David Lawrence Jr.
The author is chair of The Children’s Movement of Florida and the retired publisher of The Miami Herald. He lives in Coral Gables.
Just about a month ago I was teaching a class in American Government at a state university. Went decently well, I thought, and several students came up to me after class to tell me they were inspired (making my day). Much of my focus was on the lessons of history, a topic for which I care so much that I average two books a week, mostly history and biographies. In that pursuit every month or so these past dozen years I have hosted 25 or so people in my home in the pursuit of people knowing history and the lessons thereof. One example of what I want people to know: Hitler came to power legally in 1933 at least partly so because business leaders and others thought, more or less, “I know he is a bit wacky, but he’s better than the Communists.” A dozen years later 60 million people were dead.
In those after-class moments, a middle-age Army and Coast Guard veteran and a really nice guy wanted to comment on something I had said in class. I had quoted a single sentence from Anne Frank’s famous diary written while hiding out with her family during the Holocaust years in a garret in Amsterdam (later to be betrayed and to die in March 1945 in a Nazi concentration camp): “How wonderful it is that nobody needs wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” My new friend wanted me to know that he understood that diary was fake because, among other reasons, it was written in ballpoint pen, and those didn’t exist then. I told my new friend that I would check and come back to him. It turns out that ballpoint pens were scarcely available until years after the Second World War. In my own childhood of the Forties and early Fifties, I never heard of such a pen. We used fountain pens with inkwells on each desk, for example, in my third-grade penmanship class. Tests were done after the war that showed the famous diary was written in gray-blue fountain pen ink and color and black pencils. What we had here was yet another of those Holocaust-denial lies. Such is the nature of today’s world and the media landscape.
Today the newspaper business, in which I spent 35 years of my life as reporter-editor-publisher, is basically shredded. Network news viewing is in significant decline. Now we live in a world where otherwise degreed and “educated” people think they know what’s going on after reading two things on their iPhone. I consume a lot of media – two newspapers daily in print plus a bunch of apps from serious sources. Daily I also see Facebook, Linked In, Instagram and Twitter-X. I find myself blitzed by well-done entries that “seem real,” but absolutely are not. This republic depends on informed citizens. All this is in serious peril. Newspapers, for one example were, and are, imperfect. But you could depend on good newspapers, including the Miami Herald from which I retired as publisher, to work hard to get as close to the truth as human beings can. No journalist is “objective”; no human being is “objective.” We all have our biases, predilections, prejudices, but the best journalists worked hard to understand all that and keep those biases and predilections out of print and off the air.
I worry. Deeply. Too many people want to know “when it is over,” which is how you get a 19-year war in Afghanistan in which we spent $2 trillion to bring democracy to that country (and failed). World War II in America lasted fewer than four years.
Joe Friday on “Dragnet,” in a TV show of my growing-up years, repeatedly said, “Just the facts, ma’am.” The “facts” in context now are so often missing.
I’ve always loved books and bought a first edition some years ago of Sinclair Lewis’s last good work, “It Can’t Happen Here,” written in 1935, with a theme of a fascist takeover happening here. Twenty years ago, Philip Roth wrote on a similar theme about that same time of the Thirties in his “The Plot Against America.” And Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote a book in 2022 called “It Could Happen Here: Why America Is Tipping from Hate to the Unthinkable – and How We Can Stop it.”
Yes, it could happen here.
That is why the Holocaust Education Research Council is so important. We all need to pursue the truth and not assume we have found it. We all need to learn the lessons of history. We all need to listen to one another.
There was another famous TV show of my childhood, “The Twilight Zone.” Its creator, Rod Sterling, said this back in 1964 when I was 22: “Hatred is not the norm. Prejudice is not the norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, scapegoating ― none of those are the transcendent facets of the human personality. They’re diseases. They are the cancers of the soul. They are the infectious and contagious viruses that have been bleeding humanity for years. And because they have been and because they are, is it necessary that they shall be? I think not.”