For the better part of 3,500 years, India has been the world’s foremost producer of cotton. There was no competition during the first 3,000 of those years, the other cotton rich areas of the planet not yet on the radar of European capitalists. For two millenia, India’s cotton reached nearly every corner of the world unimpeded, from the markets of Cairo to the Sultanate of Malacca in modern Malaysia. Indian cotton was ubiquitous. As Sven Beckert aptly describes the influence of India’s longstanding tradition of cotton production in his masterful Empire of Cotton: “Even the names of particular fabrics became global brand names—chintz and jackonet, for example, are corruptions of terms in Indian languages that eventually came to describe a particular style throughout the world.” India has never wavered from its perch atop the production list of cotton, though it has perhaps seemed so by the reputation of the American South.
Slaves had been toiling in the American colonies for nearly two hundred years, their bodies and spirits exploited for tobacco and rice, before demand for cotton ever reached the ears of their captors. The first cotton imported from the brand-new United States arrived in Liverpool in 1785 and aroused such suspicion that it was impounded, the Board of Trade stating that it “cannot be imported from thence it not being the Produce of the American States.” Cotton was from India. It was from Brazil and the West Indies. It was from Anatolia. Within ten years, as those forcibly relocated (both slave and native) or seized from their homeland and oppressed into a life spent in its never-ending extraction, the American States would become synonymous with cotton in all its wonder and all its horror. India’s cotton, however, was not cultivated using slave labor. It had been the work of peasants for centuries, control over its trade being handled by internal networks of indigenous merchants that were too convoluted for Europeans to infiltrate.
Undeterred, Salomon and Johann Georg Volkart, brothers aged 34 and 25 respectively, began operating a new business which opened jointly in Bombay and Winterthur, Switzerland on 1 February 1851. Volkart Brothers purchased raw cotton in India, manufactured goods in Switzerland, and exported them back to India for sale. A hand drawn poster from the early days of the company, which has not aged well, shows a woman playing a recorder in a meadow with wild animals at her feet, a smiling tiger, a stoic lion, and a slightly confused looking cheetah all seemingly enchanted by this creature who was Made In Switzerland just like the yarn being sold. Slowly and steadily, the Volkart Brothers expanded their business to include coffee, tea, spices, and all the other colonial stuff you vaguely remember hearing when you learned about the East India Trading Company in 11th Grade.
As the business expanded, the methods changed, and Volkart Brothers began the process of – and please note that I put on a double-breasted pinstripe suit and hired a secretary just so that I could call her “honey” to type this sentence – vertical integration, a needlessly obtuse phrase that simply means controlling one’s own supply chain. Their success in joining the growing side to the manufacturing side provided a template which would be replicated the world over. As Beckert notes, “[a]gents in the employ of Volkart would purchase cotton from local dealers, have it processed in the firm’s own gins, then press it at “Volkart’s Press” and send it by rail to Bombay, where it was branded by Volkart agents to be shipped to Liverpool, Le Havre, or Bremen to be sold to mill owners who put great trust in the “VB” stamped on the bales. While the old system had relied on many intermediary merchants, Volkart now single-handedly connected cotton growers to cotton manufacturers.” This model would make the company gobs of money and make Salomon fabulously wealthy. Beckert draws a fairly straight line from the Volkarts’ success in infiltrating a market based on peasant rather than slave labor to the Emancipation Proclamation:
The realignment of the economic elites of the United States, along with the promise of tapping nonslave hinterlands as the Volkarts had done in India, threw the rising costs and diminishing benefits of combining slavery and industrial capitalism into high relief. In 1861, the mix exploded, and the ensuing American Civil War became a turning point not just for that young republic, but also for the history of global capitalism.
J.G. passed away in 1863, and Salomon stepped away from the business in 1875, going on to become a board member of, among other enterprises, the Bank of Winterthur, whose merger with Toggenburger Bank in 1912 begat the Union Bank of Switzerland, UBS (because I clearly hate banks, I encourage everyone to visit the following website: https://www.corp-research.org/UBS). As Salomon departed the company, Theodor Reinhart, the son of a cotton man himself whose family’s firm had been around since 1788, married Salomon’s daughter, Lily, and Volkart Brothers continued doing business under his stewardship. They had four sons, the eldest of whom, Georg, continued in the family business, which survived well into the 20th century before being run into the ground by generation number five in the 1980s. As it turns out, Reinhart’s family’s company is still in the cotton business today, somehow avoiding the pitfalls of generational ownership begetting idiot sons for the time being. Georg Volkart’s younger brothers, however, spent their time, money, and energy enriching the cultural landscape of Winterthur.
Oskar, born in 1885, became an art collector whose primary areas of focus are boring as all hell given his position as a rich dude active in the painting scene in the 1920s with a fabulous villa, Am Römerholz, in which to display his treasures. That villa is a museum today, their collection Oskar’s collection. “Reinhart saw in Impressionism the most important artistic achievement of all time. He believed that its focus on colour and light had generated an entirely new visual language. This view led him to judge works of art from all periods principally in terms of their painterly qualities.” I in no way intend to disparage Impressionism, but for a man of wealth and alleged taste to spend his intellectual and actual capital acquiring those works in a world where Expressionism, Dadaism, and Surrealism were exploding the status quo was as facile as it was, I’m sure, spectacular to behold.
His brother Werner, though? Now there went a man with taste.
As a patron Werner Reinhart’s legacy is impressive enough to have been given the moniker “Winterthur Maecenas” by the professor, author, and record label operator Allan Evans, Maecenas being the sponsor and supporter of a couple of old Greek writers named Virgil and Homer and such a legendary patron that the folks at Merriam-Webster define the word “Maecenas” as “a generous patron especially of literature or art.” Reinhart was the key figure in the growth of Switzerland’s oldest orchestra, the Musikkollegium Winterthur, helping turn it into an institution so popular that Petr Rybar, personally recruited by Reinhart to become the concertmaster of the orchestra while he was on vacation in Winterthur in 1936, remarked that “Winterthur people are a wonderfully educated public, who have just three kinds of activity: working, eating, and going to concerts.” Reinhart was an accomplished amateur clarinetist, gifted enough to perform with some true icons in the early days of the International Society of Contemporary Music, and is the dedicatee music for his instrument by a bunch of famous composers, including Richard Strauss, Paul Hindemith, and Arthur Honegger, whose international breakthrough with Le Roi David came in 1921 thanks in large measure to Reinhart’s patronage of the Théâtre du Jorat in Vaud. The sheer quality of the roster of artists behind which he threw his support is perhaps bested only by the Princesse de Polignac.
The same day that Ramuz and Stravinsky first discussed The Soldier’s Tale in correspondence, which we learned in the last chapter was 28 February 1918, a second piece of correspondence from Ramuz arranges a meeting between author and composer under auspices any husband will immediately recognize. “My wife has announced that there will be some ‘ladies’ visiting at my house tomorrow, so I hesitate no longer: I will do errands, and tomorrow I will visit you. I am sending this note by express mail, along with the rough draft of the letter to Reinhart. Tomorrow you can tell me if you agree.” After their hangout, with Stravinsky’s concurrence obtained, Ramuz sent the letter to Reinhart and received an immediately enthusiastic response, which he passed along to Stravinsky in a letter dated 10 March 1918.
Reinhart's response. Very kind and simple. He first assures us of all his moral support and undertakes to interest all ‘art lovers’ in Winterthur and Zurich in our company. He subscribed for his part a sum of 3,000 francs which he puts at our disposal immediately. I have a very good impression. I will also bring you his letter. He says that he has been trying for some time to make your music known around him and that the opportunity seems excellent to him.
Reinhart himself wrote to Stravinsky a few weeks later conveying his enthusiasm directly.
As I wrote to your friend Ramuz, I look forward with the greatest pleasure to having the opportunity, on one of my next trips to Lausanne, to discuss your project with you and M. Ramuz and to give an answer to your interesting proposal…I look forward with great joy to being initiated by you and your friends into the “secrets” of your new work. Then I can form a precise conception of the piece, and it will be easier for me to interest other people here in your project.
As spring turned to summer, the search for seed money reached an echelon above even Reinhart, who wrote to Stravinsky on 10 June 1918:
According to what my brother Oscar told me, it seems that Her Royal Highness the Infanta Beatrice of Spain is very interested in the composition on which you are working with your friends Ramuz and Auberjonois, and she has graciously offered to find people in Zurich ready to contribute part of the sums necessary to enable you to carry out your project.
Whatever discussions may have taken place between Beatrice and the suits in Zurich, they went nowhere. By month’s end, Reinhart notified Stravinsky that the “15,000 francs will be guaranteed to you and to Ramuz by me personally and independently.” Reinhart’s generosity would be repaid with the working artist’s stock-in-trade: the work itself. The manuscript score, along with sketches from Auberjonois, were gifted to Reinhart and can still be found in the town library in Winterthur.
With the necessary financing now secured, work began in earnest, though the division of labor in the early going was not remotely equitable. Ramuz, in addition to composing a raft of letters to potential collaborators and, more importantly, potential financiers, auditioned the cast, which was initially comprised of students from Lausanne University. The Narrator was to be played by Elie Gagnebin, a geologist and guest lecturer in the paleontology department whose eyes were apparently odd enough to warrant his being described by son and father of the Renés Auberjonois Fernand, in his book about Stravinsky’s Swiss years, as the “brilliant cross-eyed Narrator.” A classics student named Gabriel Rosset auditioned for Ramuz on 13 July 1918 and was chosen to play The Devil, but the part turned out to be more than Rosset could handle, presumably because he could not dance. Reinforcements were brought in in the person of Jean Villard, a young performer who would go on to a stage career through the ‘20’s and ‘30’s before rebranding as a cabaret owner and songwriter who wrote Les trois cloches, a hit song for Edith Piaf, then The Browns, and then, forty years later, Tina Arena (Australian demographic secured!). Villard was apparently not a suitable dancer either, the “Triumphal March of the Devil” proving as problematic for him as for Rosset.
All options were on the table, and I do mean all options. Ramuz wrote to Auberjonois on 5 September 1918:
You could help me, especially with the soldier; it is completely “monotonous” at the moment. I will rehearse with him alone; it is a role of just nuances and attitudes…The devil is better (the devils). We will have to decide between the scenes between Rosset and Villard; and Stravinsky announced to me last night his intention to dance the last scene. It would be perfect. Encourage it.
In what can only be described as one of history’s great disappointments – surely on a par with Chinese Democracy or Detox whenever Dr. Dre finally releases it and only a smidgen below the Great Disappointment that led to the founding of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church – Stravinsky did not dance the final number. That distinction would go to Georges Pitoëff, an actor and director of some acclaim. It didn’t hurt that Pitoëff’s wife, Ludmilla, was herself an actress and was thereby cast as The Princess.
Beyond the challenges, obstacles, and distractions any of us could imagine would arise in undertaking such an enterprise, there were countless others that are as absurd as they are hilarious. There was the dispute between Ramuz and Stravinsky over the style of mask that The Devil would wear, Ramuz preferring abstract, Stravinsky straightforward and direct. “I had quite heated arguments with Stravinsky; they always end well and only show the degree of passion in the imagination.” There was the letter from Ramuz to Stravinsky on Friday 19 July 1918 cancelling a rehearsal scheduled for the next day, which begins with the phrase “Impossible to call you: 10 people registered before me,” written immediately after Ramuz failed to gain access to the telephone at the laundromat. If you have kids and they ask you for a smartphone because all their friends have them, please consider telling them that people used to have to register at a laundromat to make a phone call and they lived long and fruitful lives. That will definitely get through to a teenager. There was Stravinsky’s plea for help from Lord Berners for a pair of ballet slippers. The most historically significant, however, was the recruitment of the musicians, which was taking place at the same time that Ansermet was putting the finishing touches on the formation of a new ensemble. Fernand Closset would play the solo violin in the premiere of The Soldier’s Tale. Less than two months later he would appear as the concertmaster of the new Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, an orchestra Ansermet would conduct until 1967 and which remains one of the best orchestras in the world to this day.
The greatest obstacle was the easiest to see coming and the most impossible to prepare for. Our old pal from Haskell County, Kansas, Dean Nilson, had long since made his way into the war. The hometown papers tracked his progress through his letters home:
30 May 1918
Dean Nilson has gone east on his way over. He wrote his family from St. Louis.
11 July 1918
A card has been received announcing the safe arrival of Corp. Dean Nilson across the ocean. He is probably in England.
12 September 1918
In a letter from Dean Nilson he says that he has met a boy who was with Charlie Giles and the Haley boys. He was writing in a dugout somewhere in France and is getting along fine.
Dean Nilson as soldier lagged behind Dean Nilson as viral metaphor when it came to ravaging Europe. The first wave of what would become known as the Spanish Flu had come and gone without much fanfare beyond acquiring its name after the King of Spain contracted it in May 1918, news that was fit to print in a neutral country that wasn’t censoring their press for purposes of maintaining morale. From there, the countermeasures began, as Laura Spinney tells us:
In 1918, as soon as the flu had become reportable and the fact of the pandemic had been acknowledged, a raft of social distancing measures were put in place–at least in countries that had the resources to do so. Schools, theatres and places of worship were closed, the use of public transport systems was restricted and mass gatherings were banned. Quarantines were imposed at ports and railway stations, and patients were removed to hospitals, which set up isolation wards in order to separate them from non-infected patients. Public information campaigns advised people to use handkerchiefs when they sneezed and to wash their hands regularly; to avoid crowds, but to keep their windows open (because germs were known to breed in warm, humid conditions).
Readers of this passage in a post-COVID-19 world will recognize the fact that, even a hundred years on, the weapon of choice in a battle against a contagious virus is to stay the hell away from each other. Readers of the next paragraph in a post-COVID-19 world will recognize the fact that, even a hundred years on, jumping to conclusions and using false optimism to spread bullshit is still the weapon of choice in the quest to shoot our own species directly in the foot.
In France, military doctors, seemingly trying to keep everyone from freaking out about an influenza epidemic and managing to come up with something infinitely creepier, called the illness “maladie onze” or “disease eleven.” By July, the US Army issued a bulletin indicating that the “epidemic is about at an end...and has been throughout of a benign type.” A study of the pandemic conducted in 1927 concluded that “[i]n many parts of the world the first wave either was so faint as to be hardly perceptible or was altogether lacking...and was everywhere of a mild form.” There wasn’t even widespread agreement that the illness was influenza, with some doctors thinking it meningitis, others wondering if it was a new disease entirely, and many agreeing that it was too meek to be the flu.
Whatever period of respite humanity was given, it didn’t last long. A US Navy Intelligence Officer, having received a telegram from a source he deemed reliable, forwarded his concerns under classification: “I am confidentially advised . . . that the disease now epidemic throughout Switzerland is what is commonly known as the black plague, although it is designated as Spanish sickness and grip.” The contention that the symptoms were too mild for the disease to be influenza was replaced by the contention that the symptoms were too severe to be influenza. A letter from Dr. Roy Grist, physician at Camp Devens, an hour outside Boston, described the symptoms in harrowing fashion:
The men start with what appears to be an attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day, and still keeping it up. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a new mixed infection here, but what I don’t know.
Camp Devens dealt with a massive outbreak at the same time as similar outbreaks in France and Sierra Leone, a sure sign that the virus was wreaking havoc all over God’s Green Earth.
The French blamed the Swiss for bringing the flu to their country. The Swiss blamed the Austrians and the Germans for bringing it to theirs. It seems quite clear that Switzerland would have been at extreme risk for an outbreak given their position in the war. As a neutral nation, they had reached agreements with the warring actors to care for infirmed prisoners of war in internment camps which utilized the same mountain air that Stravinsky had sought for his wife in years prior, and there was a virtually never-ending stream of soldiers for which to care in a war with 40 million casualties.
However it got to Switzerland, it was there, and it came lusting for death. Some areas of the country had mortality rates in excess of ten percent. Doctors were of unfortunately no help. Medical science, essentially in its infancy at this point, was in many cases still recommending such medieval treatments as bloodletting and laxatives. To be fair, there is evidence to suggest that Spanish Flu mortality was cut significantly by the use of convalescent plasma, which had been in use since the 1890s to treat diptheria. To be less fair, doctors also frequently recommended quinine, which accomplished exactly nothing since it only worked for malaria. Point being, it was a scary time and nobody had any answers. John Barry tells us that there were some tips in the medical journal The Lancet that at least sounded slightly more modern:
For sleep, twenty grains of bromide, opiates to relax cough, and oxygen for cyanosis. The recommendations warned that venesection was seldom beneficial, that alcohol was invaluable, but that little could be gained by giving food. For headache: antipyrin and salicylic acid—aspirin. To stimulate the heart: strychnine and digitalis.
Home remedies were, of course, stranger still and hadn’t improved much since the 14th century either. Onions were chopped and scattered around people’s houses because they were thought to “absorb” the virus. In England, as it had been observed that workers in industrial plants were being infected at lower rates, some parents took their children to these plants so they could inhale noxious fumes. But the first-choice remedy among both the lay persons and the medical persons for this and every other global health emergency until Jonas Salk was alcohol.
America was in the late stages of the temperance movement that would lead to the 18th Amendment in 1920, and yet even there doctors were prescribing whiskey as a “necessary therapeutic agent.” Needless to say Europeans, having long since realized that voluntary self-restraint is for suckers, let the booze flow freely into the chests of the populace. That doesn’t mean there was no concern about a second epidemic in the form of alcoholism. In Vaud, doctors received a letter instructing them to “vigorously oppose the idea taking root that alcohol in high doses protects against influenza.” And yet, in a philosophy that managed to remain prevalent enough in the medical community to seemingly make its way into the administration of Donald Trump, all manner of curative theories were bandied about and people could pick and choose the ones that appealed most to them. Alcohol could be used as a nutrient substitute in the case of a person so feverish as to be unable to feed themself? You bet! Inhaling cigarette smoke killed the germ that caused the virus? Thanks, Doc!
The Great Influenza must have seemed absolutely terrifying to a great many, and to the Stravinsky family in particular. This was a family forever burdened by illness, and respiratory illness specifically. From the time he was young, Stravinsky had been sickly. His correspondence is filled with health reports to his mother, often with rigidly detailed commentary on the quality of the air or the staggering volume of koumiss, a fermented drink made of horse or donkey milk, popular in Central Asia, which was supposedly useful for combating gastrointestinal maladies and tuberculosis, he was drinking. This continued even into his adult years. Age twenty-five: “With us, thank heaven, everything is all right apart from minor ailments, such as general colds and mild stomach upsets…Yesterday I had a tummy upset. I took some castor oil, went to the lavatory, and now I’m on a diet. We’re all extremely careful, as we’re scared of the spectre of cholera…”
Stravinsky’s preoccupation with his health and the health of his family appears to have served them in relatively good stead. There is little in all of Stravinsky’s many writings and conversations and correspondences about the impact of the flu on his family beyond a passing mention of the general wave of illness in his autobiography. Auberjonois and Ansermet were both infected but emerged unscathed. Ramuz was all but guaranteed to face off with the virus, having gone to battle with the flu every eighteen months or so since his return to Switzerland. Letters to his friend, the writer Henry Spiess, in March 1915 and October 1916 make specific mention of his illness, a timetable which put him right in the firing line for spring/summer 1918. Making matters worse, his sister-in-law, Marguerite Ramuz-Bovon, with whom he was quite close, succumbed to The Flu on 2 April 1918. Thankfully, like his collaborators, Ramuz dodged the worst of the pneumonic bullet. Their joint creation did not.
On the evening of 28 September 1918, the Théâtre Municipal in Lausanne was as crowded as would be expected for a production bearing the pedigree of an internationally famous composer and a favored native son. Concerns about the performance on the part of its creators were confined not to the proximity of the crowd but to its economic composition, Ramuz noting that the wealthy sections of the audience seemed annoyed by the work’s peasant, folkloric aesthetic. This loomed as a potential obstacle in future performances, some of which were already on the books. As Stephen Walsh puts it, “[t]he voyeuristic idea of rustic performance observed by a cultured audience of intellectuals had not yet become the stuff of musical theatre.”
It was Robert Burns who first coined the phrase “the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray,” though what Burns actually wrote was “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men. Gang aft a-gley” because he was Scottish AF. In the end, Ramuz’s concerns proved needless. Due to the ongoing public health crisis, the theaters in Switzerland were closed for a time. In the weeks thereafter, with theaters reopened, the production remained star-crossed. Even if they had gone through with the tour, audiences were sparse as fear gripped the Swiss and, for that matter, the rest of the planet. A full third of all the deaths in the three-wave Spanish Flu pandemic occurred in the fall of 1918, somewhere between 17 and 30 million people, at a time when the world’s population was 1.6 billion. More than one percent of the people on Earth died in twelve weeks, like a real-life version of The Leftovers.
The Soldier’s Tale was never again heard in its original form. It would be six years before it was heard again at all.
In what the late Saddam Hussein once dubbed “the great Satan,” roughly two-thirds of the United States enlisted military corps is white . . . The fat, bulbous U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin once confirmed in a 93-2 vote of the U.S. Senate, immediately embarked on a whirlwind media tour of duty, telling the pseudo-secular sycophants in the state-controlled tabloid press and state-controlled television talk show circuit about how the U.S. Army is full of bad racist white men.
Senior Defense Department leaders celebrating yet another Pride Month at the Pentagon sounding the alarm about the rising number of state laws they say target the LGBTQ+ community, warned the trend is hurting the feelings of the armed forces . . . “LGBTQ plus and other diverse communities are under attack, just because they are different. Hate for hate’s sake,” said Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for personnel and readiness, who also serves as DoD’s chief diversity and inclusion officer.
And now the U.S. Army is doing ads begging for more young white males? What happened?
Even with a full-on declaration of war from Congress, and even if Gavin Newsome could be cheated into the Oval Office by ZOG somehow, with Globohomo diversity brigades going door-to-door looking to impress American children into military service, they will be met with armed, well-trained opposition, the invasion at the Southern border is going full tilt, and the drugs are flowing in like never before.
Get ready for it . . . the fat old devil worshipping fags on Capitol Hill, on Wall Street, in Whitehall, and in Brussels are in no shape to fight a war themselves, and most Americans are armed to the teeth with their own guns . . . NATO hates heterosexual white men . . . they said so themselves . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/i/138320669/nato-an-anti-white-and-anti-family-institution