A screenshot of a Feb. 4, 1939, New York Times front page story about the Nazis silencing a quintet of German entertainers is making the Facebook rounds.
I suspected that sooner or later a journalist who knows some history would write about it.
“In the hours after Jimmy Kimmel was indefinitely suspended from his show by ABC over comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s death, another cancellation also made waves on the internet — that of five comedians, in Nazi Germany,” wrote Forward Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman. (Kimmel is back at work.)
The Times story said Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, expelled “five ‘Aryan’ actors and cabaret announcers ... from the Reich’s Chamber of Culture on the grounds that ‘in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades.’”
I taught history at West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah for two dozen years. History instructs that, with few exceptions, dictators and authoritarians – right wing and left – are vain, thin-skinned, egotistical, and narcissistic folks. The same goes for the would-be authoritarian — some say Fascist — in the White House.
Their megalomania often reflects deep-seated insecurity and angst, if not paranoia.
Strongmen “do not like to see their hypocrisies, their biases, and their physical quirks to be put out in the open and made fun of — and we all have hypocrisies, biases, and physical quirks — because then they are on our level,” according to Berman. “Then, as now, dictators and those who admire them are incapable of laughing at themselves.”
She pointed out that Trump’s message to Kimmel and ABC was unambiguous: “Make fun of me, or anyone in my orbit, and you’ll pay.” Goebbels’ message was the same for the Germans.
Anyway, except for George Washington, every American president and his inner circle has been satirized, ridiculed, and lampooned, sometimes mercilessly.
Since Trump is a Republican, it might be worthwhile to compare how he and Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, dealt with detractors.
A good example is a devout Democrat who voted for Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky over Lincoln in 1860.
The guy belittled Lincoln as “the original gorilla.” He blamed the disastrous Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861 on the Lincoln administration’s “imbecility.” He harrumphed that “irretrievable misfortune and national disgrace are to be added to the ruin of all peaceful pursuits and national bankruptcy as the result of Lincoln’s ‘running the machine’ for five months.”
The naysayer’s name was Edwin M. Stanton.
In 1862, Lincoln fired his first secretary of war and hired Stanton because he knew Stanton could do the job and wouldn’t be a yes-man. “Edwin Stanton, who had treated Lincoln with contempt at their initial acquaintance, developed a great respect for the commander in chief and was unable to control his tears for weeks after the president’s death,” wrote Doris Kearns Goodwin in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. “... The bluntness and single-minded intensity behind Stanton’s brusque dismissal of Lincoln at that first acquaintance were the qualities the president valued in his secretary of war – whom he would affectionately call his ‘Mars.’”
Team of Toadies would make an apt title of a book about Trump and his cabinet. Obsequiousness is a prerequisite for a job in Trump’s cabinet and White House.
Unlike Trump, Lincoln didn’t respond to criticism by throwing tantrums. “If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business,” he explained. “I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.”
Lincoln’s choices for his cabinet revealed his profound strength of character and confidence in himself. Some cabinet secretaries had been among his strongest rivals for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860.
In the 1960s, comedians Tom and Dick Smothers hosted The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS TV. The siblings regularly satirized President Lyndon B. Johnson over his prosecution of the Vietnam War.
In private, LBJ seethed at the brothers and tried to get CBS to axe their show. (After he was sworn in as president in 1969, Richard Nixon, also the target of the brothers’ barbs, pressured CBS into canceling the show.)
Meanwhile, after Johnson chose not to run for reelection in 1968, the siblings sent him a letter of apology. On their last show, the brothers read Johnson’s reply: “It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.”
With Kimmel (and Steven Colbert), Trump did a 180 from LBJ and the Smothers Brothers.
“Hours before Kimmel was suspended, ABC was threatened by President Donald Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, on a podcast,” Berman wrote. “‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way,’ Carr said. ‘These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.’”
A footnote: A year ago on President’s Day, a panel of scholars ranked Lincoln, who could take a joke, one of our greatest presidents. The guy in the White House who can’t take a joke? The scholars rated him dead last.
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