NEW SOLIDARITY

May 23, 1980

Page 6

How Wall Street's Otto Kahn Brought Fascist Culture to America

by Dennis Speed

Otto Kahn in Hollywood during the 1920s. Here the father of American counterculture is flanked by film star Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin, who made his way into show business under the patronage of Britain's Lord Mountbatten.

The rotten modernist "counterculture" now infecting the nation is usually taken for granted as the result of the growth and acceptance of "bohemian" artistic elements in the United States over the past 70 years. Closer inspection establishes that the presence of such obscenities as jazz, punk rock, and the all-Wagner program scheduled for the coming season at the Metropolitan Opera have nothing to do with an intrinsic attraction of Americans for moral degeneracy. The spread of the counterculture was one of the most carefully planned and financed psychological warfare operations ever implemented against the American republic. The same circles that at the turn of the century properly earned the hatred of the average American citizen for their monetarist sabotage of the U.S. economythe circles of

Kuhn Loeb and J.P. Morganwere the coordinators of a campaign to push modernist art and counterculture that the general public only dimly perceived as an attempt to permanently alter American moral and ethical values for the worse. Corrupting the youth of the turn of the century was the short-term target; the method was to degrade their concept of artistic creativity to broadly concur with the world outlook of the then recently created Order of the Golden Dawn and other such "Aquarian" cults. The key operative charged with the execution of this policy was Otto H. Kahn, known more generally as a financial speculator and partner of Edward Harriman and Jacob Schiff at Kuhn Loeb. Kahn was a deployment of those Anglo-British networks charged with carrying out a turn of the century British mandate to curtail the industrial progress of the United States at all costs. A leading psychological warrior, Kahn was charged with popularizing dionysian cult-perversion in the United States under the guise of "promoting contemporary music and the graphic arts." Kahn's young career at Deutsche Bank in Mannheim, Germany took him to England in the early 1890s, where he became initiated into the circles of H.G. Wells and other prominent British intelligence cultists. After becoming a British subject, he moved to America. Here he began his career with Kuhn Loeb in 1897 by marrying the daughter of Abraham Wolff. Kahn's heroes and friendly patrons betray the fact that he was being groomed for an important British intelligence function. His closest friendship was with Edward Harriman, railroad tycoon and associate of the notorious American-economy wrecker J.P. Morgan. Kahn also came under the wing of Lord Beaverbrook, the media magnate and head of the English Propaganda Ministry during the first world war. Lord Beaverbrook made some effort to get Kahn to enter Parliament in 1913, but apparently decided Kahn would be more useful on the propaganda end in the United States. Especially after Kahn had proved his usefulness to British intelligence by aiding in setting up the assassination of Rosa Luxemburga service for which he was nicknamed "King of New York" Kahn had merited a prominent intelligence post indeed. Kahn at the Met It was as head of the Metropolitan Opera that Otto Kahn carried out his fiercest attack against humanist culture in America. Kahn became director of the Met in 1908, after the position had earlier been offered to Schiff.

According to one report of his takeover, "he immediately became one of the most active men at the early board meetings, with fresh ideas for enlarging the repertory, modernizing the theatre, and engaging new singers," Kahn brought Caruso and Toscannini, then the director of La Scala, to the United States, billing them as major attractions, and staging them with the music of Gustave Mahler. Kahn, who had been a devotee of Wagner from the age of eleven, cited as Toscannini's major qualification as a conductor: "he can conduct the entire Ring series from memory." Kahn's next project was to organize "all-Wagner sessions" for the Met. The Met premiered Parsifal in the United States in December 1908, one month after Kahn had premiered Caruso in Rigoletto. Between 1908 and 1917, the Met premiered the work of Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, Satie and most of Strauss. Kahn personally selected all the singers for the operas, interviewing several thousand from Europe and America. He personally designed the repertoire for every season and designed or helped to design the sets. More than $5 million of Kahn's own money was poured into the Met between 1908 and 1933. But Kahn's more enduring endowment to cultural subversion was his campaign to convince the Vanderbilts, Belmonts, etc., to begin that practice of contributing to "the arts" which is now almost second nature to the AngloAmerican elite. The naive reader might ask, "Could Otto Kahn have been just an interested patron of the arts with bad ideas?" One episode answers this question.: During long scenes at the operaKing Mark's monologue in Tristan Und Isolde, for exampleKahn would stroll into the press room at the Metropolitan, gather together any lounging reviewers, and take them to 42nd street to enjoy a few acts of vaudeville, or in Minsky's burlesque, before shepherding them back down Seventh Ave. for Isolde's "Liebestod." Since Kahn knew every working member of the New York press by name, he was able to control, both through diplomacy and bribery, how they received the Met performances. After each premier, rave reviews would appear about the "supercasting of Parsifal last night at the Metropolitan under the watchful eye of Otto H. Kahn." The more "discreet" of critics would complain that the "King Mark monologue was nondescript"given that the critic wasn't there, he couldn't describe it! (So much for the whores of the "music critic" fieldthen and now.)

Kahn also served on the boards of the Metropolitan Opera House of Philadelphia, the Boston Opera Co., and the Chicago Grand Opera. He bought out Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera house for $1.2 million on the condition that Hammerstein agree to not put on any opera in the four major cities where opera was located for a period of 10 years. Kahn considered these expenditures essential to molding the next two generations of Americans away from the idea of progress and the republican content of great culture without any interference from amateurs. "Project Bohemia" While Kahn was busy at the Met, a group of young dionysiac elements from America circulated in Europe, pulling together the beginnings of what was to become known as the "lost generation." One of the most active, Gertrude Stein, had been deployed directly to Paris by Anglophile and kook cultist William James. Stein, trained by James at Harvard, had conducted experiments there in what she termed "automatic writing"a form of demonic possession" in which the writer puts down on paper anything in his or her head. Later Isadora Duncan would arrive in Paris (with the financial assistance of Otto Kahn) and set up a dancing school modeled on the dionysiac orgies of Greece. By the 1920s, large numbers of talentless U.S. "expatriates" arrived in Europe by the same "arrangement and began work with continental cultist networks to create the fraud of a "new American intellectual Renaissance" that mysteriously could only develop in Europe. In 1910, Otto Kahn arranged a tour of Europe for the Metropolitan Opera. Arrangements were worked out with a man named Astruc, who premiered most of the modernist cult pieces for opera and ballet in France and was the principal agent for the Diaghilev Ballet Company. Diaghliev's crew was simply the biggest bunch of dope smokers, freaks, and pederasts to hit the art world since the Roman Empire. The type of show they would put on is exemplified by a "cubist ballet" they performed, called Parade. Costumes for Parade were done by opium-eater Pablo Picasso, scenery and back-drop by opium-addict Jean Cocteau, and the music, which consisted of mechanical noises, ragtime, and pop tunes, was done by Erik Satie. There was no plot to the balletit was simply what it said it was, a "parade." As a result of discussions with Astruc and others Kahn had decided as early as 1909 that it would be his vocation to bring "the most modern in art to the American public." Two of the Diaghliev dancers premiered at the Met in 1910. Kahn then financed a nationwide tour for them, pouring in money

whenever they would prove to be a box-office disasterwhich was often. When Kahn premiered Stravinsky's Firebird and Petrouchka in 1915, there was a near riot. Kahn then attempted to bring Nijinsky, the star of the Diaghliev company, to America to save the show. When he was informed that Nijinsky was being held by the Austrians in a detention camp (Nijinsky was a Russian), Kahn got U.S. Secretary of State Lansing to speak to the Austrian government. The Emperor of Austria personally secured Nijinsky's release and in order to keep his new performer in America, Kahn had Nijinsky appointed artistic director for ballet of the Metropolitan Opera for the year 1916-1917. Despite the new star, the tour was still a financial disaster. But Kahn persevered. When the Russian military summoned Nijinsky for service, Kahn telegraphed the Russian ambassador in Washington, the American ambassador in Russia, and the Spanish ambassador to Russia, an acquaintance, to intervene. By this time the Met was giving away upward of 1,000 tickets a night for the "faggot show." Still Kahn continued. Total losses for Kahn came to $300,000, but Stravinsky had been shoved down New York's throat. Kahn was not above extending financial as well as political favors to the "artists" he used in spreading his modernist counterculture. According to one report, Kahn "handled the investments of several artists, into whose accounts he sometimes slipped one or two thousand of his own funds as a personal gift. Several of the most famous artists of his time owed their huge fortunes to his management of their financial affairs." Out of the Salon Circuit Nor did Kahn confine his subversion to established institutions of the arts such as the Metropolitan Opera. Kahn personally created most of the "little theatre" front groups that were used as a means of deployment for anarchist and terrorist bands. He funded, for example, one group called the "Washington Square Players" to the tune of $30,000 over two years. Considering that their production cost less than $35 each, one wonders where the money went. Out of the "Players" group came today's "living theater" movement. Kahn also gave Michael Gold, the editor of the Communist Party's literary magazine New Masses (converted from Max Eastman's Masses magazine)

This scene from Gershwin's celebrated swindle Porgy and Bess features the villain of the piece, Sportin' Life. Of this character Gershwin said: "Instead of being a sinister dope-peddler, Sportin' Life is a humorous dancing villain who is likeable and believable and at the same time evil."

over $50,000 to put together what was called the "New Playwrights Theatre." Whatever Kahn was not running directly via his frequent trips to Greenwich Village and Little Italy was controlled through the salons of such people as Mabel Dodge, a proterrorist associate of Gertrude Stein and the assassin Emma Goldman. The entire so-called Harlem Renaissance, for example, was run out of Mabel Dodge's salon in Greenwich Villageincluding the tickets for its principals for their training in Paris. Guests to the salon like Walter Lippmann gave liberal amounts of advice on how they thought the Harlem Renaissancewhich by the way virtually no one in Harlem knew anything aboutwas to be conducted. Kahn owned everyone. He gave Eugene O'Neill $10,000 ten days before his play Desire Under the Elms was to open and made him an overnight success. He funded Paul Robeson. He met with Michael Gold about once a week for "discussions." When Kahn wanted to build an audience for what he called a "people's extravaganza," he deployed organizations like the Society for the Improvement of the Poor, the Women's Socialist Organization, the Women's Trade Union League, the Jewish Women's Trade Union, to get out tickets for 50 cents each. Kahn also ran the literary circuit in New York and Paris through a series of "bohemian" literary journals like the Little Review, which premiered the writing of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and others. Pound operated a fascist literary circle in Paris which included James Joyce and Kahn used Pound on the music front to promote American musicians like the fascist George Antheill. Antheill, originally from Trenton, N.J., had become an overnight sensation in Paris with the performance of his Ballet Mecanique scored for eight pianos, a mechanical piano, xylophones, pots and pans, and an airplane propeller. Antheill was introduced to and composed music for Yeats and Joyce. Concerning the Ballet Mecanique, Pound said: With the performance of the Ballet Mecanique one can conceive the possibility of organizing the sounds of a factory, let us say of boiler-plate or any other clangorous unison, the actual sounds of the laborer, the various tones of the grindings, according to the needs of the work, and yet, with such pauses and durees, that at the end of the eight hours, the men go out not with frayed nerves, but elatedfatigued, yes, but elated.

Kahn and a lawyer by the name of Quinn, an employee of Kuhn Loeb ally J.P. Morgan, were in regular contact with Pound through the 1920s. Quinn was later deployed to defend James Joyce's book Ulysses against obscenity charges in 1933. Although Kahn claimed that he had stopped supporting Mussolini, he kept up a correspondence with Mussolini for Pound until 1932. The Gershwin Operation The method that Kahn wanted to use to destroy the notion of progress in the urban working population of America can be exemplified by what his crowd did to the black population of this country during the 1920s and 1930s. First, let it be said that "jazz" as it exists today and existed in the 1920s is nothing but fascist ideology. There is no difference between "authentic" and "inauthentic" jazz. Both were imposed from the top down by Otto Kahn. Every bohemian freak thought of himself as "projazz." Stravinsky, Debussy, Antheill, Satie, etc. all wrote what they termed "jazz pieces." Gertrude Stein started her automatic writing phase with a story about Melanctha, her black maid from Baltimore. Picasso painted Stein during the time when she was writing her story and thus began his "Negro period." Every writer, painter, etc., claimed to be interested in blacks because they were "primitives." It was this perceived "primitiveness" that they wanted to extend to the rest of mankind. Very simply they believed that blacks were insane, and it was this insanitysometimes called "rhythm"that they were striving to impose on the population at large. In 1924, Otto Kahn stunned the editorial board of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal by declaring that "jazz is the only distinctive American art form." This is a now familiar argument. But Kahn's declaration was the first from someone with Kahn's influence. Shortly thereafter, it was disclosed that Kahn had plans for someone to write a "jazz opera" for the Metropolitan. Kahn offered the job to Jerome Kern, then to Irving Berlin. Then, in the late 1920s, he offered it to George Gershwin. At a party for Gershwin after the premiere of An American In Paris at Carnegie Hall, Kahn presented Gershwin with a gift, and stated, "Gershwin is a leader of young America in music, in the same sense in which Lindbergh is a leader of young America in aviation." Kahn compared the war in the musical world with the Civil War out of which emerged "the noblest, most

George Gershwin with his portrait of the irrationalist composer Arnold Schoenberg.

moving and most beautiful figure among the public men of all history Abraham Lincoln." He wished the same development for Gershwin! Gershwin had himself considered writing a jazz opera, taking as his plot Dubose Heyward's story called Porgy about a black beggar without legs in Charleston, South Carolina. Al Jolson, at that time America's most popular entertainer, showed an interest in doing a show based on Porgy. Gershwin got the idea that he would do something novel with the opera, after he finished writing ithe would get black actors to perform it. (Parts were

normally done by whites in blackface.) By the time that Gershwin finished his Porgy and Bess in 1935, Kahn was dead. "Conceivably," according to one Gershwin biographer, "Gershwin could have gotten the Metropolitan Opera to mount the work if Otto Kahn had been alive." Although Kahn was no longer around, Gershwin used the arguments that Kahn had made popular to turn his racist, talentless swindle of an opera into a crusade for "authentic American music." In an interview in 1935, he stated, "I'd like to point out that Negro music is the prototype of jazz. . . Though of course I will try to keep my own style moving in the opera, the Negro flavor will be predominant throughout." Porgy and Bess, Gershwin said, would be entertaining because "the Negroes, as a race, have all these qualities inherent in them . . . for instance, the character of Sportin' Life, instead of being a sinister dope-peddler, is a humorous, dancing villain who is likeable and believable and at the same time evil." However, when it came time for the rehearsals, most of the black actors who were retained for the parts were unable to use the "authentic" dialect that had been composed for them by Heyward and Gershwin. "As one sign of the times, the job of coaching the cast in the black dialect written for them by Heyward and Ira fell to George, Heyward, and their white associates," one account of the production reported. The actor who played the part of Sportin' Life also had "difficulty with rhythm, pitch and tempo." This was the real meaning of the modern culture of Otto H. Kahn. It had no different meaning for him than it had had for Rudyard Kipling in the Indian theatre, of for Lord Beaverbrook in the Propaganda Ministry. The whole point was to promote infantilism and primitiveness, and to use the so-called culture of the lower classes as a ruse. Black musicians bitterly denounced Gershwin as a racist and some organized boycotts against Porgy and Bess. But they were ill-equipped to combat the problem on advanced grounds. To effectively undermine the pernicious influence of Kahn's campaign for jazz and counterculture, the leading black musicians would have had to undertake projects in advancing the frontiers of the genuine American musical tradition. This would have meant, for example, composing a series of short canons in the style of Beethoven, which satirized Debussey, Stravinsky, and the other neanderthals pushed by Kahn by emphasizing counterpoint as opposed to syncopation. These they should have circulated as true examples of American "black" music.

Under the conditions of Kahn's stranglehold over the American musical culture, even years after his death, most young black musicians were compelled to capitulate to his terms. Those talented holdouts who did not become immersed in the world of jazz retreated to the safe ground of moral indignation, and continue to produce mediocre products to this day. Consequently, they were unable to stop Porgy and Bess from being circulated internationally as the leading authentic example of the "black experience" in America. The fundamental damage had been done. Toward an American Musical System Prior to the turn of the century, all music education in the United States relied heavily on the exchange between American and German musicians. This was the tradition that Otto Kahn deployed to destroy. It was a tradition that was inextricably linked with that tradition of economic and political cooperation that had characterized the best of German-American relations, first in the period of the American Revolution, then through Friedrich List, then through the collaboration of Germans such as Karl Marx with the Lincoln forces and the German Workingman's Associations during the Civil War. The necessity for that form of European-American collaboration must be revived if excellence in music and the arts is to be restored and if the British oligarchy-based forces are to be defeated. It is the higher cognitive functions of our nation's population that are the target of the operation Kahn set into motion. It is only through strengthening those higher cognitive functions through an intellectual Renaissance that puts the premium on the creative life of the citizenry that the damage of the past 70 years of counterculture can be reversed in this country. The great musical tradition of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven is central to this process. The question is: can the population of America reject Otto Kahn's concept of "oligarchical culture" in time to mobilize the necessary internal resources of mind to survive?