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{{short description|American journalist}}
⚫ =Edgar Ansel Mowrer=


{{infobox person
Edgar Ansel Mowrer was awarded the ] in 1933 for his reporting on the rise of ] . Mowrer had a very long and distinguished career in ] and no other American is known to have witnessed more great moments of ] historical events . His understanding of ] and ] was unrivalled and his writings remain the clearest source for their understanding gained by this personal proximity or ] he had as a ] .
⚫ | name = Edgar Ansel Mowrer
| image = Edgar Ansel Mowrer.jpg
| image size = 200px
| caption = Edgar Ansel Mowrer
| birth_date = {{Birth date |1892|03|08}}
| birth_place = ], ], U.S.
| death_date = {{Death date and age|1977|3|2|1892|03|08}}
| death_place = ], Portugal
| nationality = U.S.
| education = ], ] (graduated in 1913)
| occupation = journalist, writer
| awards = ] in 1933
| works = ''This American World'' (1928), ''Germany Puts The Clock Back'' (1933), ''Mowrer in China'' (1938), ''Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of our Time'' (1968) etc.
| family = brother ]
| parents = Rufus Mowrer and Nellie Mowrer (née Scott)
| spouse = ] (née Thomson)
}}
'''Edgar Ansel Mowrer''' (March 8, 1892, – March 2, 1977) was a ]-winning American journalist and writer best known for his writings on international events.


==Weimar Germany== ==Life and career==
Born in ] to Rufus and Nellie née Scott,<ref>Obituary of Rufus Mowrer - Chicago Daily Tribune; January 1, 1942 - Page 35</ref> Mowrer graduated from the ] in 1913. From his elder brother, ], the editor of '']'', Mowrer received a job and in 1914 went to France as a ]. From there he reported on events throughout the ], including the Italians' defeat at the ]. In 1916, he married ]; the two had a daughter, Diana, and would remain together until Mowrer's death 61 years later. In May 1915 he was assigned to the Rome office of the Chicago Daily News, and there he interviewed ], then a Socialist, who was urging Italy to enter the war on the side of the Allies. After his marriage in London in February 1916, Mowrer returned with his wife to Italy, where he covered the battlefronts and witnessed the Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917.


Mowrer remained a correspondent in Europe throughout the 1920s and 1930s, living in ] for eight years until 1923, before moving to ]. In 1933, Mowrer won the ] for his reporting on the rise of ] in Germany and was named president of the ]. In his dispatches from Germany, he had managed to cut below the patina of normalcy to capture events that challenged the belief that Germany's transformation was democratic and natural; he was therefore a target of Nazi ire. In addition to reporting for the ''Chicago Daily News'', Mowrer wrote a best-selling book, '','' published in 1933, which had angered Nazi officials to the point where Mowrer's friends believed he faced mortal danger.
Mowrer is particularly clear in regard to the state of ] between ] and ] and his analysis following bears the essence of the ] situation in the years preceding the ascent to power of the ] , at which point Hitler had had him required to leave Berlin as his first act after the disastrous ] of March ].


The German government openly pressured him to leave the country, with Germany's ambassador to the United States notifying the State Department that because of the "people's righteous indignation" the government could no longer hope to keep Mowrer free from harm. When the ''Chicago Daily News'' learned about the threats, ], the owner of the newspaper, offered Mowrer a position in the paper’s bureau in ]. Mowrer, who did not want to leave Germany, agreed to leave before covering the annual Nazi Party spectacle in Nuremberg set to begin on 1 September 1933. After American diplomatic missions to Germany refused to guarantee his and his family's safety, and after a futile personal appeal to the newly appointed US ambassador to Germany ], Mowrer agreed to depart immediately,<ref>{{cite book |first=Eric |last=Larson |authorlink=Erik Larson (author) |title=In the Garden of Beasts | chapter = Chapter Nine: Death is Death.|publisher=Crown Publishing Group |location=NY, NY, USA |year=2011 | asin=B008NXNDE6}}</ref> in return for the release of ], an elderly Jewish correspondent for the Austrian newspaper '']'', who was being held by the Gestapo for high treason.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.jta.org/1933/08/10/archive/mowrer-secures-release-of-jewish-journalist-by-bargain-with-nazis |title=Mowrer Secures Release of Jewish Journalist by Bargain with Nazis |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> |date= 10 August 1933|work= Jewish Telegraphic Agency|accessdate=17 June 2013}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://ajwnews.com/archives/13960 |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130619230835/http://ajwnews.com/archives/13960 |url-status=dead |archive-date=19 June 2013 |title=Book Review: "Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, by Andrew Nagorski" |last1=Gendler |first1=Neal |date=18 July 2012 |work=American Jewish World |accessdate=17 June 2013 }}</ref>
Mowrer's analysis starts with an assertion that neither a foreigner nor a German himself in those days could understand the motives for any German actions but only what those actions might ''be''. This began with the First World war defeat . The military leaders who had to the last shot fed their populace a false diet of victory talk , then of a sudden imposed both the withdrawal and ending of the royal ] and the implementing of a new ] .


A Nazi official, assigned to make sure Mowrer actually left Berlin, approached him as he was boarding the train and asked when he was coming back to Germany; Mowrer answered: "Why when I can come back with about two million of my countrymen."<ref>Larson 2011, Chapter Twelve: Brutus</ref> Although he’d initially been given a post in Tokyo, upon leaving Berlin he went to Paris and took over as the ] bureau chief for the ''Chicago Daily News'',<ref><Family history></ref> continuing to report on European affairs until France's defeat by German forces in 1940.
Public expectations therefore were of a negotiation of the terms of ] whereas the country faced in fact a complete Diktat of the terms . It was take -it-or-leave-it , and the German forces were beyond re-opening hostilities . Mowrer reports that in fact though , the terms of this ''diktat'' were less severe than the terms imposed by Germany herself upon ] the previous year ] at ] . The People however knew that Russia had been subject to German invasion after her defeat whereas in ] German soldiery were everywhere placed on foreign soil when its' commanders petitioned for peace .
Upon his return to the United States Mowrer lectured for a time to American audiences, warning them of the burgeoning power of Fascism. Although he had expected to be sent to Tokyo, Mowrer was assigned in January 1934 to replace his brother as chief of the Paris bureau of the Chicago Daily News.
From this vantage point, he covered the events that led to the outbreak of World War II, and he acquired a growing distrust of plebiscites and treaties. In 1936 he covered the beginning of the civil war in Spain and visited the Soviet Union to report on the adoption of the new Soviet constitution.
Upon his return to France, he witnessed the fall of the Popular Front government headed by his friend Leon Blum. He visited China for a few months in 1938 to gather material for his book The Dragon Wakes. A Report from China (Morrow, 1939) and then returned to Paris, where he remained until the fall of France in June 1940.
Assigned in August 1940 to Washington, D.C. as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, Mowrer collaborated with William J. Donovan on a series of articles on fifth-column activities in Europe. Several trips to the Far East in the next two years resulted in the book Global War: An Atlas of World Strategy (McClelland, 1942), which he wrote in cooperation with Marthe Rajchman.
From 1941 to 1943 he served as deputy director of the Office of Facts and Figures in the Office of War Information and broadcast news analyses from his post in Washington. In his postwar book The Nightmare of American Foreign Policy (Knopf, 1948) Mowrer criticized the foreign policy of the United States since 1918.
He expressed pessimism about the American love of the status quo and warned that the United States must choose between “world leadership and rapid decline.” He advocated a voluntary federation, strong enough to keep world order through the enforcement of world law. He maintained that the United Nations, which he described as “an unfinished bridge leading nowhere,” was inadequate to undertake this task.


W. Fox, writing in the New York Times (October 31, 1948), called the book “incomparably the best study of American foreign policy for this period that has yet been written.” Pursuing his ideas on international organization further in Challenge and Decision:
The following years of disappointment , of tribulation and continuous crises became for Germany a night-mare on top of the nationally wounding 6 million war-dead. Germany was prey to continous partisan and political Insurrection as well as pressure from ] and ] . In result the unrepentant nationalists created the legend that an undefeated Germany had been felled by a revolutionary ''dagger thrust'' at home . A ''new army'' and the Radical Righ] combined and fought against Poles , ] and Left Socialists and against the self-same new ] . The influential ] was the first to declare that in fact the new Republic was doomed .


A Program for the Times of Crisis Ahead (McGraw, 1950), Mowrer urged the United States to take the lead in forming a “peace coalition” and the ultimate federation of non-Communist countries, to weaken the “expansionist bloc.” M. S. Watson noted in the Saturday Review of Literature (December 9, 1950) that Mowrer’s program resembled that of the United World Federalists.
The Republic refused , as the tough Mowrer language reports , to hand over the hundreds in number of War Criminals demanded of them and in fact the ] Government circumvented the ''agreed'' limitations upon the magnitude and character of its new armed forces inside Germany ,until with the ] , it began semi-secretly to develope prohibited Air and Tank forces inside Russia . Why disarm if no-one else does , being Mowrers reflection.
In his A Good Time to be Alive (Duell, 1959), a collection of articles he wrote for the Saturday Review, Zionist Quarterly, Western World, and the New Leader, Mowrer surveyed the impact of world affairs upon the United States.
He suggested that Soviet successes were compelling Western peoples to “pull themselves together in a real effort to survive as free men,” and concluded that America’s pioneer spirit was “still warm beneath the ashes of self-indulgence.” Mowrer’s most recent book, An End to Make-Believe (Duell, 1961), analyzes the history of the Cold War and its meaning to Americans.
In it, he contrasts what he calls the “fanatical ambition of international Communism with the unshakeable complacency of most Americans,” and maintains that in “the sinister game of international poker forced on us by Moscow and Peiping” the West still “holds the aces” but needs “bolder, better players.”


Returning to the United States, Mowrer served as the Deputy Director, first of the Office of Facts and Figures, then, after the OFF's consolidation, of the ], from 1942 until 1943. Upon his departure, he started his column "Edgar Mowrer on World Affairs," which he later supplemented with a column entitled "What's Your Question on World Affairs?" After the ], Mowrer wrote a number of books and helped organize the ]. In 1956, he took over as editor of '']'' magazine, a position he held for four years. In 1969, he moved to ] and wrote a column for '']'' until 1976.
Republican leaders (of the Establishment classes ) who had throughout supported the ] War and aprobated territorial annexations in the good times , now contested their own government's ''technical'' admission of Germany's war guilt, correctly recognising it's basis for the payment of ''damages'' done by their own invading ] armies in Belgium and France .


==Works==
Mowrer even-handedly wrote that they relied on the support of ] because the ] had removed itself from the Versailles Treaty apart from it's desire for continuance of the payments of ''inter allied'' debts . Mowrer accuses these German Republicans of conniving more with ] where all party leaders disapproved of the reparations (Britain itself not having been invaded he says ) , and favoured typically British further balancing of power machinations .
*{{cite book|title=This American World|publisher=J. H. Sears & Co.|year=1928}}
*{{cite book|title=Germany Puts The Clock Back|publisher=] (in US ])|year=1933}}
*{{cite book|title=Mowrer in China|publisher=] (UK)|year=1938}}
*{{cite book|title=Global War: An Atlas of World Strategy|publisher=]|year=1942|author=(with Marthe Rajchman)}}
*{{cite book|title=The Nightmare of American Foreign Policy|publisher=]|year=1948}}
*{{cite book|title=Challenge and Decision; A program for the times of crisis ahead, for world peace under American leadership|publisher=]|year=1950}}
*{{cite book|title=A Good Time to be Alive|publisher=]|year=1959}}
*{{cite book|title=Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of our Time|url=https://archive.org/details/triumphturmoilpe00mowr|url-access=registration|publisher=]|year=1968}}
*{{cite book|author=(with )|title=Umano and the Price of Lasting Peace|publisher=]|year=1972|isbn=0-8022-2103-3}}


==References==
The losing Imperial War was financed nearly exclusively with internal loans and currency inflation . The landed and industrial German Baronetcy now saw that these heavy internal loans would have to be repaid (having banked on the defeated Allies footing the bill} as well as them shouldering the promised reparations. Their pressure led to the ''democratic'' republic repudiating the payment schedule- and imperilling the German people further with the consequent franco-belgian takeover of the economic ] heartland . Mowrer knew that the British had been encouraging the German government throughout reparation demands to simply export new printed Marks. When America's President Coolidge removed all occupying American forces open resistance against those remaining followed and ] in the Ruhr prevented franco-belgian exploitation , as well as further debasing the German currency and destroying the small-savings of the next echelon of society .In January ] the Allied Reparations Commission formally accused Germany of breaking the terms of the peace treaty .
{{Reflist}}


==Further reading==
In the Ruhr the French used force by executing saboteurs and jailing industrialists , agitators and workers .They seized the railways and industries and against the British , organised a separatist movement for secession of the Rhineland .
*], ''The Parting of Ways: A Personal Account of the Thirties''. Memoir by a British reporter who mentored under Mowrer
*], '']'',


{{Authority control}}
Despite the Reichsbank discount rate reaching 30 per cent exports fell to nothing amidst general despair . ] ] combined with ] under General ] in overthrow of the republic .In ] and ] , Communist-sympathising local authorities acted against the Republic. At which the German Chancellor ] stopped the several billion dollar costs of ] by negotiating with the ] Poincare .


{{DEFAULTSORT:Mowrer, Edgar Ansel}}
With the use of force General ] neutralised the ''Black Reichswehr'' and Labour Commandos, moving the Prussian Army to the Bavarian border to stop the Reich] agitation . Proper financiers such as Helferich and ] were employed to repair the currency which had been debased to 6,000,000 Marks per Dollar on November ].
]

]
This was an abandonment of the hitherto '''Catastrophe Policy ''' and now German leaders settled into acceptance of the peace treaty . The French accepted discussions (the Franc had also fallen from 12 to 26 to the dollar during the Ruhr ''war'') and the Americans promised to privately enter two commissions of study into the German problems .
]

]
In social terms the Mowrer reports are highly illustrative of the consequences of the defeat , ] and robbery inflicted upon the German people , but he is firm in viewing the years of the treaty observance as showing no more than a scheme to eject the Allied forces and then default on payments . Mowrer remained convinced through later history that although the Weimar Republic was indeed the creation of ''Unilateral Disarmament'' following ''exclusivity'' of war guilt , that Weimar would have in fact survived and prospered were it not for the heavier ,in Germany than elsewhere, effects of the ]] . Mowrer witnessed from 1923 onwards that the war-weary German population wanted no-more than a democratic republic so long as it brought the also universally desired ''restoration of status''.
]
]
]
]
]
]
]
]

Latest revision as of 08:54, 16 October 2024

American journalist
Edgar Ansel Mowrer
Edgar Ansel Mowrer
Born(1892-03-08)March 8, 1892
Bloomington, Illinois, U.S.
DiedMarch 2, 1977(1977-03-02) (aged 84)
Madeira, Portugal
NationalityU.S.
EducationUniversity of Chicago, University of Michigan (graduated in 1913)
Occupation(s)journalist, writer
WorksThis American World (1928), Germany Puts The Clock Back (1933), Mowrer in China (1938), Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of our Time (1968) etc.
SpouseLilian Thomson Mowrer (née Thomson)
Parent(s)Rufus Mowrer and Nellie Mowrer (née Scott)
Familybrother Paul Scott Mowrer
AwardsPulitzer Prize in Correspondence in 1933

Edgar Ansel Mowrer (March 8, 1892, – March 2, 1977) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and writer best known for his writings on international events.

Life and career

Born in Bloomington, Illinois to Rufus and Nellie née Scott, Mowrer graduated from the University of Michigan in 1913. From his elder brother, Paul Scott Mowrer, the editor of Chicago Daily News, Mowrer received a job and in 1914 went to France as a foreign correspondent. From there he reported on events throughout the First World War, including the Italians' defeat at the Battle of Caporetto. In 1916, he married Lilian Thomson; the two had a daughter, Diana, and would remain together until Mowrer's death 61 years later. In May 1915 he was assigned to the Rome office of the Chicago Daily News, and there he interviewed Benito Mussolini, then a Socialist, who was urging Italy to enter the war on the side of the Allies. After his marriage in London in February 1916, Mowrer returned with his wife to Italy, where he covered the battlefronts and witnessed the Italian defeat at Caporetto in 1917.

Mowrer remained a correspondent in Europe throughout the 1920s and 1930s, living in Rome for eight years until 1923, before moving to Berlin. In 1933, Mowrer won the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence for his reporting on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and was named president of the Berlin Foreign Press Association. In his dispatches from Germany, he had managed to cut below the patina of normalcy to capture events that challenged the belief that Germany's transformation was democratic and natural; he was therefore a target of Nazi ire. In addition to reporting for the Chicago Daily News, Mowrer wrote a best-selling book, Germany Puts the Clock Back, published in 1933, which had angered Nazi officials to the point where Mowrer's friends believed he faced mortal danger.

The German government openly pressured him to leave the country, with Germany's ambassador to the United States notifying the State Department that because of the "people's righteous indignation" the government could no longer hope to keep Mowrer free from harm. When the Chicago Daily News learned about the threats, Frank Knox, the owner of the newspaper, offered Mowrer a position in the paper’s bureau in Tokyo. Mowrer, who did not want to leave Germany, agreed to leave before covering the annual Nazi Party spectacle in Nuremberg set to begin on 1 September 1933. After American diplomatic missions to Germany refused to guarantee his and his family's safety, and after a futile personal appeal to the newly appointed US ambassador to Germany William Dodd, Mowrer agreed to depart immediately, in return for the release of Paul Goldmann, an elderly Jewish correspondent for the Austrian newspaper Neue Freie Presse, who was being held by the Gestapo for high treason.

A Nazi official, assigned to make sure Mowrer actually left Berlin, approached him as he was boarding the train and asked when he was coming back to Germany; Mowrer answered: "Why when I can come back with about two million of my countrymen." Although he’d initially been given a post in Tokyo, upon leaving Berlin he went to Paris and took over as the Paris bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News, continuing to report on European affairs until France's defeat by German forces in 1940. Upon his return to the United States Mowrer lectured for a time to American audiences, warning them of the burgeoning power of Fascism. Although he had expected to be sent to Tokyo, Mowrer was assigned in January 1934 to replace his brother as chief of the Paris bureau of the Chicago Daily News. From this vantage point, he covered the events that led to the outbreak of World War II, and he acquired a growing distrust of plebiscites and treaties. In 1936 he covered the beginning of the civil war in Spain and visited the Soviet Union to report on the adoption of the new Soviet constitution. Upon his return to France, he witnessed the fall of the Popular Front government headed by his friend Leon Blum. He visited China for a few months in 1938 to gather material for his book The Dragon Wakes. A Report from China (Morrow, 1939) and then returned to Paris, where he remained until the fall of France in June 1940. Assigned in August 1940 to Washington, D.C. as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, Mowrer collaborated with William J. Donovan on a series of articles on fifth-column activities in Europe. Several trips to the Far East in the next two years resulted in the book Global War: An Atlas of World Strategy (McClelland, 1942), which he wrote in cooperation with Marthe Rajchman. From 1941 to 1943 he served as deputy director of the Office of Facts and Figures in the Office of War Information and broadcast news analyses from his post in Washington. In his postwar book The Nightmare of American Foreign Policy (Knopf, 1948) Mowrer criticized the foreign policy of the United States since 1918. He expressed pessimism about the American love of the status quo and warned that the United States must choose between “world leadership and rapid decline.” He advocated a voluntary federation, strong enough to keep world order through the enforcement of world law. He maintained that the United Nations, which he described as “an unfinished bridge leading nowhere,” was inadequate to undertake this task.

W. Fox, writing in the New York Times (October 31, 1948), called the book “incomparably the best study of American foreign policy for this period that has yet been written.” Pursuing his ideas on international organization further in Challenge and Decision:

A Program for the Times of Crisis Ahead (McGraw, 1950), Mowrer urged the United States to take the lead in forming a “peace coalition” and the ultimate federation of non-Communist countries, to weaken the “expansionist bloc.” M. S. Watson noted in the Saturday Review of Literature (December 9, 1950) that Mowrer’s program resembled that of the United World Federalists. In his A Good Time to be Alive (Duell, 1959), a collection of articles he wrote for the Saturday Review, Zionist Quarterly, Western World, and the New Leader, Mowrer surveyed the impact of world affairs upon the United States. He suggested that Soviet successes were compelling Western peoples to “pull themselves together in a real effort to survive as free men,” and concluded that America’s pioneer spirit was “still warm beneath the ashes of self-indulgence.” Mowrer’s most recent book, An End to Make-Believe (Duell, 1961), analyzes the history of the Cold War and its meaning to Americans. In it, he contrasts what he calls the “fanatical ambition of international Communism with the unshakeable complacency of most Americans,” and maintains that in “the sinister game of international poker forced on us by Moscow and Peiping” the West still “holds the aces” but needs “bolder, better players.”

Returning to the United States, Mowrer served as the Deputy Director, first of the Office of Facts and Figures, then, after the OFF's consolidation, of the Office of War Information, from 1942 until 1943. Upon his departure, he started his column "Edgar Mowrer on World Affairs," which he later supplemented with a column entitled "What's Your Question on World Affairs?" After the Second World War, Mowrer wrote a number of books and helped organize the Americans for Democratic Action. In 1956, he took over as editor of Western World magazine, a position he held for four years. In 1969, he moved to Wonalancet, New Hampshire and wrote a column for The Union Leader until 1976.

Works

References

  1. Obituary of Rufus Mowrer - Chicago Daily Tribune; January 1, 1942 - Page 35
  2. Larson, Eric (2011). "Chapter Nine: Death is Death.". In the Garden of Beasts. NY, NY, USA: Crown Publishing Group. ASIN B008NXNDE6.
  3. "Mowrer Secures Release of Jewish Journalist by Bargain with Nazis". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 10 August 1933. Retrieved 17 June 2013.
  4. Gendler, Neal (18 July 2012). "Book Review: "Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, by Andrew Nagorski"". American Jewish World. Archived from the original on 19 June 2013. Retrieved 17 June 2013.
  5. Larson 2011, Chapter Twelve: Brutus
  6. <Family history>

Further reading

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