Fun Archival Finds: The William L. Shirer Papers
Courtesy of Dr. Michael Socolow, a media historian at the University of Maine, here are two telling documents from the 1940s
One of the greatest things about this reading group has been all the people it’s brought out of the woodwork. Friends from elementary school to grad school have all signed up, and a fair number of experts have got in contact to share their thoughts.
Dr. Michael Socolow, a media historians at the University of Maine, contacted me to share some of his archival finds. Back in 2020, he was in Iowa covering the caucauses, and he stopped by to check out the William L. Shirer papers at Shirer’s alma mater Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Both documents are revealing, but for very different reasons.
The first is a book pitch in 1942 or 1943, in the wake of his success publishing “Berlin Diary,” which included all the thoughts he couldn’t get past the Nazi censors.
A recurring argument is that no one really knew what was going on inside Nazi Germany, even the Germans themselves. Based on Shirer’s book proposal in 1942 or 1943, Socolow notes that American journalists in Europe were aware that the Nazis were planning murder camps, death trains, and the extermiation of the Jews.
And then the second archival find is another interesting piece of correspondence: payment for a magazine article about covering Nazi Germany for CBS radio.
Have any of you written for The Atlantic recently? What’s the going rate these days for an article? It can’t be much more than $250.
For reference, $250 in September 1940 is the equivalent of $5635 today…