker in the Pittsburgh plant, he reportedly told the PA state government, “it's my property, either you let me build it or you buy the property!”

The construction itself began in October 1931 the hotel, which would be shaped like a ship since fog in the valley reportedly looked like the sea. Herbert told them that they had from October until May of the following year to expand the hotel, a time frame of less than eight months, mostly in cold and snowy weather. A former owner of a car dealership in the area, Walter T. Matthews, told Butko that the ship needed over 63 tons of steel and cost about $125,000 to build, which was borrowed at 16% interest. [7] Matthews further claimed that Emilio and Louis went broke in attempting to build the base of the hotel, having to drill down 32 feet to find rock. But, this doesn’t tell the full picture. The site was over 2,400 feet above sea level and 500 feet below the Allegheny Mountain summit, making it hard to build. Specifically, there was burrowing under the Lincoln Highway (also known as U.S. Route 30), in order to insert the three heavy I-beams, with embedded huge concrete piers allowing the ship to “ride.” Other than the cement and 18 steel piers, numerous carloads of lumber were used for the 3/4-inch thick wood which was overlaid with metal siding, coming from at least 22 junked car frames to cover the hotel’s exterior. Also, nails and 72 tons of steel, by some counts, went into the construction of the expanded 5-floor-hotel, coupled with water piped from half-a-mile away.

Emilio and Louis undoubtedly did manual work to build the expanded hotel. However, as construction managers, they had a crew to help them with the laborious process. Years later, a living relative, Lou Balya, noted that her father, Joseph Ovarec had, in the words of the article writer, “helped build the Ship Hotel with the Paulson family back in the 1930s” and that four generations of her family were associated with the hotel itself. [8] In 1931, Ovarec, according to census records, was a 42-year-old coal miner from Czechoslovakia. He had a family of five, including himself, which were his 34-year-old wife, Anna, his 16-year-old daughter, Mary, and his 14-year-old daughter, Josephine. Later information described him as an “outside laborer.” This means it is possible then that many of the other laborers on the project were Eastern European.

After 1931, the Ship Hotel blossomed. At noon on May 29, 1932, after it was announced in the local Bedford Gazette, the ship opened, offering tours, staff inspections, and concerts. [9] On that day, the Bedford American Legion Junior band, a local German band, and Bedford High School band played, while a plane flew overhead dropping flowers on the ship’s deck and a stilt walker entertained guests later in the day. With the hotel, it remained, as one book put it, “one of the most significant scenic views on the North American continent” with views of a fertile region of PA, West Virginia, and of Maryland’s rolling hills. The main claim was that you could see “3 states and 7 counties” from the ship, with no official list of what one could see from the ship itself.

As years went by, the hotel stayed on despite difficulties. The Paulson family lived on the ship for years upon years, with Clara Paulson having the distinction as the only person who was born on the ship, and the family worked to keep it running. [10] As a part of day-to-day entertainment, a local comedian used his craft, a grand orchestra played, and much more, even when it was snow-bound in the winters. Beyond this, the ship was remodeled numerous times, thrived even with the building of the PA turnpike, suffered the brunt of anti-German discrimination during World War II, and stayed busy until the 1970s when public interest in roadside attractions was beginning to seriously wane.

It is not known whether Louis revisited the Ship Hotel later in his life. Despite the seventy-mile distance from Turtle Creek to the hotel, there is still a possibility he, or some of his related family members, visited again the ship he, along with many others, had worked laboriously on. [11] If he had visited it in 1954, for example, he would have been among the ranks of the reportedly 2 million people who visited it by that point, covering 20 volumes of registers, including those living in 62 foreign countries and possibly famous celebrities such as Calvin Coolidge, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and others. He likely would have seen the big business in souvenirs and refreshments the hotel did starting in 1932 and until Herbert’s death in 1973. Due to his death in 1967, he never saw the Loyas, who still have the old guest registers, owning the ship, after 1978 and turning it into “Noah’s Ark” before it fell into disrepair, then burning down in October 2001. He saw the Ship of the Alleghenies, as some called it, in its glory days, in its height.

Even though Louis Franci died on March 13, 1967, the Ship Hotel stood as a testament to his achievement as a contractor and builder, standing for seventy years (1931-2001) after its construction. In the end, his memory lives on not just in his living relatives but in the blueprints of the Ship Hotel still sitting in the office of his late son.

Editor's note: This is a story I wrote back in September 2016 but am publishing here to start off this blog on a strong footing. Some revisions have been made to protect living individuals.

© 2019-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] U.S. Federal Census of 1930 for Patton, Allegheny, Pennsylvania. United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Route from Humbert Street to Mellon Plan, Google Maps, accessed September 5, 2016.

[2] According to conversation with my cousin M.G. on July 31, 2016 and in Summer 2016. Apparently, two of his sisters, Angelina and Barbara came to the United States while three of his sisters stayed in Italy along with his parents.  Emilio Rosso Veterans Compensation Application, February 10, 1934, World War I Veterans Service and Compensation File, 1934–1948. RG 19, Series 19.91. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg Pennsylvania. Courtesy of ancestry.com.

[3] Dominico Rustici Petition of Citizenship, November 24, 1930, Naturalization Petitions of the U.S. District Court, 1820-1930, and Circuit Court, 1820-1911, for the Western District of Pennsylvania, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1537, Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Dominico Rustici Petition for Naturalization, 1930, Record of Admissions to Citizenship, District of South Carolina, 1790-1906, National Archives Microfilm Publication M1183, Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Passenger list of the Pesaro, 1921, Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820-1897. Microfilm Publication M237, 675 rolls. NAI: 6256867. Records of the U.S. Customs Service, Record Group 36. National Archives at Washington, D.C. Courtesy of ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census of 1910 for Young, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, NARA microfilm publication T624, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29. National Archives, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Draft card for Domenico Rustici, United States, Selective Service System. Selective Service Registration Cards, World War II: Fourth Registration. Records of the Selective Service System, Record Group Number 147. National Archives and Records Administration. Courtesy of ancestry.com; 1940 U.S. Federal Census, April 1940, Alleghany County, PA, Patton Township, Mellon Plan. Courtesy of ancestry.com. This census claims that there are four people in the Baccarini house: John (aged 65, a coal loader), Celesta (his wife, aged 59, houseworker), Mario (aged 35, a coal loader), and Domenico Rustico (aged 48). The latter is a lodger who has, it seems, more money coming in, and working more hours than them in one category and the same in another.

[4] U.S. Federal Census of 1920 for Alleghany, Somerset, Pennsylvania, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. (NARA microfilm publication T625, 2076 rolls). Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29. National Archives, Washington, D.C. Courtesy of ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census of 1930 for Juniata, Bedford, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census of 1940 for Juniata, Bedford, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. T627, 4,643 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com.

[5] Birth of Elsa Irene Sinnhuber, Pennsylvania (State). Birth certificates, 1906–1908. Series 11.89 (50 cartons). Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Record Group 11. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Draft card of Albert Sinnhuber, United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Albert Sinnhuber declaration in Pennsylvania, March 3, 1917, Naturalization Petitions for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 1795-1930. (National Archives Microfilm Publication M1522, 369 rolls); Records of District Courts of the United States, Record Group 21; National Archives, Washington, D.C. p. 258. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Albert Sinnhuber declaration in Pennsylvania, March 25, 1929, National Archives at Philadelphia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; ARC Title: Petitions for Naturalization, 1820 - 1979; NAI Number: 2837692; Record Group Title: Records of District Courts of the United States, 1685-2009; Record Group Number: RG 21. Courtesy of ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census of 1930 for Turtle Creek, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census of 1940 for Turtle Creek, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. T627, 4,643 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com; Draft card of Albert Sinnhuber, United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm. Courtesy of ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census of 1930 for Turtle Creek, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census of 1940 for Turtle Creek, Allegheny, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. T627, 4,643 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com.

[6] Herbert Paulson gravestone. Find A Grave, updated May 13, 2010, accessed September 5, 2016; Albert Sinnhuber gravestone. Find A Grave, updated October 10, 2011, accessed September 5, 2016; Death certificate of Albert Sinnhuber, Pennsylvania (State). Death certificates, 1906–1963. Series 11.90 (1,905 cartons). Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Record Group 11. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of ancestry.com. Dates of Sinnhuber on his grave seem to be wrong if one relies on his death certificate, which says that he was age 68 at his death in 1943, meaning he was born in 1875. Also see Brian Butko, The Ship Hotel: A Grand View along the Lincoln Highway (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2010), 34-5; “U.S.S. Grandview Ship Hotel: Lincoln Highway,” Miniature Railroad & Village, accessed September 5, 2016; Brian Butko, “Ship Hotel: Afloat with the Lincoln Highway's Most Unusual Landmark,” Pennsylvania Heritage Vol. XL, No. 2, Spring 2014.

[7] Brian Butko, Pennsylvania Traveler's Guide: The Lincoln Highway (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), 230-231; “Carnegie Science Center Unveils 2003 Miniature Railroad and Village,” Allegheny City Society Reporter Dispatch, Winter 2003, p. 3, accessed September 5, 2016; William A. White, “Mountain Ship,” The Pittsburgh Press, Section Two, March 23, 1954, p. 21. Courtesy of Google News Archive; “Just Another Roadside Attraction,” The Pittsburgh Press, June 28, 1986, Sunday Magazine, p. 7. Courtesy of Google News Archive; “U.S.S. Grandview Ship Hotel: Lincoln Highway”; “Ship Hotel: Afloat with the Lincoln Highway's Most Unusual Landmark”; David Greenlees, “The S. S. Grand View Point Hotel On The Lincoln Highway,” The Old Motor, July 9, 2012, accessed September 5, 2016.

[8] Chris Wechtenhiser, “Historic Ship Hotel burns,” Bedford Gazette, October 27-28, 2001; 1930 U.S. Federal Census for Lansford, Carbon, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com; 1940 U.S. Federal Census for Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne, Pennsylvania, United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940. T627, 4,643 rolls. Courtesy of ancestry.com. Oravec is not the same as one listed in the 1910 census as living in Spangler, Cambria, Pennsylvania and born in 1885. Also dates do not match up. Other workers on the ship included, but are not limited to, Cecelia Davies (Butko, The Ship Hotel, 88).

[9] Brian Butko, Pennsylvania Traveler's Guide: The Lincoln Highway (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), 230-231; Butko, The Ship Hotel, 35-36; “Ship Hotel: Afloat with the Lincoln Highway's Most Unusual Landmark"; The Federal Writers Project, The WPA Guide to Pennsylvania: The Keystone State (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1940 (2013 reprint)), 451; Patrick M. Reynolds, “Western Pennsylvania Embraces Visitors,” Reading Eagle, June 25, 1978, Leisure, p. 73. Courtesy of Google News Archive; Doug Pappas, “Grand View Hotel Tribute 2,” Lincoln Highway Home, Society for American Baseball Research, accessed September 5, 2016.

[10] Butko, The Ship Hotel, 42-44, 46-47, 49, 51, 54-55; “The S. S. Grand View Point Hotel On The Lincoln Highway.”

[11] Route from Turtle Creek to “scenic overlook” (former site of Ship Hotel), Google Maps, accessed September 5, 2016; Butko, The Ship Hotel, 44; William A. White, “Mountain Ship,” The Pittsburgh Press, Section Two, March 23, 1954, p. 21. Courtesy of Google News Archive; Gilbert Love, “Bedford Immersed In History and Elegance,” The Pittsburgh Press, October 25, 1972, p. 23. Courtesy of Google News Archive; “Just Another Roadside Attraction,” The Pittsburgh Press, June 28, 1986, Sunday Magazine, p. 7. Courtesy of Google News Archive; Butko, The Ship Hotel, 57-58, 61, 66-68, 70; Associated Press, “Fire destroys quirky ship hotel in Pennsylvania,” Rome News-Tribune, October 28, 2001, p. 5A, no. 501. Courtesy of the Google News Archive; Mary Thomas, “Passing Scenery,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, May 8, 2004, Homes & Gardens, Section B, p. B-6. Courtesy of Google News Archive; “Just Another Roadside Attraction,” The Pittsburgh Press, June 28, 1986, Sunday Magazine, p. 6-7. Courtesy of Google News Archive; Associated Press, “Group wants to restore hotel in shape of ship,” Gettysburg Times, Aug. 3, 1998, Vol. 96, no. 183, Digest, p. A2. Courtesy of Google News Archive; Associated Press, “Group wants to restore Ship Hotel,” Beaver County Times, Aug. 2, 1998, Sports, p. B7. Courtesy of Google News Archive; Tom Gibb, “Fire sinks the 'Ship,' U.S. 30 hotel-eatery,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 27, 2001; Chris Wechtenhiser, “Historic Ship Hotel burns,” Bedford Gazette, October 27-28, 2001; Doug Pappas, “Grand View Hotel Tribute,” Lincoln Highway Home, Society for American Baseball Research, accessed September 5, 2016; Doug Pappas, “Grand View Hotel Tribute 3,” Lincoln Highway Home, Society for American Baseball Research, accessed September 5, 2016; “The S.S. Grand View Point Hotel,” Lincoln Highway Corridor, 2016, accessed September 5, 2016; Patricia Lowry, “Ship Hotel has sailed, but a jaunty new book honors its history and heyday,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 12, 2010; Tom Gibb, “The Ship sails choppy seas,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 15, 1998; Doug Kirby, Ken Smith, and Mike Wilkins, “Lincoln Highway's Ship of the Alleghenies Burns,” RoadsideAmerica.com, Accessed September 5, 2016; David Greenlees, “The S. S. Grand View Point Hotel On The Lincoln Highway,” The Old Motor, July 9, 2012, accessed September 5, 2016; Richard Funk, Along Pennsylvania's Lincoln Highway (San Francisco, CA: Arcadia Publishing, 2006), 91; “Local Fun,” Schellsburg, PA, Accessed September 5, 2016; Jeffrey J. Kitsko, “Lincoln Highway,” November 27, 2015, accessed September 5, 2016; “3 States And 7 Counties!,” WQED, August 15, 2008, accessed September 5, 2016; Jerin Miller and Angelica W. Capone, “A Coffee Pot for Giants,” Pennsylvania Center for the Book (Penn State), Fall 2010 and Spring 2011, accessed on September 5, 201; Charles Phoenix, “S.S. GRAND VIEW SHIP HOTEL, BEDFORD COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA, 1957,” Charles Phoenix, 2016, accessed September 5, 2016.

[transilvaniaroots]

Michael Hermann was from Hungary…but where in Hungary?

This was chapter 1 of my booklet, "Unwinding the Mystery of Johann Hermann from the Land of Transylvania to the Shores of Baltimore: Documenting the Hermann Lineage," which was an early Father's Day present in June 2017. While I now know that Michael Hermann was NOT born in Hungary, and his exact place of birth, but I still see this as worth reprinting here.

The Necktar was one of the first ships to arrive at Baltimore's Pier 9 in 1904. This ship was made by the same company that had created the passenger ship Michael would travel on across the Atlantic and would dock at this same pier. Courtesy of the Maryland State Archives.

The year was 1906. Michael Hermann was a simple farm laborer who had just come of age. On April 2, after a long train ride to Bremen, Germany, Michael boarded the Karlsruhe. Those recording the manifest, who were not immigration officials, described his nationality as “Hungarian” and race as “German” and name as “Michael Herman” which is not far off from Hermann. [1] This distinction would explain why in stories told years later, after the marriage of Lena Franci and Raymond Hermann (the son of Michael), the Hermann side of the family would be called “German” and the Franci side called “Italian.” Technically they were Hungarian, or to be more precise, Transylvanian, but nitpicking isn’t the point here. Instead, it is worth digging more into this record.

Originally posted on my WordPress blog on Jan. 25, 2021.

When he boarded the ship to the United States, Michael had a ticket to his destination, which was East Pittsburgh. His passage was paid for, and he had no mental health (or other) issues. He may have had only $40 on him at the time. He would arrive in Baltimore, “Charm City” as some call it today, on April 17. Years later, in his Petition for Naturalization and the Declaration of Intention he would say that the ship left on March 13, 1905, and arrived on March 30, 1905, but his dates were mixed up. Perhaps this is because he was applying for citizenship in 1913 and later, once he was more established in the US. By then, coming over on a ship may have seemed like a distant memory. He may have remembered stepping off the boat, perhaps even going into a tavern for a meal, but it soon became a blur, and he didn’t remember the date precisely.

On April 17, Michael was on a journey to East Pittsburgh. But he was there for one simple reason: to visit his half-brother Johann within the same town. Along with them was a woman named Sara (or Jara) Wenzel who was going to join her brother-in-law, which happened to be the same person, Johann. This could indicate that the Wenzel and Hermann families were intertwined, since, Michael’s father had married a woman named Marie Wenzel. So, it is possible that a member of the Wenzel family would have felt secure going to the United States to the home of a cousin. One could also consider the possibility that Sara or Jara and Michael planned this trip together and came over as friends, since they were on the same ship, but no documentation supports or refutes this possibility. Regardless, Michael likely took the daily Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad to Pittsburgh from Camden station, then within Baltimore’s port area, with a direct ride to Pittsburgh starting at 10 AM. [2]

Some may be asking why this was not mentioned before. After all, in the previous family history, I said that he was a German farm laborer going to Pittsburgh with a possible servant woman named Jara Wenzel traveling with him and a relative named Johann Hermann, guessing it was his father. That supposition was not correct. However, I was right to say that the Hermanns may have been established in Pennsylvania by this point. I’ll explain why that is the case later on.

Once Michael stepped his foot likely on a pier at Baltimore, he was one of many who entered the city in that way. With direct connections to St. Louis and Chicago, and contracts with immigrant passenger lines such as those run by Norddeutscher Lloyd, of which the Karlsruhe was part of, Piers 8 and 9 were run by the B&O railroad at Locust Point. This area played a major role in “receiving the millions of immigrants” coming to the US in the post-Civil War period as former Maryland State Archivist Edward Papenfuse points out. Michael was arriving two years after the B&O inspection center had opened at Locust Point, which was documented in great fanfare in company literature and in the Baltimore Sun. In later years, thousands would use the port to come to the US, with their final destination as Baltimore. But, by 1913, the pier was seeming worrisome as it was built out of shoddy materials and to replace it, some of Fort McHenry’s land was re-purposed into “a new immigration reception station which included a hospital facility” while the rest of the fort became a public park.

Articles in the Baltimore Sun shed further light on Michael’s journey to the United States. He was not alone on the passenger ship. There were 1,610 in steerage and four in the cabin, with a 6-month baby body dying of enteritis on the journey, and Captain Francke in charge. [3] The twin-screw steamer ship was scheduled to leave the port that Friday, April 20, at 2 PM and sail back to Bremen, one of two ships (the other Gneisenau) sent over to the US bringing immigrants, the latter to New York. Cabin rates ranged from $45 to $50 depending on the cabin selected.

Beyond his journey, the minute he stepped onto Pier 9 of Locust Point, where the Karlsruhe docked, he was leaving behind his homeland in the “Old Country.” His Declaration of Intention says he was born in “St. Ivan, Hungary” and his draft registration card in 1917 says he was born in “Yohanisdorf” with other documents saying he lived (or temporarily stayed) in Segesvár/Sighișoara before he left on a train headed to Bremen. Perhaps he was born in a village named Johannisdorf, two of which are near Sighișoara and in Romania today, with a church also with that name, but on the fringe of Transylvania. [4] There is even a St. Ivan, called Pilisszentiván (Sankt-Iwan in German) which exists but it is within Hungary, not in Romania.

There is one town which has names in Hungarian and Romanian that literally mean Saint John. It is 133 to 145 kilometers by foot from Sighișoara. [5] There likely was a railroad between that city and the city he was born and raised in.

Other records give further clues. The East European Genealogical Society has some answers, although their results should be taken with a grain of salt. [6] They list the “Herman” surname as within three villages in the Galicia province (Mezhirichi, Pischatyntsi, and Radomysl Wielki) and in the Volhynia province (Mezhirichi). It also lists the “Hermann” surname in Gau Warszawa village within the Warszawa province and the Neuborn village within the Volhynia province. From these results, two are of those living within the Russian Empire and three are within the Austro-Hungarian empire with those with the Herman surname. Any of those families could have been those from which Michael’s parents originated. Narrowing this down would require on-the-ground research.

Other information on Michael is not clear. While there are passenger records for the Karlsruhe assembled by the Bremen archives, they only date back to 1907, one year after Michael was a passenger on that ship which sailed across the Atlantic. [7] The available censuses are no better. An all citizens census in 1869 lists 22 people with the surname of Hermann, two with the surname of Hermann in the assorted census records of Hungary from 1781 to 1850, 11 with the surname of Hermann in the 1848 Jewish Census in Hungary, and one in the Jewish Names in the Property Tax Census in 1828. None of these provide any leads. There are a number of “Genealogical Guides and Handbooks” for those who are Hungarian or Romanian provided by the National Archives. [8] There are also “Maps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” assembled by the Foundation for Eastern European Family History Studies (FEEFHS) but this is also of no help. But there are other sources which provide more insight into Michael’s immigration to America.

Gradual immigration of Romanians commenced in 1880 and increased by the turn of the 20th century. [9] Many of these immigrants came from Transylvania, Banat, and Bucovina, which were territories under Austro-Hungarian rule, where “political ethnic and religious persecution” and precarious social and economic conditions had forced them to leave their homes. These immigrants “found employment in the factories, the mines, and on the railroads” and in 1906, the “The American Newspaper,” the organ of the Union and League of Romanian Societies of America was founded. Furthermore, as a result of “ethnic and economic repression,” Romanians emigrated from their homeland to Canada and the US in search of better lives. This short bit provides more background than a number of other varied sources, such as a website dedicated to covering certain Romanian villages, and the Morton Allan directory of steamship arrivals from 1890 to 1930.

© 2021-2023 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] Michael Herman, 1906, Immigration, Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, United States, NARA microfilm publications M255, M596, and T844 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.); FHL film 833,019 within Family Search database titled “Maryland, Baltimore Passenger Lists, 1820-1948.” Accessed in April 2017. Specifically see this page of the document; “List of Alien Passengers for the U.S. Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival,” Passenger Lists for vessels arriving at Baltimore, Maryland, 1891-1909, Record Group 85, NARA, NationalArchives, INS, Reel 53, Vol. 205 (Apr. 1, 1906-apr. 30, 1906), p. 474-475.

[2] “Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,” The Sun (1837-1991): 13. Apr 21 1906. ProQuest. Web. 7 June 2017.

[3] “Immigrants Coming,” The Sun (1837-1991): 12. Apr 18 1906. ProQuest. Web. 7 June 2017; “Port Paragraphs,” The Sun (1837-1991): 12. Apr 04 1906. ProQuest. Web. 7 June 2017; “North German Lloyd. Baltimore—Bremen,” The Sun (1837-1991): 5. Apr 13 1906. ProQuest. Web. 7 June 2017; “Activity among Immigrant Ships,” The Sun (1837-1991): 12. Apr 17 1906. ProQuest. Web. 7 June 2017; “To Sail for Bremen Today,” The Sun (1837-1991): 6. Apr 20 1906. ProQuest. Web. 7 June 2017; “North German Lloyd. Baltimore to Bremen Direct,” The Washington Post (1877-1922): 1. Apr 14 1906. ProQuest. Web. 7 June 2017.

[4] “Sajószentiván, Sântioana, Johannisdorf,” Place, Genealogical Gazetteer (GOV), Accessed Jun. 2017; “Vajdaszentiván, Johannisdorf, Voivodeni,” Place, Genealogical Gazetteer (GOV), Accessed Jun. 2017; “Johannisdorf,” Evangelical Church, geographic position estimated, Genealogical Gazetteer (GOV), Accessed Jun. 2017.

[5] “Sajószentiván, Sântioana, Johannisdorf,” Place, The Genealogical Gazetteer (GOV), Accessed Jun. 2017. Distances stayed on maps provided by Google Earth and Google Maps; “European Transportation Maps of the 19th Century” provided no answers on this question, but is a good start.

[6] East European Genealogical Society, “Surname Index for H,” Surname Index, index last updated Mar. 29, 2017. Accessed in June 2017; Result 1, Result 2, Result 3, Result 4, Result 5, Result 6. All courtesy of the East European Genealogical Society’s database. Accessed May 2017.

[7] “The ship ' Karlsruhe ' run the following passages,” Bremen Passenger Lists: A Project with the Bremen Chamber of Commerce and the Bremen Staatsarchiv, copyright 2003-2009. Search on passengerlists.de. Accessed June 2017; Cyndi’s List, “Eastern Europe » Census,” Cyndi Ingle, CyndisList.com, Accessed June 2017. Lists numerous censuses. It is not worth naming these individuals as they may not be related to the Hermann family.

[8] See Edward R. Brandt, Contents and addresses of Hungarian archives: with supplementary material for research on German ancestors from Hungary (Minneapolis, Minn.: E.R. Brandt, 1993); Emil Lengyel, Americans from Hungary (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974); Jared H. Suess, Handy guide to Hungarian genealogical records (Logan, Utah (P.O. Box 368, Logan 84321): Everton Publishers, 1980); Steven Béla Várdy, The Hungarian-Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985); Vladimir Wertsman, The Romanians in America and Canada: a guide to information sources (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1980); Vladimir Wertsman, The Romanians in America, 1748-1974: a chronology & factbook (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Oceana Publications, 1975).

[9] “Romanians in America,” from the “History of the 'United Romanian Society'; Istoria Societatii 'Unirea Romanilor,’” put online by the Foundation for Eastern European Family History Studies (FEEFHS). Accessed in June 2017; “Concise History of the Romanian People,” from the “History of the 'United Romanian Society'; Istoria Societatii 'Unirea Romanilor,’” put online by FEEFHS. Accessed in June 2017; See  “GenealogyRO Group”; “Donauschwaben Villages Helping Hands”; and the Morton Allan directory of European passenger steamship arrivals for the years 1890 to 1930 at the Port of New York and for the years 1904 to 1926 at the ports of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore.

[unsolicited-opinions]

I'm starting to think that a whole lot of US Jews don't understand why a crowd of tiki torch Nazis chanted "Jews will not replace us" in Charlottesville. It seems like a lot of US Jews don't yet understand how the anti-immigrant sentiment Trump used to recapture the presidency is a direct threat to US Jews.

If you don't know this yet, please read the broad strokes below:

1. Like a certain Austrian in the 20th century, Trump saw both a disgruntled part of the electorate and their antipathy for non-white, non-Christian, foreign-born people. He capitalized on their xenophobia and feelings of abandonment by blaming foreigners, LGBTQ+ folks, and DEI for all the US's challenges.

He's used and amplified bigotry against already-marginalized people in order to ride his base's bigotry to power. All comparisons people make between this and how Hitler amplified and harnessed the power of antisemitism are entirely appropriate. It's demagoguery.

2. One of the existing, popular, xenophobic ideas on which Trump capitalized is a right-wing conspiracy theory usually called The Great Replacement.

It seems as though many US Jews do not realize that Jews are a huge part of this conspiracy theory.

Great Replacement, also known as white replacement theory or white genocide theory, claims there is an intentional effort, led by Jews, to promote mass non-white immigration, inter-racial marriage, and other efforts that would lead to the “extinction of whites.”

This conspiracy theory was famously promoted at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, when white supremacists chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

Right wing commentators have invoked the Great Replacement theory to say Democrats are “replacing” American citizens with illegal immigrants. Belief in the Great Replacement theory has been cited as motivation for recent terror attacks, including the 2018 Pittsburgh, PA, synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life, the 2019 El Paso, TX, and Christchurch, New Zealand, shootings, and the 2022 shooting in Buffalo, NY.

4. This isn't a theory limited to the far-right fringe. About half of US Republicans believe it.

It's been actively promoted on Fox "News" by Tucker Carlson and others.

This was the theory Elon Musk agreed with in a tweet, causing a mass exodus of advertisers from Twitter and prompting Musk's apology tour to Auschwitz with Ben Shapiro.

5. The anti-immigrant fervor, the mass deportation plans...? They're all tied up with Jews in the minds of the far-right base to whom Trump and his henchmen keep winking and dogwhistling. Trump has openly endorsed this conspiracy theory.

I see a lot of Jews online deciding to keep their heads down because they think Jews aren't the immediate target of this authoritarian and I'm gobsmacked by their ignorance of history and failure to pay attention to the rapid and violent increase in far-right antisemitic violence in recent years, driven by the very same Trump who they mistakenly believe is "good for the Jews."

Jews are being set up as scapegoats.

----

The irony is amazing, too. If you ask believers in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory for evidence of the Jewish plot to replace white people, they'll produce headlines about Jewish charitable organizations which seek to aid refugees:

The fact that Jews...care about refugees...is the proof of our sinister plot against white people.

[onceuponatown]

Elizabeth Cochran was born on May 5, 1864 in Cochran’s Mills, Pennsylvania. The town was founded by her father, Judge Michael Cochran. Elizabeth had fourteen siblings. Her father had ten children from his first marriage and five children from his second marriage to Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Jane Kennedy.

Michael Cochran’s rise from mill worker to mill owner to judge meant his family lived very comfortably. Unfortunately, he died when Elizabeth was only six years old and his fortune was divided among his many children, leaving Elizabeth’s mother and her children with a small fraction of the wealth they once enjoyed. Elizabeth’s mother soon remarried, but quickly divorced her second husband because of abuse, and relocated the family to Pittsburgh.

Elizabeth knew that she would need to support herself financially. At the age of 15, she enrolled in the State Normal School in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and an added an “e” to her last name to sound more distinguished. Her plan was to graduate and find a position as a teacher. However, after only a year and a half, Elizabeth ran out of money and could no longer afford the tuition. She moved back to Pittsburgh to help her mother run a boarding house.

In 1885, Elizabeth read an article in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that argued a woman’s place was in the home, “to be a helpmate to a man.” She strongly disagreed with this opinion and sent an angry letter to the editor anonymously signed “Lonely Orphan Girl.”

The newspaper’s editor, George A. Madden, was so impressed with the letter that he published a note asking the “Lonely Orphan Girl” to reveal her name. Elizabeth marched into the Dispatch offices and introduced herself. Madden immediately offered her a job as a columnist. Shortly after her first article was published, Elizabeth changed her pseudonym from “Lonely Orphan Girl” to “Nellie Bly,” after a popular song.

Elizabeth positioned herself as an investigative reporter. She went undercover at a factory where she experienced unsafe working conditions, poor wages, and long hours. Her honest reporting about the horrors of workers’ lives attracted negative attention from local factory owners. Elizabeth’s boss did not want to anger Pittsburgh’s elite and quickly reassigned her as a society columnist.

To escape writing about women’s issues on the society page, Elizabeth volunteered to travel to Mexico. She lived there as an international correspondent for the Dispatch for six months. When she returned, she was again assigned to the society page and promptly quit in protest.

Elizabeth hoped the massive newspaper industry of New York City would be more open-minded to a female journalist and left Pittsburgh. Although several newspapers turned down her application because she was a woman, she was eventually given the opportunity to write for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

In her first act of “stunt” journalism for the World, Elizabeth pretended to be mentally ill and arranged to be a patient at New York’s insane asylum for the poor, Blackwell’s Island. For ten days Elizabeth experienced the physical and mental abuses suffered by patients.

Elizabeth’s report about Blackwell’s Island earned her a permanent position as an investigative journalist for the World. She published her articles in a book titled 10 Days in A Mad House. In it, she explained that New York City invested more money into care for the mentally ill after her articles were published. She was satisfied to know that her work led to change.

Activist journalists like Elizabeth—commonly known as muckrakers—were an important part of reform movements. Elizabeth’s investigations brought attention to inequalities and often motivated others to take action. She uncovered the abuse of women by male police officers, identified an employment agency that was stealing from immigrants, and exposed corrupt politicians. She also interviewed influential and controversial figures, including Emma Goldman in 1893.

The most famous of Elizabeth’s stunts was her successful seventy-two-day trip around the world in 1889, for which she had two goals. First, she wanted to beat the record set in the popular fictional world tour from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. Second, she wanted to prove that women were capable of traveling just as well as—if not better than—men. Elizabeth traveled light, taking only the dress she wore, a cape, and a small traveler’s bag. She challenged the stereotypical assumption that women could not travel without many suitcases, outfit changes, and vanity items. Her world tour made her a celebrity. After her return, she toured the country as a lecturer. Her image was used on everything from playing cards to board games. She recounted her adventures in her final book, Around the World in 72 Days.

In 1895, Elizabeth retired from writing and married Robert Livingston Seaman. Robert was a millionaire who owned the Iron Clad Manufacturing Company and the American Steel Barrel Company. When Robert died in 1904, Elizabeth briefly took over as president of his companies.

In 1911, she returned to journalism as a reporter for the New York Evening Journal. She covered a number of national news stories, including the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913 in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth often referred to suffrage in her articles, arguing that women were as capable as men in all things. During World War I, she traveled to Europe as the first woman to report from the trenches on the front line.

Although Elizabeth never regained the level of stardom she experienced after her trip around the world, she continued to use her writing to shed light on issues of the day. She died of pneumonia on January 27, 1922.

[mariacallous]

The New York Times once dubbed the Princeton professor Robert George, who has guided Republican elites for decades, “the reigning brain of the Christian right.” Last year, he issued a stark warning to his ideological allies. “Each time we think the horrific virus of anti-Semitism has been extirpated, it reappears,” he wrote in May 2023. “A plea to my fellow Catholics—especially Catholic young people: Stay a million miles from this evil. Do not let it infect your thinking.” When I spoke with George that summer, he likened his sense of foreboding to that of Heinrich Heine, the 19th-century German poet who prophesied the rise of Nazism in 1834.

Some 15 months later, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson welcomed a man named Darryl Cooper onto his web-based show and introduced him to millions of followers as “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” The two proceeded to discuss how Adolf Hitler might have gotten a bad rap and why British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War.”

Hitler tried “to broadcast a call for peace directly to the British people” and wanted to “work with the other powers to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem,” Cooper elaborated in a social-media post. “He was ignored.” Why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place—and what a satisfactory “solution” to their inconvenient existence might be—was not addressed.

Some Republican politicians spoke out against Carlson’s conversation with Cooper, and many historians, including conservative ones, debunked its Holocaust revisionism. But Carlson is no fringe figure. His show ranks as one of the top podcasts in the United States; videos of its episodes rack up millions of views. He has the ear of Donald Trump and spoke during prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention. His anti-Jewish provocations are not a personal idiosyncrasy but the latest expression of an insurgent force on the American right—one that began to swell when Trump first declared his candidacy for president and that has come to challenge the identity of the conservative movement itself.

Anti-Semitism has always existed on the political extremes, but it began to migrate into the mainstream of the Republican coalition during the Trump administration. At first, the prejudice took the guise of protest.

In 2019, hecklers pursued the Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw—a popular former Navy SEAL from Texas—across a tour of college campuses, posing leading questions to him about Jews and Israel, and insinuating that the Jewish state was behind the 9/11 attacks. The activists called themselves “Groypers” and were led by a young white supremacist named Nick Fuentes, an internet personality who had defended racial segregation, denied the Holocaust, and participated in the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

The slogan referred to a far-right fantasy known as the “Great Replacement,” according to which Jews are plotting to flood the country with Black and brown migrants in order to displace the white race. That belief animated Robert Bowers, who perpetrated the largest massacre of Jews on American soil at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018 after sharing rants about the Great Replacement on social media. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the gunman wrote in his final post, “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Less than three years later, Carlson sanitized that same conspiracy theory on his top-rated cable-news show. “They’re trying to change the population of the United States,” the Fox host declared, “and they hate it when you say that because it’s true, but that’s exactly what they’re doing.” Like many before him, Carlson maintained plausible deniability by affirming an anti-Semitic accusation without explicitly naming Jews as culprits. He could rely on members of his audience to fill in the blanks.

Carlson and Fuentes weren’t the only ones who recognized the rising appeal of anti-Semitism on the right. On January 6, 2021, an influencer named Elijah Schaffer joined thousands of Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol, posting live from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. Eighteen months later, Schaffer publicly polled his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers: “Do you believe Jews disproportionately control the world institutions, banks, & are waging war on white, western society?” Social-media polls are not scientific, so the fact that more than 70 percent of respondents said some version of “yes” matters less than the fact that 94,000 people participated in the survey. Schaffer correctly gauged that this subject was something that his audience wanted to discuss, and certainly not something that would hurt his career.

With little fanfare, the tide had turned in favor of those advancing anti-Semitic arguments. In 2019, Fuentes and his faction were disrupting Republican politicians like Crenshaw. By 2022, Fuentes was shaking hands onstage with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In 2019, the Groyper activists were picketing events held by Turning Point USA, the conservative youth organization founded by the activist Charlie Kirk. By 2024, Turning Point was employing—and periodically firing and denouncing—anti-Semitic influencers who appeared at conventions run by Fuentes. “The Zionist Jews controlling our planet are all pedophiles who have no regard for the sanctity of human life and purity,” one of the organization’s ambassadors posted before she was dismissed.

In 2020, Carlson’s lead writer, Blake Neff, was compelled to resign after he was exposed as a regular contributor to a racist internet forum. Today, he produces Kirk’s podcast and recently reported alongside him at the Republican National Convention. “Why does Turning Point USA keep pushing anti-Semitism?” asked Erick Erickson, the longtime conservative radio host and activist, last October. The answer: Because that’s what a growing portion of the audience wants.

“When I began my career in 2017,” Fuentes wrote in May 2023, “I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views … In 2023, on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream.” Fuentes is a congenital liar, but a year after this triumphalist pronouncement, his basic point is hard to dispute. Little by little, the extreme has become mainstream—especially since October 7.

Last December, Tucker Carlson joined the popular anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points to discuss the Gaza conflict and accused a prominent Jewish political personality of disloyalty to the nation. “They don’t care about the country at all,” he told the host, “but I do … because I’m from here, my family’s been here hundreds of years, I plan to stay here. Like, I’m shocked by how little they care about the country, including the person you mentioned. And I can’t imagine how someone like that could get an audience of people who claim to care about America, because he doesn’t, obviously.”

The twist: “He” was not some far-left activist who had called America an irredeemably racist regime. Carlson was referring to Ben Shapiro, arguably the most visible Jewish conservative in America, and insinuating that despite his decades of paeans to American exceptionalism, Shapiro was a foreign implant secretly serving Israeli interests. The podcast host did not object to Carlson’s remarks.

The war in Gaza has placed Jews and their role in American politics under a microscope. Much has been written about how the conflict has divided the left and led to a spike in anti-Semitism in progressive spaces, but less attention has been paid to the similar shake-up on the right, where events in the Middle East have forced previously subterranean tensions to the surface. Today, the Republican Party’s establishment says that it stands with Israel and against anti-Semitism, but that stance is under attack by a new wave of insurgents with a very different agenda.

Since October 7, in addition to slurring Shapiro, Carlson has hosted a parade of anti-Jewish guests on his show. One was Candace Owens, the far-right podcaster known for her defenses of another anti-Jewish agitator, Kanye “Ye” West. Owens had already clashed with her employer—the conservative outlet The Daily Wire, co-founded by Shapiro—over her seeming indifference to anti-Semitism. But after the Hamas assault, she began making explicit what had previously been implicit—including liking a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood,” a reference to the medieval blood libel. The Daily Wire severed ties with her soon after. But this did not remotely curb her appeal.

Today, Owens can be found fulminating on her YouTube channel (2.4 million subscribers) or X feed (5.6 million followers) about how a devil-worshipping Jewish cult controls the world, and how Israel was complicit in the 9/11 attacks and killed President John F. Kennedy. Owens has also jumped aboard the Reich-Rehabilitation Express. “What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” she asked in July. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’”

“Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote after Carlson’s Holocaust conversation came under fire. The post received 15,000 likes.

Donald Trump’s entry into Republican politics intensified several forces that have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism on the American right. One was populism, which pits the common people against a corrupt elite. Populists play on discontents that reflect genuine failures of the establishment, but their approach also readily maps onto the ancient anti-Semitic canard that clandestine string-pulling Jews are the source of society’s problems. Once people become convinced that the world is oppressed by an invisible hand, they often conclude that the hand belongs to an invisible Jew.

Another such force is isolationism, or the desire to extricate the United States from foreign entanglements, following decades of debacles in the Middle East. But like the original America First Committee, which sought to keep the country out of World War II, today’s isolationists often conceive of Jews as either rootless cosmopolitans undermining national cohesion or dual loyalists subverting the national interest in service of their own. In this regard, the Tucker Carlsons of 2024 resemble the reactionary activists of the 1930s, such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who infamously accused Jewish leaders of acting “for reasons which are not American,” and warned of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”

Populism and isolationism have legitimate expressions, but preventing them from descending into anti-Semitism requires leaders willing to restrain their movement’s worst instincts. Today’s right has fewer by the day. Trump fundamentally refuses to repudiate anyone who supports him, and by devolving power from traditional Republican elites and institutions to a diffuse array of online influencers, the former president has ensured that no one is in a position to corral the right’s excesses, even if someone wanted to.

As one conservative columnist put it to me in August 2023, “What you’re actually worried about is not Trump being Hitler. What you’re worried about is Trump incentivizing anti-Semites,” to the point where “a generation from now, you’ve got Karl Lueger,” the anti-Jewish mayor of Vienna who inspired Hitler, “and two generations from now, you do have something like that.” The accelerant that is social-media discourse, together with a war that brings Jews to the center of political attention, could shorten that timeline.

For now, the biggest obstacle to anti-Semitism’s ascent on the right is the Republican rank and file’s general commitment to Israel, which causes them to recoil when people like Owens rant about how the Jewish state is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles. Even conservatives like Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, a neo-isolationist who opposes foreign aid to Ukraine, are careful to affirm their continued support for Israel, in deference to the party base.

But this residual Zionism shields only Israeli Jews from abuse, not American ones—and it certainly does not protect the large majority of American Jews who vote for Democrats. This is why Trump suffers no consequences in his own coalition when he rails against “liberal Jews” who “voted to destroy America.” But such vilification won’t end there. As hard-core anti-Israel activists who have engaged in anti-Semitism against American Jews have demonstrated, most people who hate one swath of the world’s Jews eventually turn on the rest. “If I don’t win this election,” Trump said last week, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss.”

More than populism and isolationism, the force that unites the right’s anti-Semites and explains why they have been slowly winning the war for the future of conservatism is conspiracism. To see its power in practice, one need only examine the social-media posts of Elon Musk, which serve as a window into the mindset of the insurgent right and its receptivity to anti-Semitism.

Over the past year, the world’s richest man has repeatedly shared anti-Jewish propaganda on X, only to walk it back following criticism from more traditional conservative quarters. In November, Musk affirmed the Great Replacement theory, replying to a white nationalist who expressed it with these words: “You have said the actual truth.” After a furious backlash, the magnate recanted, saying, “It might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” Musk subsequently met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and accompanied Ben Shapiro on a trip to Auschwitz, but the lesson didn’t quite take. Earlier this month, he shared Carlson’s discussion of Holocaust revisionism with the approbation: “Very interesting. Worth watching.” Once again under fire, he deleted the tweet and apologized, saying he’d listened to only part of the interview.

But this lesson is also unlikely to stick, because like many on the new right, Musk is in thrall to a worldview that makes him particularly susceptible to anti-Jewish ideas. Last September, not long before Musk declared the “actual truth” of the Great Replacement, he participated in a public exchange with a group of rabbis, activists, and Jewish conservatives. The discussion was intended as an intervention to inoculate Musk against anti-Semitism, but early on, he said something that showed why the cause was likely lost before the conversation even began. “I think,” Musk cracked, “we’re running out of conspiracy theories that didn’t turn out to be true.”

The popularity of such sentiments among contemporary conservatives explains why the likes of Carlson and Owens have been gaining ground and old-guard conservatives such as Shapiro and Erickson have been losing it. Simply put, as Trump and his allies have coopted the conservative movement, it has become defined by a fundamental distrust of authority and institutions, and a concurrent embrace of conspiracy theories about elite cabals. And the more conspiratorial thinking becomes commonplace on the right, the more inevitable that its partisans will land on one of the oldest conspiracies of them all.

Conspiratorial thinking is neither new to American politics nor confined to one end of the ideological spectrum. But Trump has made foundational what was once marginal. Beginning with birtherism and culminating in election denialism, he turned anti-establishment conspiracism into a litmus test for attaining political power, compelling Republicans to either sign on to his claims of 2020 fraud or be exiled to irrelevance.

The fundamental fault line in the conservative coalition became whether someone was willing to buy into ever more elaborate fantasies. The result was to elevate those with flexible approaches to facts, such as Carlson and Owens, who were predisposed to say and do anything—no matter how hypocritical or absurd—to obtain influence. Once opened, this conspiratorial box could not be closed. After all, a movement that legitimizes crackpot schemes about rigged voting machines and microchipped vaccines cannot simply turn around and draw the line at the Jews.

For mercenary opportunists like Carlson, this moment holds incredible promise. But for Republicans with principles—those who know who won the 2020 election, or who was the bad guy in World War II, and can’t bring themselves to say otherwise—it’s a time of profound peril. And for Jews, the targets of one of the world’s deadliest conspiracy theories, such developments are even more forboding.

“It is now incumbent on all decent people, and especially those on the right, to demand that Carlson no longer be treated as a mainstream figure,” Jonathan Tobin, the pro-Trump conservative editor of the Jewish News Syndicate, wrote after Carlson’s World War II episode. “He must be put in his place, and condemned by Trump and Vance.”

Anti-Semitism’s ultimate victory in GOP politics is not assured. Musk did delete his tweets, Owens was fired, and some Republicans did condemn Carlson’s Holocaust segment. But beseeching Trump and his camp to intervene here mistakes the cause for the cure.

Three days after Carlson posted his Hitler apologetics, Vance shrugged off the controversy and recorded an interview with him, and this past Saturday, the two men yukked it up onstage at a political event in Pennsylvania before an audience of thousands. Such coziness should not surprise, given that Carlson was reportedly instrumental in securing the VP slot for the Ohio senator. Asked earlier if he took issue with Carlson’s decision to air the Holocaust revisionism, Vance retorted, “The fundamental idea here is Republicans believe not in censorship; we believe in free speech and debate.” He conveniently declined to use his own speech to debate Carlson’s.

[girlactionfigure]

Back in the 50s, Danny Thomas was a major TV star who had a successful comedy series on national television (CBS) called ‘Make Room for Daddy’ (Later changed to ‘The Danny Thomas Show’). The son of Maronite immigrants from Lebanon, read that a young medical student, the son of Chassidic immigrants from Ukraine, was struggling to pay his tuition, and donated the shortfall. As a result, countless lives were saved and made better by Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, who passed away exactly one year ago.

Rabbi Twerski described the story in an interview with the Pittsburgh Quarterly on November 19, 2007:

“By that time, I had several children, so my dad and some members of the congregation helped me to pay for school. I applied for a scholarship through a foundation, but it didn’t come through, so in my third year, I fell two trimesters behind on tuition.

One day, I called my wife at lunch as always, and she asked, “What would you do if you had $4,000?” I said, “I’m too busy to talk about fantasies.” She said, “But you really do have $4,000!” I said, “From where?” She said, “From Danny Thomas.” “Who’s Danny Thomas?” She said, “The TV star.”

Then she read me an article from The Chicago Sun. Local officials had told Mr. Thomas about a young rabbi who was struggling to get through medical school. Thomas asked, “How much does your rabbi need?” They said, “Four thousand dollars.” He said, “Tell your rabbi he’s got it.”

Rabbi Twerski was a scholar with feet planted firmly in two worlds — the rabbinic world of Torah and Talmud study, and a medical doctor and licensed psychiatrist. It was a rare pairing that earned him respect in both the insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish world and wider American society. He was an expert on addiction and scion of a long line of prominent rabbis descended from the 18th-century founder of Hassidic Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov.

Rabbi Twerski was a prolific writer. He authored dozens of books on a wide array of subjects: from addiction and mental health to religious law for medical professionals and commentaries on Jewish texts. Twerski also collaborated with late “Peanuts” comic strip creator Charles Schulz on a series of popular self-help books featuring Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

May their memories be for a blessing.

Rabbi Yisroel Bernath

[iphigeniacomplex]

i dont know much about chilchuck but i do know that hes a pittsburgh-born welder descended from working class hungarian immigrants who were part of the city’s steel industry. and i also know he and i will eventually be married at phipps conservatory and botanical gardens in this great city. and thats all i need to know about this manga.

[torque-witch]

I can’t sleep. I woke up at like 4:45 and watched my husband go to work. I wrote a huge email to my mom I never sent. Yesterday multiple women that came through the consignment shop had tears in their eyes. My friend came in and we tried not to cry hugging each other. She’s a first gen immigrant who fled from war and a destructive government. It’s all trauma. Pittsburgh is weirdly silent. Even the majority trump supporters at my husband’s job site were silent.

Our one friend and his wife are planning to emigrate back to Ireland because she has citizenship there. He walked out of work yesterday when he was told he would be working under a dude that was aggressive towards him for gloating about the election (both him and my husband are at different job sites but same union).

But the sun is out. Day 2 of a raging tension headache. I’m going to go to the grocery store and continue painting today.

[relaxedstyles]

Several wks ago, Allegheny Lutheran Social Ministries received 2 curious HHS payments totaling $17m+. Where did the money actually go?

[militantinremission]

Enter the Elites... But will it help?

Black America has begun to Stand On Our Square & it's obvious that the Democratic Party doesn't know how to deal w/ it. I said that 2024 is a 'Year Of Affirmation' & as Black America reaffirms Our Agenda, the DNC continues to send out Democratic Shills that do Kamala Harris more harm than good. The latest Tools out of the DNC Toolbox are Magic Johnson & Barack Obama. Magic is not known for his Public Speaking, but there he was- trying to Sell the Soap to Black Men at a Rally in Flint, Mi. What I first noticed, was Magic's 3rd Party reference to the Black Community; I guess he isn't Black anymore, he's 'Magic'. It was pretty clear that he didn't write what he was reading. Magic sounded like a White Man from the Jim Crow South: "We gotta get Our Black Men to Vote". This despite The Fact that the ONLY Demographic Group that votes at a larger percentage than Black Men, are Black Women.

Magic Johnson is beloved for his outstanding Professional Basketball Career, his victory over HIV, and his success in Business. I don't know who he is beholden to, but I suggest he stays out of Black Politics; especially at a Time when We're taking note of Who's with Us & Who isn't. Politics isn't Magic's lane, & he risks doing real damage to his Social Capital. Unfortunately, Magic Johnson is just one of many Black Celebrities & Elites stepping up to Democratic Microphones. It's comical to see this recent spotlight on Black America, when you consider how unapologetic The Democratic Party has been in BLATANTLY ignoring Our Concerns over the last 3Yrs. Not long after his inauguration, Joe Biden spoke to CBC Members on a Zoom Call. They were trying to ferret out Biden's 'Black Agenda', but he told them that they need to work w/ Latinx because they will be the Majority in 2040. The CBC fell back, but the Black Grassroots aren't settling. Joe Biden TOTALLY reneged on his Promise to 'Have Black America's Back'. Among the Measures that The Biden-Harris Administration ignored were:

A George Floyd Justice in Policing Bill

An Anti-Black Hate Crime Bill

An Anti-Lynching Law that focused on Black Lives

A Measure to 'Defund' or divert resources from Militarized Units of Police Departments to Mental Health Outreach & EMS Units

$4.5B in Aid to Black Farmers

Joe Biden's 'Lift Every Voice' Act

Kamala Harris' 'Lift Act'

Democratic Shills are quick to say that the Biden- Harris Administration didn't have the numbers to get ANY of that legislation through Congress, but They had no problem gathering enough Bipartisan support to Sign Off on:

An Asian Hate Crime Law

A Federal Gay Marriage Law

Aid & Comfort to 100,000 Afghani & 100,000 Ukrainian Refugees, in addition to MILLIONS of unvetted Illegal Immigrants

Roughly $175B to support an Ultraconservative (Neo Nazi) Ukrainian Oligarchy

Over $30B to support The [Ethno] State of Israel's Zionist Agenda of Genocide & a 'Greater Israel'

Magic Johnson was still catching lumps from the New Black Media, when Barack Obama made a stop on the Campaign Trail (in Pittsburgh?) to give Black Men yet another scolding. In his Address that was equal parts Condescension & Accusation, Barack Obama had the audacity to tell 'The Brothas'(???) that Kamala Harris:

Grew up like Us

Knows Us

Went to College w/ Us

Understands 'The Struggles' & the Pain & Joy that comes out of that Experience

Worked harder & did more (like We did) to 'achieve' the 2nd highest Office in The Land

Barry needs to go back to Martha's Vineyard & stay Radio Silent. His Legacy is not as shiny as he thinks. Black America lost 54% of Our Collective Wealth on his Watch, while Mainstream America gained $35 Trillion in Wealth. The more he speaks, the more he spotlights how different He & Kamala Harris are from Us. As I stated before, Barack & Kamala don't have a 'Black American' Experience, they both have an IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE. Neither grew up in Black Culture or spent their Formidable Years in the Black Community. The Truth is that BOTH began their 'Black Experience' as Young Adults (in Black Elite/ Boule settings). How many Black Men did Barack have access to before Reverend Jeremiah Wright? The Fact that the First [Noticably] 'Black' Man & Woman in The Oval Office AREN'T from 'The Soil' is not lost on Us. We also see how BOTH aspired to the Highest Levels of Power in just 2 Generations; This has not been the Experience of Indigenous Black Americans in 248Yrs.

Michael Harriot, Ta Nehesi Coats, Van Jones, & a growing number of Mainstream Black Journalists are taking a harder political line. Nina Turner was first to pubically call out Obama for his condescending language towards Black Men, but she has been joined by Roland Martin & a growing number of Media Bootlicks that are starting to See the Light. The accusation of Sexism & Misogyny levied on Black Men Collectively, is unfounded. A recent CNN Poll showed 69% of Black Men voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, higher than the 60% that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Barack himself favored an Open Nomination Process, over simply placing Kamala at the top of the Democratic Ticket. Rumor has it that He favored Gavin Newsome & Sen. Mark Kelly; does that make Barry a Misogynist? Nina Turner told a CNN Panel that the Black Men she spoke to have reasons for moving away from the Democratic Party, but NO ONE in Mainstream Media is talking about those reasons. Society regards Barack Obama as the'Chief Negro Whisperer', but he seems clueless about what motivates Black Men.

The Aftereffect of Barack's 'Address to Black Men' has been a barrage of comments on New Black Media Platforms. CNN's Abby Phillip had a Panel of 'Black Men' to discuss Barack's Message, but the Panelists featured were questionable at best. No One can deny that Barack Obama has lost his luster w/ Black America, & Mainstream Media Outlets are beginning to admit that this is a Trend that started after Obama's First Term in Office. Blackfolk committed to Obama's Agenda of 'Hope' & 'Change'; We could not fathom that he would put EVERYONE ELSE before Us. We made excuses for his disregard of Black Specific Issues. Obama's 'Beer Summit' w/ Skip Gates was a head scratcher. Flint, Michigan was a Wake Up Call. Mother Emmanuel Church, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, & Michael Brown made it clear that Barack WON'T protect Us. His interview w/ Ta Nehesi Coats on the topic of Reparations brought it Home that Barack had no intention of doing ANYTHING for Us. We touted Obama as One of Our Own, but he was far from it. We validated him & he used that validation to publicly scold Us. 8Yrs later, Barack Obama's 'Big Daddy' Routine has gotten stale & his language towards Black Men is unacceptable.

Some of Us question Obama's motivation. Were his comments really a gaff, or was this part of a larger narrative? We know that Barack was behind Joe Biden's decision to 'drop out' of the Presidential Campaign, & We know that Kamala Harris wasn't his first choice to replace him. If earlier rumors regarding a plot by Obama, Nancy Pelosi, & possibly Chuck Schumer to destroy Joe Biden's 'Legacy' are true, Barack looks more Clinical than Clueless. The Harris-Walz Campaign tried to mitigate the damage by quickly putting out a 'Plan for Black Men', but EVERYONE KNOWS that Affirmative Action set a precedent on Race Specific Policy. Congress will reject ANY Plan for 'Black Men' before Ed Blum or SCOTUS does. In other words, this 'Policy' is more Word Salad. A closer look at this Harris- Walz Policy reveals more of the same 'Rising Tide' Legislation that Dems only offer Black Voters. It ignores Issues that Black Men say are important.

The Harris-Walz Campaign may have a better understanding of Black Specific Issues if they appeared on Platforms other than The Breakfast Club, Roland Martin Unfiltered, All The Smoke, The Shade Room, & Call Her Daddy. New Black Media has REAL QUESTIONS. We want to know about Kamala's Policy Platform & 'Black Agenda', but We also want to know more about Kamala personally:

What's the deal w/ her Father's Lineage?

Where is his Birth Certificate?

What Year was he born- Was it 1938?

Who is Beril/ Beryl Finegan?

If her Grandmother died in 1960, WHO is the woman pictured holding her as a baby?

Who is Iris Finegan?

Are the Black People pictured w/ her in Jamaica actual Family Members or Plantation Hands?

Did she know about Doug Emhoff's indiscretions?

If her Father (& Step Mother) currently live crosstown from her & Doug in Washington D.C., why is he absent from her Campaign?

Kamala has been making herself more available to Media, but it has not worked in her best interest. The Harris-Walz Campaign has no other options w/ Election Day being less than 3 Weeks away, & her support leveling off. The DNC can keep sending out Shills to get Blackfolk 'In Line', but without a Clear Message & SPECIFIC STRATEGY to actually move America 'Forward'', Kamala just looks like she's repeating the same Menu of Word Salads across different Platforms. We're not the only demographic moving away from the Democratic Party, but We appear to be leading the Exodus. As for Black Celebrities & Elites, it's Time to choose Sides... You're either On Code or you're Not.

-The Smart Play, is to Bet on Black.

[portraitsofsaints]

Happy Feast Day

Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos

1819-1867

Feast Day: October 5

Patronage: against cancer

Blessed Fr. Francis Xavier Seelos was beatified by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000. Born in Germany, he was inspired to be a Redemptorist missionary priest in the U.S. to serve the German immigrants. At St. Philomena’s Parish in Pittsburgh, he was the assistant to St. John Neumann, who was his spiritual director and encouraged him to preach missions. Fr. Seelos lived a simple lifestyle, serving the poor and abandoned. He was called the “Cheerful Ascetic,” the “American Wonderworker,” the “Doctor of Souls,” for his intercession in healing bodies and souls. He was assigned to parishes in Detroit, Baltimore, and New Orleans, where he died from yellow fever contracted from caring for victims of the disease.

Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase. (website)

[coffee-at-annies]

I feel like I should take a page out of @patrichornkissed’s book and start shouting out local charities that are doing work in the area against the current administration. I know most of my followers are only interested in the city through the lens of the sports teams but idk some of us do actually live here.

For those who care about immigration I’ll shout out a couple places:

Casa San Jose is charity that serves the Latino community and operates as a resource center that provides youth programming, ESL classes, and support with legal and immigration proceedings.

City of Asylum Pittsburgh provides sanctuary to artists and writers who are under threats of persecution and death in their home countries. It also provides art education with free community poetry and jazz events.

JFCSPGH (Jewish Family & Community Services Pittsburgh) is a multi-entity organization that provides comprehensive social services for people of all backgrounds including counseling, career development, immigration legal services, and refugee resettling and support. Their career counselors are the people who helped me find my current job after I was laid off due to COVID. Currently there’s a refutation of Tr*mps executive order on their website. You can donate specifically to the cause/entity you most care about if you just want your money going to refugee services.

If you’d like to support queer charities, SistersPGH is a black and trans non-profit serving the southwestern PA community. They’re the ones who organized the non-corporate local pride parade.

Since its black history month, consider donating to a local bail fund. I don’t think I need to explain why bail funds are important, most of us were online during the BLM protests.

If food is your no. 1 charity concern consider donating to the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank or 412 Food Rescue which takes in food that would become waste and connects it with people who are experiencing food insecurity.

If none of these charities appeal to you, consider looking up your own local chapter or local charities. Figure out who is doing the work in your own community and support them.

I would recommend supporting multiple charities in addition to any sports charities in terms of charitable giving and action. The Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation supports a lot of initiatives but it’s mostly focused on youth hockey and education, along with medical issues like cancer research through the Mario Lemieux Foundation. There’s nothing wrong with supporting these charities but it’s not the same as donating directly to black, trans, or immigrant causes directly. The Pens Foundation will likely shoutout and donate a portion of the proceeds to local black charities as part of tonight’s Black Hockey History Game. If you feel moved, consider donating to those charities directly so that they get more money.