Every citizen of my race who can should travel. Travel is broadening.
—ROBERT S. ABBOTT to PATRICK B. PRESCOTT JR.
Much has been written about the Chicago Defender and its importance in American history. The newspaper’s influence on the Great Migration is well documented. In addition, Defender reports and editorials were a vital source of information and helped spark race activism locally and nationally. It could even be argued that the Defender helped create a wider, national African America by publishing society news about every black community in the country from Pocatello to Harlem. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Defender played a powerful role in the Black Chicago Renaissance. The paper promoted and published major figures of the renaissance; Langston Hughes wrote for the Defender as did Willard Motley and St. Clair Drake, among many others. Gwendolyn Brooks’s early poetry was published in the paper. In addition, the paper was an important source of information about the activities and successes of Chicago artists and musicians.
These elements of the renaissance and the Defender’s history have been well documented. However, one area has been more neglected: The paper’s role in creating a sense of the black Chicagoan, indeed the black American, as a member of the world community. Foreign reporting by African Americans in the black press helped place American racism in a larger context and likely gave African Americans a sense of being part of a larger community. It is certain that this international reportage was an essential element in the cosmopolitan identity of black Chicago.
Throughout its history, the Defender regularly reported international news. Like most other black papers, the Defender used wire services, such as Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI), for most of its foreign news. It augmented these sources by printing articles by African American students, tourists, and artists overseas. In Chicago in the 1920s, readers could learn something about the Middle East with “Letters from Cairo, Egypt,” written by “Two Performers Who Went Abroad in 1878 and ‘Never Came Back.’” Among many columns reporting on Europe, from 1926 until late 1939, “Across the Pond” relayed the social and theatrical news of African Americans. During the mid-thirties, one of the many authors of “Across the Pond,” Edgar A. Wiggins, also wrote about Montmartre under the name “The Street-Wolf of Paris.” Probably to compete with Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press, the Defender from 1929 until 1940 had a formal foreign news service. News on Africa was steady, and there were regular reports from Russia, South America, and Asia as well. Not surprisingly, many of these articles included information on the existence, extent, or lack of the color line.
In addition to these more traditional kinds of news reports and columns, Defender readers could experience the world outside the United States through series written by African American travelers. Though not strictly “foreign reporting,” the articles written by overseas travelers served to introduce readers to new cultures and important events. These travel series gave black Chicagoans a sense of their place in a broader, more diverse world and showed them that the racism of the United States was not universal. In addition, some of these travelogues allowed black Americans to participate in a traditionally white, upper-class adventure—the European Grand Tour.
Obviously, the perspective of a black American traveler to Europe would, on many occasions, be starkly different from that of a white traveler, but the ability to take a Grand Tour, to know the ins and outs of international travel, to have first- (or even second-) hand knowledge of the founding places of “culture” and “civilization” were important to black Chicago’s, and particularly the black elite’s, cosmopolitan identity.
Travel writing as a genre is not unique to the Defender. The travelogue is an important element of African American letters, and the form has received a fascinating review and analysis in Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing by Farah Griffin and Cheryl Fish (1998), among others. In addition, African American internationalism and diasporic identity in general are burgeoning fields of study with important contributions by many scholars including Brent Edwards on African Americans and interwar Paris in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), Tina Campt on black German identity in Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), and Penny Von Eschen on anticolonialism in Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (1997).
Over the past two centuries, many African Americans who ventured overseas wrote of their experiences in memoirs, diaries, pamphlets, and essays. Among the most famous travelers who wrote about their time in Europe and beyond during the interwar years were W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. In addition, a variety of biographies of prominent African Americans detail their subjects’ overseas travel.
However, it is the travel reporting in the popular press that deserves a closer review. Articles published in the black press reached wide audiences, comprising all classes and educational levels. In the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to the Defender, travel writing appeared in the Crisis and Opportunity magazines. Travel writing also appeared in Ebony and Negro Digest in the 1950s and 1960s. More research needs to be done on the other major black newspapers, particularly the Pittsburgh Courier. In the case of the Defender, the question is: Did these travel articles affect or change typical readers, whether in a kitchenette or a mansion, whether in Chicago or Clarksdale?
The first example of a travel series in the Defender appears to be three articles written in 1912 by Dr. U. G. Dailey on his time in Europe as a postgraduate student. In 1923, Abbott himself wrote a series of ten articles on his trip to South America, and in 1929, he wrote a thirteen-part series on his trip to Europe. In 1932–33, Roberta Thomas and Flaurience Sengstacke (both nieces of Robert Abbott) wrote a nineteen-article series on their year abroad.1
In late 1934 Patrick B. Prescott Jr. also wrote a series of articles on his and his wife’s seven-week European tour. Prescott and his wife, Annabel Carey Prescott, were community leaders. He was an attorney. She was an administrator in the Chicago public school system and the daughter of Bishop Archibald J. Carey of the Woodlawn AME Church.
Patrick B. Prescott Jr. was born on November 24, 1889. in New Orleans, Louisiana. It appears that he was the illegitimate son of Emma Mills and Patrick Prescott Sr. In 1900, eleven-year-old Patrick was living in New Orleans with his mother, Emma (now Redmond), his stepfather, John Redmond, and his half-sister, Cora, as well as various uncles and aunts. His mother worked as a laundress, his stepfather as a laborer at a lumber mill, and the young Prescott attended school. He was a Southern University normal graduate in 1907, and by 1910, he had moved to Chicago.
In the early days in Chicago, Prescott worked as a clerk in the post office and was rooming at 3134 Forest Avenue with other “mulattoes.” It seems that he was an aspiring writer at this time. He published at least one story, “The Dormitory Tragedy,” in Top-Notch magazine in 1912.2 He was also a columnist for the Chicago Whip and wrote under the name “The Grist Mill.”
There is no information on whether Prescott as a child had a relationship with his father, Patrick Sr. However, it is clear that after Patrick Sr. moved to Chicago around 1917, the two had a fairly close relationship. According to family lore, Patrick Sr. and his wife Josephine Baumann Prescott took in Patrick Jr., and he lived with the family for some time. The 1920 census has Patrick Jr. still working at the post office and living with his father, stepmother, and his four half-siblings. At the same time, he was studying law privately. In 1924 Prescott was admitted to the bar and married Annabel Carey.
After his marriage, Prescott’s career flourished. He served as assistant corporation council from 1927 until at least 1931. He later served as special assistant traction attorney and special commissioner of the circuit and superior courts. In 1928, he was awarded a doctor of laws degree from Wilberforce University for his “distinguished service in the promotion of Mississippi flood control legislation” and for his legal service in Chicago. In 1940, a Chicago Daily Tribune article listed him as a “specialist in constitutional law.” By all accounts, Prescott was an honest and able attorney. In 1943, the Chicago Bar Association wrote that he was “a man of integrity and good legal ability . . . patient, courageous, diligent and conscientious.”3
Like other members of the black elite, Prescott was involved in a variety of community organizations. He joined the Criterion Club in 1914, and by 1940, he was a director of the Chicago Urban League and chairman of the board of directors of the South Side Community Arts Center. He was deeply involved in local Republican politics. In 1932, he was a delegate-at-large to Republican convention, and in 1934, he ran for Third Ward committeeman but lost to Oscar De Priest.4 In 1940, he ran for the First District congressional seat but did not get the GOP nomination. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, Prescott’s chances were hurt in part by his connection to the Democratic Kelly-Nash machine (possibly because Prescott was on the city payroll at the time as assistant traction attorney).5
In 1941, Prescott’s career reached its apex. Republican Governor Dwight H. Green named Prescott associate justice in the municipal court. Prescott was chosen to fill a vacancy created when Edward Scheffler was elected to the position of chief justice. In being so named, Prescott became the second black judge in Chicago’s history. He was also the only Republican judge on the municipal court at the time.
Sadly, Prescott’s greatest achievement was also his greatest heartbreak. Scheffler refused to recognize the appointment, arguing that the governor did not have the right to appoint judges to posts that lasted longer than one year. Green countered by saying that although Scheffler had submitted his resignation on November 5, Green had refused to accept the resignation until December 10. The commission only ran until the following December 7, therefore the post was open for less than a year, and the appointment was legal.6 Prescott spent the next year fighting to gain his place on the bench. In June 1942, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled in Scheffler’s favor, but Prescott moved for a rehearing. Finally in November, the court ruled in Prescott’s favor. Less than a month was left of the term. He was then replaced by Wendell E. Green, also a black man and a Republican but nominated by Democrats.7 Prescott ran for the position of municipal judge in the following two elections but never won a seat. He died shortly thereafter, on December 20, 1945. In 1950, Edgar A. Jonas, Republican congressman and a former judge, told the Chicago Tribune that the Democrats “drove Patrick Prescott to his grave” by denying him his seat on the bench.8
However, in 1934, when they took their Grand Tour through Europe, Patrick and Annabel Prescott were at the height of their respective careers. Prescott was a partner in the law firm of Prescott, Burroughs, and Taylor, which had offices at 188 West Randolph Street. Annabel was the dean of Wendell Phillips High School.
In true Defender style, the paper reported that it had “prevailed upon” Prescott to undertake the series “so that the thousands of citizens who may never go will nevertheless feel the joy of European travel.” Prescott wrote fifteen articles, each starting with a byline and the words “for the benefit of those readers of the Chicago Defender who desire a glimpse of Europe as it is today. It is in keeping with this paper’s policy to give its readers the best.”
An initial survey of the paper indicates that Prescott’s series is the last of its type. He wrote it when American unemployment was at 21.7 percent, (down from 24.9 percent the previous year).9 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the second year of his presidency. Many of Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies had been created including the National Recovery Administration (which the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the following year). The Defender had already published at least one article on inequities in the new government policies, “What the NRA Is Doing to the Race! ‘New Deal’ Rapidly Becoming ‘Raw Deal’ for Dark Americans,” by Lewis Caldwell Jr.10 Prohibition had recently ended with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment. The folk criminals John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde were front-page news—at least in the white papers. Imitation of Life, with Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington, hit the movie theaters, as did the first Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musical The Gay Divorcee. The Apollo Theater opened its doors that year, and Charles Hamilton Houston recommended that the NAACP focus its legal efforts on ending discrimination in education, which led, in twenty years, to the Brown decision.
In Chicago, the World’s Fair: A Century of Progress, which had run from May 27 through November 12, 1933, reopened for another summer. The attendance for the two years was close to 40 million.11 At the same time, unemployment in Chicago stood at almost 385,000.12 As a community, African Americans suffered the most. By 1932, 40 to 50 percent of black workers in Chicago were unemployed.13 However, Bronzeville, black Chicago’s main business and residential district, was still the center of black America. By the end of the 1920s, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, “black Chicagoans gained unprecedented access to city jobs, expanded their professional class, and won elective office in local and state government.”14 This then was the diversity of black Chicago—and the Defender’s readership—old settlers and migrants, the unemployed as well as laborers, entrepreneurs, civil servants, and professionals.
Prescott begins his travelogue in New York prior to the couple’s departure for England. He reports on two things: the sight of a black ticket-seller in the subway and Ethel Waters’s performance in As Thousands Cheered. For him, the ticket-seller is a beacon of hope and call to action for more African Americans to enter the public work force.
In New york City the first rounds of the fight for racial recognition in this particular field had been won. Colored people were at work in decent jobs for the corporations which they helped support. It was an opening wedge. From this splendid example others must follow. Back in the third century before Christ, Archimedes, the great mathematician of ancient Syracuse, in Sicily, declared, “If I had a fulcrum, a lever and a place to stand I could move the world!”
The fulcrum in this case, Prescott argues, is the employment of African Americans; the lever is the “tremendous political, industrial and purchasing power” of African Americans. Then “all that we need is a place to stand to move the world of proscription and prejudice.”
Next, Prescott raves about Waters’s performance and discusses her improvement as an actress over the years. He spends particular time on Waters’s rendition of “Suppertime” in the scene “Unknown Negro Lynched”: “[I]t is our guess that there will not be any lynchers—thanks to her—among the thousands who saw As Thousands Cheer.”
Having established his perspective and politics, Prescott admonishes himself, “My task is a tale of travel. . . . May I say at the outset that I am not setting myself up as an authority on ocean-wide travel or on things European.” He goes on to make clear that his intent in the series is to give a “green-horn’s” perspective on the sights he and his wife will see. And he does so immediately.
Of the activity at the pier, he writes, “All is haste. Baggage is flying. Flower vendors everywhere. Ah!” Then they board the ship:
Confetti is flying. A group of young folk are singing Russian folk songs at the tops of their lusty voices. . . . Now good German ballads rend the crowded air. Someone has begun singing “The Sidewalks of New York.” . . . A whistle blows—not loud, not long—a rather small whistle for this giant of the deep. . . . [W]e are going, going . . . It’s a strange feeling, like the first second of the skyride at the World’s Fair. . . . The magic lights of the harbor blink everywhere within eyesight. The Statue of Liberty, with her magnificent torch, stands at the mouth of the harbor. Ellis Island with her dark buildings just opposite across the channel. . . . Whatever may be my feelings about this ocean it is too late now. We are definitely on our way across three thousand miles of trackless water.
So ends Prescott’s first installment, leaving the reader breathless for more.
The next two installments of the series are both about the journey on the ocean liner. The first of these, headlined, “The Prescotts Learn a Few Things about Steamship Travel,” begins:
I had been aroused by a “toot.” Now a toot may not mean a thing to you when you are on a railroad train, all of the tracks of which are firmly annexed to dry land. . . . But a “toot” on an ocean liner is a serious thing, because away out there in no man’s swimming pool there is nothing to toot at, or toot about—unless it be trouble. . . . Certainly no self-respecting ship will go tooting all over this ocean, without good rhyme and better reason. So at once I concluded that the captain needed me to help watch this thing through.
He discovers that the ship is surrounded by a deep fog.
We were tooting to see if we were the only ones in and about these parts of the sea. We were tooting to let the world know that we were coming straight on with more than 50,000 tons displacement; not looking for trouble of course, but coming. We were the tooters so far. But if any tootee gave us answering toot, and thus became the tooter and we became the tootee; and if there wasn’t time to stop the engines of both ships and get the question of rights of way straightened out—Boy, what a headline! What a HEADLINE! As I stood by the porthole of my stateroom the ship kept up its warning blasts every minute or less. It sounded like the crack of doom. After about an hour of this watchful waiting I realized that my heart was ticking between toots, and the ship was tooting between ticks.
Nothing came of my fears. Mrs. Prescott, of course, got a good laugh out of it. She thought it very funny that a full grown man should be afraid of only three thousand little miles of water 25,000 or so feet deep. Mere trifle.
Prescott’s description, though much lighter in tone, mirrors a snippet from the Thomas-Sengstacke series, where a dangerous Channel crossing in a deep fog is described.
The fog must have eventually dissipated because Prescott then moves on to his surroundings. He describes the couple’s stateroom in great detail. The room is large and carpeted. The beds are box springs, not bunks, and have fresh, clean linens. There are two wash stands not just one and, “delight to the ladies,” a full dressing table with an enormous variety of adjustable mirrors. In addition he gives a wonderful description of a bath aboard ship:
These are the longest and deepest tubs I have ever seen. You can’t touch the bottom except by definitely trying, nor reach the foot except by extending yourself. . . . And it is filled to the brim—almost—with hot salt sea water, which leaves the victim very fresh and fine, but a bit sticky. To remedy this a shower of fresh water is overhead subject to the turn of a handle. Ah! how thoughtful these shipbuilders are.
Later, he paints just as vivid a picture of the ship as a whole, including its enormous size and many amenities. He pauses to comment on the elevators (called lifts by the English, he informs the reader) and writes of “that most important task at sea—to eat heartily and well.” He includes, verbatim, a full menu and explains the ritual of English tea.
One cannot get off the ship without having had his four o’clock tea. It just isn’t done, don’t you know. Breakfast at 9, bouillon at 11, luncheon at 1 and dinner at 7. But ah! my friends, tea—English tea!—at 4. It is a ceremony and a rite. The English would stop the war to have tea at four. And it’s ra-wther funny. Funny to see big, strong men with their cup of tea, fingers crooked and taking it quite adroitly as the ladies while an orchestra plays soft strains of classical offerings.
Among the other amusements described are the games on board: shuffleboard, deck tennis, pingpong, and deck golf.
But the outstanding pastime of all is “deck chairing.” That is played by all—old and young, male and female, well, sick and sea sick. It is done by renting a long reclining chair labelled with your name, and a heavy woolen blanket for about $2.50 for the voyage. Drop down into it and permit the uniformed “deck steward” to wrap up you and your legs—that’s deck chairing.
Early on in the articles, Prescott explains the variety of stewards (and stewardesses) aboard the ship, their various duties, and the fact that those terms are used instead of “servant.” He even takes the time to detail the finer points of English versus American pronunciation. At one point, he writes of the stewards, “They talk like college professors for the most part.” In fact, reporting on the quality of service is one of the through lines of the series. There is not one country or city the Prescotts visit where the service is not discussed. Of the stewards on the ship, he writes:
They make it appear that it is a pleasure to them to be called on to serve you. It is peculiarly a European accomplishment, as we were to learn. They take such an interest in serving that you almost feel embarrassed if you have no task at hand. That is elevating personal service to an art.
Prescott also serves as something of a traveler’s guide during the series, giving future Grand Tourers the benefit of his experience. When traveling on an ocean liner, he suggests, “If you are early in making your selection [of a stateroom]—and you should be—you will get an outside room (at a small added cost), with its additional space and air.” On dining, he advises, “If you have been wise you have made a written reservation for the type and location of the table that you want in advance. Naturally, the best tables are the small one[s] seating two, three, or four persons, and near a porthole.”
He also answers a few hypothetical questions. He takes the fifth on his opinion of ocean travel. Yes, there is a swimming pool on board. Gambling? “Well, if you look for trouble, no doubt you could find it.” Dinner clothes? Absolutely, if you are in first class. You might squeeze by without them in tourist class, and “[i]n third class anything within the bounds of decency goes.” (This is the only time he mentions the existence of the “classes” on the ship.)
Despite his obvious fear of ocean travel, Prescott paints a picture of supreme ease and leisure. However, early in the description of the ocean crossing, Prescott pulls back for a moment. The joy of travel is not “unalloyed”: “Then, too, a great desire to ‘share’ comes over you. You want to organize a general migration—to have all of your friends along to help enjoy the many wonders that you are sure will be yours.” This leads to ruminations on the shortness of life and losses the couple recently experienced. He tells of friends who have recently died: a woman “snuffed out before we could realize she was ill,” an older woman “driven to an untimely close by the cruelty of a criminal,” and a child “called as a little lamb to higher greener pastures.”
However unlikely, it is tempting to think that this passage was written to reconnect with the Defender readers, many of whom have also been part of a migration and left loved ones behind, who possibly share the desire to have their friends and family with them, and who suffer painful loss as part of life.
No matter their economic status, Prescott can and does connect with his readers with regard to race. At the end of the first article aboard ship, Prescott deals with the color line. His report: There is none. The reason: There is strict discipline aboard a ship. Further, he says, the ship is British, and the British “are perhaps the most disciplined nation on Earth.”
Since the ship’s owners have issued a passage to a colored person there is no one on board who would dare take responsibility for offending a guest that the company saw fit to accept. That’s discipline. Americans would not understand that. But the British do.
In addition, the couple felt no antagonism from other passengers because:
nobody wants any trouble at sea. Everybody tries to be nice to everybody else. After all this little spot in this big ocean is all that is between everybody and the great tumbling waves. Who’s going to offend who, I ask you? Create hostility in some poor meek passenger? NEV-V-VER . . . the danger of this unbelievable mass of dark, deep water makes it “One for all and all for one.”
I am for bigger and better oceans.
Later, Prescott describes the various nationalities on board—mostly English and American but with representatives from Japan, China, Siam, New Zealand, South America, and Europe. He gives special note to an American woman who travels the transatlantic journey like a commuter. This woman, he reports, prefers traveling on English ships. On American ships, “the petty officers attempted to regulate her meals and the like because she was unaccompanied. She paid her own passage, but they were the bosses instead of the servants. She could not understand it. But I could. It’s just an old American custom.”
He then moves seamlessly to “Three Kinds of ‘Colored’ People.” The text under this subhead begins, “Then, of course, there are colored people on board—three kinds.” The first he notes “are the just plain colored people. They are easy to define and understand.” Next, he says, are “the colored people who are colored but do not know they are.” He defines these people as those whose grandparents or great-grandparents crossed over the color line.
The child never knew it was colored and usually (very sincerely) ascribes its “curly locks and dark complexion” to the effects of the Chicago fire, or to shock, fright, aenemia, bad powder, sun tan, or any of the hundred fool notions that its helplessness in a color-mad America may conjure up. Usually they are perplexed and irritated over their sugar-brown situation, but, because they are definitely established as “white,” it does not become a tragedy.
The final category is the people who are passing and know they are. He describes these people as walking the deck “like a hunted animal, hoping that no one aboard will recognize the hidden strain.” In particular, he describes one woman that he felt was passing. As proof, he points to the fact that she took great care over her “crispy hair and tawny complexion.” He also notes that she avoided certain kinds of lighting and certain situations. Her children (members of class number 2—see above) won all the fancy-dress contests onboard. This was the final proof: “Only colored people have such outstanding native histrionic ability.”
Just prior to landing, Prescott reminds his readers of an African American success story. He is describing a concert onboard given by passengers for passengers. This reminds him of a story he heard about Florence Cole-Talbert. During a different transatlantic journey, Talbert participated in this shipboard ritual as well. In fact, he reports, she was so successful that the rest of the concert was scrapped, and “with her nightingale sweetness, for the rest of the evening she sang and sang.” The following night, at the captain’s request, she gave a special concert for the disabled sailors: “So much for one brilliant brown girl among a thousand music hungry souls!”
Thus far in the series, Prescott has made a few things crystal clear: his class, his race consciousness, and his sense of humor. He is not writing an exposé, he is writing an amusing and generally light-hearted travel guide. He makes no bows to the poorer people among his potential readers. There is no blush at the mention of $2.50 paid for the deck chair, no desire to unearth the servant’s perspective or to report on the lives and experiences of the third-class passengers. While the color line will be faithfully reported at every juncture, and politics plays a major role in some installments, Prescott stays true to this quality throughout the series.
The fourth article in the series finally has Mr. and Mrs. Prescott on land but not before he gives a detailed account of the landing and disembarking, including the rules on tipping all the many various stewards who have served the couple during the ocean journey. Prescott then relates the activities of the customs officials. This is the first of many such descriptions. Prescott gives detailed information on the customs officials at each border crossing. Nor is this element unique to Prescott. Thomas and Sengstacke also describe their experiences with customs several times in their series. However, Prescott sums it all up quite well this first time out, “‘Customs is customs’ the world over. It consists of letting some very narrow-minded men in uniform know your most intimate personal secrets.”
At the time of the Prescotts’ arrival in England, the country was in recovery from the world depression, though many British citizens were still suffering. Admittedly travel-weary, “disappointed, almost depressed,” Prescott’s first impression of London is that it is “grey, drab, dingy, smoky, and old.” The next day he is in a better mood.
London is almost too difficult to attempt to even describe. It is old but not too old; grey but not too grey; dingy but not too dingy. It is a city of contradictions. It has the earmarks of antiquity everywhere, and yet it has the throb, hustle and bustle of vigorous young manhood. It has landmarks galore which show that it is the capitol of a warring nation, and yet in the manners of the people there is something of quiet refinement which suggests an avoidance of conflict.
Throughout the British installments, Prescott educates the reader on the differences between Britain and the United States. He writes about how the trains are different in England, that all the traffic is “on the wrong side of the road,” that the steering wheel is on the wrong side of the car, and that the taxicabs are strange, black, and boxy. He notes that there are no tall buildings in London, and that the English public transportation system is more sensible than the American: You pay for how far you go, not one flat rate.
Prescott admonishes readers not to make the same mistake he does: People don’t look different in England nor do the surroundings: “I somehow half-way expected to see a strange weird place about as far different from our style of architecture as are the pagodas of Japan. This is not the case.” He writes that the biggest difference is that the streets are so curved that there is no sense of the entire city as one might get looking down Broadway or Fifth Avenue in New York, “State Street, Chicago; Michigan Avenue, Detroit, or Canal Street, New Orleans.” He tells the reader that there is (thankfully) no noise in London, unlike in America, no blaring radio advertisements and no honking horns. The English “seem to drive with their heads and steering wheels rather than with their horns. It is a lesson we might learn.” He explains that the policemen are called bobbies and are very picturesque. They are polite. Again the servant issue pops up: “They appear to know that they are the servants of the taxpayers rather than their bosses.”
America is having an influence, though. Prescott mentions a Woolworth’s on the Strand, the availability of cream for coffee, and American breakfasts. However, do not try “the attempted soda water” or “the counterfeit ice cream sodas.” “Save your money and your digestion,” he advises. The movies—called cinemas, he notes—are the most obvious source of American influence. This influence extends to the way African Americans are portrayed in film. He argues that the British are subconsciously absorbing American attitudes about race from the portrayals they see in American movies. “Unquestionably, the greatest influence toward race prejudice in England is the visiting of Americans there and the showing of American movies.” He pauses at this point and notes:
We did not see any prejudice anywhere in England or Europe. . . . And yet I must be honest with my readers. When Miss Valaida Snow said a few weeks since that she had seen no prejudice in London, Mr. A. Ward, president of the Negro Welfare association of that city, retorted that she had “merely been lucky.”
Prescott goes on to point out that the real test is not whether he is able to eat in the best restaurants but whether people of color have access to occupations, can succeed in any kind of business, and can live wherever they choose. Ward says this is not so, and Prescott will not argue with him. He reiterates, though, “Whatever prejudice there is in England against Americans of color has undoubtedly been inspired by white Americans.”
Prescott gives no nod to British colonization, which was reported on and editorialized about in the Defender as well as other national newspapers. This is interesting but not surprising. Other Defender travel writers do not examine European colonial policies very closely either. Most of the time the reason is stated quite clearly: The depth and violence of American racism have no comparison. However, at least one Defender travel article of the period did report on a slightly different English experience.
In 1933, William Gillett wrote one article for the Defender on a trip he took through England and Europe with a large group of women, most of them teachers. Gillett’s experience puts a slightly different cast on the Prescotts’ positive experience, at least in England if not throughout Europe. Gillett wrote that his group was denied a hotel in London because the group was too big: “The English hotels will generally accept one or two Colored persons provided that they are not too dark.”15
The remainder of the Prescotts’ British sojourn is decidedly literary and historic. First, they visit the home of “the immaculate genius of the written word,” William Shakespeare. Prescott is obviously a fan. He uses the Bard’s own words to describe him, first quoting Cassius from Julius Caesar, “he doth bestride the narrow world like a collosus; and we petty men walk under his huge legs.” Then, at Shakespeare’s grave:
you stand suffused and overwhelmed and finally turn and walk out into the deep shade of the three hundred year old oak trees that seem to feel as you do, you think of how fitting to Shakespeare are his own immortal worlds in Hamlet: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!”
Prescott next bonds with Sir Walter Scott by traveling to the “exquisitely rich and well-kept” Warwick Castle and the “mass of ruins” that is Kenilworth Castle. He describes and relates the histories of each. Of Kenilworth he writes:
Here, then, is history in the raw, walls 14 feet thick in places, which make you go back to Sir Walter Scott’s “Kenilworth,” to repopulate it properly with all of the great who once defended its gates and roamed its fair pastures.
Next, Edinburgh, Scotland, “bleak, harsh, and cold,” brings another castle and more historic and literary figures. Prescott informs the reader that no real sense of the castle can be given in less than ten thousand words. It has everything anyone could want in a castle, including moats and crown jewels. “On every hand memories of Sir Walter Scott, of Bobby Burns, of John Knox, of Mary. . . . You realize that you cannot take it all in. You simply love it—and leave it.” Of the city itself, its streets always look windswept: “Its hills and crags mark it as a place which saw the siege of many a Scottish chief during the centuries of its existence.” He also describes a Scottish Bible, enlightens his readers on the source of the phrase “burning a candle at both ends,” and reviews the history of John Knox, the Protestant reformer. This includes explaining that the doors in Knox’s house are four feet high and two feet wide in order to slow any invaders or assassins who attempted access.
While history and literature dominate the reportage of the couple’s time in Britain, Prescott does not leave out humor or landscape. At Kenilworth Castle, he writes:
A little woman with a cart stand asked us if we would have refreshment. I ordered the one which seemed most satisfying—milk and soda water. She poured out a glass of milk and squirted into it about a tablespoon or so of seltzer water. Need I describe it? I paid my sixpence in silence, took a mouthful and quietly poured the rest on the ground. Strange, strange England, I thought . . .
On the train up to Edinburgh, he gives the reader a view out the window:
You start in the warm, green pastures of southern England and watch nature grow sterner and sterner until your train skirts the bleak rock-ribbed coast of northeastern England where the cliffs are steep and harsh, and where the bare promontories overlook the cold North Sea. . . . Perhaps the most noticeable thing that strikes you as you reach the northwest part of England on this road is the long stone fences about four feet high that have been there two, three, four, and five hundred years. The remarkable thing about these fences is that they are not held together by mortar. They are made of stones one laid upon the other. They run up hills too steep for any kind of vehicle, and curve and wind, but with all this they have stood the storms of centuries, and still serve to separate the sheep and cattle of one farmer from that of another.
In Scotland, Prescott spares a moment to describe the largest cantilevered bridge in the world, which crosses the Firth of Forth. (Soon, though, to be outdone by the “one across San Francisco Bay.”) He gives a nod to the modern city of Glasgow and takes a breath to paint a picture of the acres and acres of “orchid-hue[d]” heather on the mountainsides between Loch Lomand and Loch Katrine.
He spends a bit more time on the couple’s quick stop in the Lake Country. He notes that he wanted to stay longer, it being “the most beautiful spot in Europe,” and continues, “the grandeur of nature and the civilized development of man [are in] perfect symmetry and harmony” there. The end of the British portion of the tour brings the reader back to literature when Prescott quotes Southey, the poet laureate of England, on the beauties of an apple orchard.
Already, Prescott has referenced Archimedes, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Robert Southey, among others. Soon, more names will be added to the list including de Maupassant, Clemenceau, Dumas, and Henry O. Tanner. While references to the classic writers and artists of Europe are not unexpected in a travelogue such as this, it is interesting that during this period, literary references were not unusual for the Defender in general. In 1934 alone, twenty-four articles referenced Shakespeare and twelve Walter Scott.
The next stop on the couple’s itinerary is France. France felt the effects of the depression later than many countries and in the summer of 1934 was still facing steep unemployment and low production levels. It was also still reeling from the effects of the Stavisky scandal and the ensuing riots. The Radical government had lost power, and a conservative government succeeded it. The number of ultranationalist and fascist groups in France was increasing.
These events were to some ominous signs of coming disaster. Yet, for most African Americans, including Patrick Prescott, France continued to represent sanctuary and freedom. Even before the couple gets to the country, when their boat stops on the French coast before continuing to Britain for the first part of the trip, Prescott devotes some space to a rhapsody on France:
the vast great hinterland so dear to the hearts of all true lovers of liberty for mankind regardless of race, or creed, or color—France, France, the land of Biset, and Saint Saens, of Hugo and de Maupassant, of Napolean and Clemenceau. France whose fertile bosom could nurture such giants of our own race as Alexander Dumas and Henry O. Tanner.
When the couple finally actually gets to France, the headline says it all: “American Travelers Finally Land on Soil of France; and Prescott Finds Himself Boyishly Excited Over Country.” Prescott writes:
The English are cool, quiet, serene. But as the boat landed at Calais, you realized at once that the French people had a lot of excitement, personality and color. This was no ordinary country. This was FRANCE.
Not surprisingly, it is not France in general that really grabs Prescott but Paris. He quickly remarks on the disappointing countryside of northern France, and then:
three or four hours out of Calais you are rewarded. You do not have to be told it is Paris. Gay, glamorous, interesting gateway of the world! You recall at once (at least I did) the admonition to all civilized people, “Go to Paris; see Venice—Then die!”
For the first time on the trip I began to feel boyishly excited. I suppose I expected to see Eiffel Tower, Tombeau de Napoleon (Napoleon’s Tomb), Place de la Concorde, the Tuilleries and River Seine—all seated on the railroad station steps. I guess I sort of looked for apaches to be doing muscle dances in the middle of the streets. You know how it is. This was Paris. And in Paris anything can—and should—happen.
[Paris is] strange, weird, in spots, beautiful, gracious, grave, gay, glamorous and altogether indescribable. It reminds you of a fresh fig. If one has never eaten a fully-ripe fresh fig there is no way to describe it to him because there is no other standard of comparison. There is nothing else in the world like it. So with Paris. Paris is—Paris. . . . Shade trees growing on the busiest business boulevards . . . sidewalk cafes as thick as buses in London, with colored awnings and brightly decorated small tables, where the weary, the thirsty and the just plain cussed sit in midday (or midnight) and watch the world go by; comfort stations perched gaudily in the middle of respectable thoroughfares and making themselves (and their patrons) known to at least three of the senses; theatres, art galleries, hotels, of the purest forms of artistic creation; boulevards that are made for a people used to centuries of ceremony and promenading; forests, ages old, located right in the heart of the city; stores in which the elevators have transparent glass backs so you might see through them into each floor as you pass; shops, shops, shops—“parfum” shops, pastry shops, “parfum” shops, pastry shops, “parfum” shops, pastry shops—that’s Paris.
Sadly for the modern reader, Prescott and his wife do not seem to be jazz fans. No mention is made of Bricktop’s, Josephine Baker, or any of the many jazz musicians—including Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Alberta Hunter—who are performing all over Europe at this time.16 In their travelogue, Thomas and Sengstacke also don’t give much space to black music and art in Paris or anywhere in Europe. They have the opportunity to see Baker perform in Copenhagen: “Was she good!”17 In their Paris installments, they mention that there are many cafés where a person can “eat, drink and dance to the fine French music which is sometimes played by our own people.” They also give a short and somewhat elliptical description of “the famous night life of Paris”:
Some people like it, some people don’t, but no person can claim to know Paris unless he has seen it. It is a gay, easy going sort of life, with none of the unpleasantness which is often associated with it.18
Thankfully, Defender readers could get more information on the goings-on of black artists from checking out the column “Across the Pond.”
Despite this gap in the record, Prescott’s Paris is a fascinating glimpse of a legendary city. He does momentarily pull back on his excitement to explain that Paris is usually so extravagantly described there is no way it can match anyone’s expectations. He reminds his readers that Paris has its share of poor and middle-class people just like everywhere else. The main example he gives is that not all the women are dressed in the highest style. He continues by relating some of his more mundane experiences in Paris. An example: he is charged 20 centimes for choosing to sit in a chair on the Champs Elysées as opposed to a bench, which is free. As in London, he spends a few words describing the public transportation system: The inner city buses have three sections (classes) of seats—“How’s that for class distinction.” He also soberly explains that there are a variety of meals to be had in Paris at a variety of prices depending on a person’s desire for luxury and quality.
Having done his duty depicting some of the everyday elements of Paris, Prescott happily returns to the extravagant City of Lights. His verve returns when writing of the luxury of a meal at Delmonico’s, “Hors d’oeuvres? . . . hors d’oeuvres at Delmonico’s are an event, a ceremony and a rite.” He goes on to write of the couple’s confusion when their waiter produces twelve plates of hors d’oeuvres piled on top of each other in a pyramid. “Only the French would have imagination and daring enough to make a spectacle out of a preliminary course. And all this was even before soup was served!”
He goes on to explain other key details of Parisian life. Sidewalk cafés are described down to how they are created and the size of the tables. He gives helpful tips on café etiquette:
When you arrive, always order something . . . After the first order you may sit all day, chat and watch the passersby. No one will pester you to order again. If you wish something you yourself beckon the waiter. It all seems so civilized.
He describes the French attachment to wine and champagne:
You are not quite prepared for . . . the avid thirst of the small intelligent children who quaff two water glasses of wine before dinner as a means of slaking same. It is a novel experience. Here is plain and fancy drinking in its most colorful aspect. You may have heard of wine flowing like water, but it is only in France that it is drunk like water.
And he quickly explains the French idea of theater: Shows “seem to be planned on the theory of the battle royale” and last from 8 P.M. until midnight. He also notes that you are expected to tip the ushers who have shown you to your seats.
By far, the largest amount of space in the French articles is spent on describing the lack of prejudice in Paris and Prescott’s theories on why this is the case. His thoughts on the matter are particularly poignant when one thinks of the current racial/ethnic problems in France:
There is no color line in France. They do not know—or care—what a man is. France is cosmopolitan. There is every race and creed there, and in many instances there are people who do not subscribe to the doctrines of liberal France. The Frenchman is so truly without prejudice that colored people are not even a curiosity to him. He never discloses by any word or act his recognition that the thousands of colored people in France are not of his own blood.
Frankly a careful observer must come to the conclusion that there could not be a color line in France. The French and Italians are the strangest assortment of people you have ever seen. Thousands upon thousands of French men and women look like thousands upon thousands of colored people you have seen in the United States. My hat was always half-off, ready to be tipped to someone I was sure I knew at home, only to find that the crinkly hair and tawny skin belonged to a native of France. Ah that Mediterranean Sea—and across it—in centuries long since gone, our people must have known these Latin people, and from their friendship forever made a color line impossible in France. If French people ever draw a color line, a good percentage of French people themselves would be caught in it by the sheer fact of its being impossible to tell them from the people who were supposed to be set aside. Unquestionably the French know this. Undoubtedly their enemies have reminded them of it. Indisputably the “100 per cent Nordics” have already classed them as “non nordic.” Thus, fate in her mysterious way, has by strange devices created a haven of peace and protection for the colored people who come within the borders of this land of sunshine and liberty.
Thus, Prescott not only takes his reader to an almost magical land where life is free and African Americans feel totally at home but at the same time he introduces an ominous note preparing the reader for his next installment.
Upon entering Germany, the tone of the series changes dramatically.
Suddenly your train comes to a sharp halt. Grey uniforms and stern faces appear in the aisles of the train. It is customs inspection in Germany. You must remember that we were entering Germany very shortly after Hitler’s “blood purge” of all the enemies of Nazism.19 And it was midnight. This combination was not very reassuring. . . .
The German officers were civil and courteous. But they were firm and business like. They did not display any great sense of humor. This then, was a close-up glimpse of another great nation. As before related, there was a great change when we came the short distance across the English channel from England to France. There was just as great a difference in entering Germany. The English are easy, quiet, reserved and very sure of themselves. The French are sparkling, spirited, aggressive with suggestion about them that they intend to take care of themselves. The Germans are erect, serious and militaristic. I am speaking only of the officials of England, France and Germany, understand. The officials of France, for example, always look as if they are tired of looking official and would unbend and lower their shoulders and subside at shortest provocation. But German officialdom is trained to the hilt—a holdover of the incomparable training given them in their line by Wilhelm II before the debacle of Armistice, 1918. They are put up erect, square shoulders, heel-in toe out, with chin stiff, to stay. The military precision born of the dream of Empire under the Kaiser is the same military precision now maintained as a defense against the ring of steel encircling her by her enemies throughout Europe.
It is difficult to tell when exactly the couple entered Germany. They left the United States on July 31, and Prescott notes that they “entered Germany but a few days after the German people had approved the Hitler regime by an overwhelming vote.” This probably means that the couple entered Germany after the August 19 plebiscite that made Hitler legally the chancellor and president, that is, the fuhrer. At this time in the rise of Nazism, the army had sworn a personal loyalty oath to Hitler, and the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring had been passed. (The “hereditarily diseased” included the approximately four hundred so-called Rhineland bastards, children of German women and African soldiers.) Government-sanctioned persecution of Jews and other minorities had begun. Among other things, Jewish people were no longer allowed to serve in the German civil service, their ability to attend universities was limited, and there had been several national boycotts of Jewish businesses.
In this light, Prescott’s reporting on Germany in general and Munich in particular is interesting. He begins by remarking that he prefers the German scenery to the French: “It appears more modern in its buildings and roadways.”
He also notes a detail regarding the role of women under Nazism: “A little surprising however was the number of women working in the fields, behind plows, swinging heavy scythes and handling hoes.” Prescott concludes this observation with a statement that comes across as quite odd: “It is something that the women of American could not possibly understand—this wholesale use of their sex in the tilling the soil.” That Prescott, an African American (born and raised in the south, no less) would choose to write these words for an African American audience seems either amazingly naive or supremely disingenuous. Yet, another traveler the year before, Mrs. Henry McCrory, also noted how hard the peasant women in Europe worked. According to a Defender article in September 1933, Mrs. McCrory felt that women in rural Europe worked “even much harder than the Colored women in the South.”20
Beyond Prescott’s interpretation of rural women, his description of Nazi Germany is revealing.
All along the way you realize there is something going on in Germany. The swastika, or Nazi emblem, is visible everywhere on flagpoles along the route of the train. . . .
You do not have any doubt when you get [to Munich] that there is a Hitler in Germany. His lithographs are everywhere, big as sin, with that puckered leer on his face. . . . Thousands of Nazi flags and emblems: hundreds of Nazi soldiers with their brown shirts with red bands around the left arm: hundreds of signs, slogans and what-nots reminding you of the “great qualities” of “der fuehrer” —these are the strange new things that stamp Germany as a changed place. . . .
Heaven alone knows or understands the Germany of today. Suspicion is rife everywhere, men doubt, fear and mistrust one another. A neighbor may be a traitor, and a stranger, a spy. When Mrs. Prescott and I sat on a bench in the public park the man next to us took very good pains to see that we did not speak German before he began to talk to his neighbor. Talk is dear and heads are cheap in these trying times in central Europe and one can take no chances. Everywhere the city of Munich appeared as an armed camp. Brown shirts strutted up and down the streets or flashed by on bicycles. These Nazi guards were young enough, but certainly drunk with the notoriety that world comment has thrust upon them. It must be remembered that these are only the personal soldiers of Hitler—his own political followers who have joined his guard for the purpose of enforcing the dictates of his regime. The army of Germany is another thing entirely. It is the grey-uniformed instrument of the German people trained and organized to defend German honor and liberty against the world. The brown shirts are created to defend Hitlerism in Germany against all other Germans who might oppose it. The one is the national army of the great German people. The other (the brown shirts) is a political army personally attached to the Nazi politicians who organized it. If ever there is a clash between them, just bet on the German army. All it needs is a great leader. . . .
The German people are not happy. They seem tense, strained, worried, bowed and bent. It is only a question of time when some sort of change will come. This is not the permanent form of government in [Germany] you may be assured of that.
In hindsight, Prescott’s differentiation between Nazis and Germans just a few days after the plebiscite where 89 percent of Germans voted in support of Hitler seems strained. Interesting also is Prescott’s lack of attention to the Nazi restrictions placed on Jews and people of color, which had been reported in the Defender as well as in other papers.21
However, Prescott was not the only traveler to report that Germany in the 1930s did not exhibit prejudice. In 1931, Thomas and Sengstacke visited relatives in Bremen, Germany, and stayed with them for months. They reported, “[A]fter living with the Germans and enjoying their society for a year, we could not believe the mean things said about them.” The women found “no traces of cruelty or prejudice.”22 They went to numerous dances and parties, “where everyone wanted to dance with us.”23 However, they were stared at more in Germany than anywhere else, particularly in areas where “the darker people seldom visit.”24 In 1933, William Gillett wrote, “The German people, as I know them, are as free of color prejudice as any of the other Europeans.”25 Also in 1933, Mrs. McCrory was quoted as saying, “Even in Germany with its Nordic propaganda, we met none of it [color prejudice].”26
Happily for the Prescotts, they do not spend much time in Munich, and they are quickly on their way to see the Passion Play performed in Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps, a far more pleasant experience. Prescott describes this part of the Alps as “one of the most poetic spots in the world” and the play as “the greatest drama known to man—the drama of Christianity.” True to his duties as travel guide, he explains how to arrange attending the play and its cost ($8). He also explains that every ten years, the townspeople of Oberammergau mount the extravaganza. People from all over the world attend, and all of the attendees stay in local people’s homes.
The actual article about the Passion Play is written by Annabel Prescott. She begins it by juxtaposing the experience of Munich with the Bavarian Alps. This juxtaposition brings to life the atmosphere of early Nazi Germany and provides a perspective that could only be from a woman who works with children every day.
Oberammergau—and you are in another world, another age. You cease to worry about the unchaperoned band of adolescents, straggling, unwashed and underfed in and out of the Munich railway station at every train call. You cease speculating at even this sample of the “Youth Movement” and its effects on the future of Germany. As from under a cloud, you slip from the menace of the huge lithographs of a glowering Hitler that have hung from every shop window and in almost every home.
She writes that Oberammergau is “a peaceful New Testament village nestling joyously and tranquilly in the heart of seething Germany.” Now that she is in this small town, the Europe she has seen so far seems “sophisticated and effete.” The Prescotts stay with Anton Lang, who for many years played Christ but is now too old and has the role of reading the prologues. He is described as the “beloved and reverenced patriarch of the country-side.” The house layout and color scheme are described ending with, “It is comfort to the nth degree, without one note of luxury.”
The couple heads out early the morning after their arrival to attend the play. They are among thousands of others who are walking through the small town toward the amphitheater:
You get a kaleidoscopic effect of Astrokan turbans of Russian priests mingled with Bedouin veils, Tyrolean feather-cocked hats, Parisian models, fascist uniforms and American tweeds. And everywhere your eye is caught by the black vestee and flat-topped hat of the Catholic clergy. . . .
[The play is a] series of tableaux, all reproductions of masterpieces, all illustrative of some story in the Old Testament which was prophetic of a parallel event in the New and the parallelism is explained and interpreted by the prologue preceding each scene and the chorus.
She did not expect to enjoy the Passion Play. They were in Europe in a Passion Play year, she explains, so she really had no choice but to attend: “It should not be missed just as a matter of course and common sense.” She writes that she had expected to see a play much like other Passion plays that she, “as a good minister’s daughter,” had already seen. However, her reaction surprises her: “I was not prepared to live, yes, and to suffer, this thing as I did for the eight hours duration of the performance.” She says that she was “totally unprepared for the intensity with which I was made to live [the play.]” She calls it “the most stupendous dramatic spectacle ever staged.”
Prescott retakes the narrative as the couple leaves Bavaria and heads to Austria. He begins this installment by describing his attempt to communicate via mime with two young boys (“urchins”) of the town. The boys will carry the couple’s luggage but need to know whether they are to go to the train or bus station. Prescott communicates the correct answer—successfully and much to the boys’ delight—with the international language for train: “choo choo.” This leads Prescott to comment:
I had been noticing how, under their skin, human beings are pretty much the same the world over. Tongues may differ but human nature reacts basically alike everywhere. A smile means the same in every language. So do a frown, a scowl, and a harsh voice. . . . The world after all is small.
However, the international brotherhood of the Passion Play quickly ends. The couple is on their way to Austria, which in the summer of 1934 is facing its own political crisis. Just a month previous to the Prescotts’ arrival, Austrian Nazis had assassinated chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss during a failed coup attempt. Prescott relates this information to the reader and points out that “all the way coming from America, people had asked if we intended visiting Germany and Austria in their unsettled condition.” He then goes on to relate the only “unsettling” event of the trip:
About a half hour [after the train crossed into Austria] a group of men got into a brawl the like of which I have rarely heard. They seemed intelligent which made it worse. It made it “appear” political to me, since I could not understand a word of their vociferous German. Nothing came of it, happily, and I do not yet know what it was all about. But as I look back over the stretch of months it still seems dangerous to me. That was, I believe, the only time I felt one should use a little discretion traveling about these unsettled countries at midnight.
However, based on the remainder of his installment, this experience is an aberration:
Vienna is different from any city in Europe. It is the epitome of grace and good breeding. Its civic spirit is of the highest. . . . And Vienna is to my mind the politest and most civilized city in the world.
As a traveler from Depression-era Chicago, a polluted manufacturing city that had “a virtually insolvent municipal government,”27 it is not surprising that Prescott is taken with the visual charm of Vienna. He notes the efforts made by the Viennese municipal authorities to beautify the city. The flower baskets hanging from the lampposts get particular mention, as do the municipal apartment buildings on the outskirts. This housing is for poor residents, and Prescott compares it favorably to the new housing being built by the government in the United States. He is also astounded by the city’s cleanliness (as was Annabel by Oberammergau).
As always, Prescott remarks on the excellent service he and his wife receive, and he rhapsodizes about the food. Never willing to let historic significance slip by, he reminds the reader that Vienna is the home of Strauss and informs them that the Danube is not blue but brown. The couple visits Schonbrunn, Emperor Franz Joseph’s castle, and Prescott goes into great detail describing its unbelievable luxuries. However, after all the positives, Prescott ends on an ominous note:
Somehow the little country seemed pitiful. It seemed not to know which way it was drifting or to which port it was bound. Yet it was brave, cheerful, hopeful, civil and courteous. . . . We could not help but think that Austria, with such a stout heart and smiling face, must certainly pull herself out of the morass of messy political intrigue.
The next stop on the Prescotts’ itinerary is Italy and the fabled city of Venice. To a modern reader, the headline of this article is somewhat startling: “Travelers Leave Vienna for Land of Mussolini: Greatly Impressed by Picturesque Fascist Italy.” The headline does not mislead. Prescott writes very positively of Benito Mussolini. In the Defender in general, Mussolini and the Fascisti get a mixed reception until Mussolini threatens Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in late 1934, when the dictator loses all support. Prior to that point, some Defender articles point positively to Il Duce’s relations with Africa and the fact that his armed forces are not segregated. For example, a 1926 article about Mussolini’s alliance with Africa says in part, “No color line has marred Italy’s dealings with the darker races.”28 In addition, in the early 1920s, just after he came to power, Mussolini publicly disassociated himself from certain members of the Ku Klux Klan who were calling themselves American Fascisti. This was another point in his favor as was his praise of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1928.
Even when Mussolini published an appeal to “his countrymen and to the white race in general” that expressed concern about declining birth rates among whites and “black and yellow . . . fecundity,” the Defender expressed no outrage. At the time (1928), Mussolini’s statements were blamed on “Nordic propagandists” and “American informers.”29 In March 1934, the issue came up again when Mussolini wrote an editorial in his own newspaper, part of which was published in the Chicago Daily Tribune and later reported in the Defender:
From Rome comes the information that the premier of Italy, Mussolini, has been somewhat worried as to who will be president of the United States 100 years from now. His alarm is predicated upon the diminution of births in this country among the white race.
Says the premier: “The yellow peril is nothing. We will encounter an Africanized America in which the white race, by the inexorable laws of number, will end up being suffocated by the fertile grandsons of Uncle Tom. Are we to see within a century a Negro in the White House?”30
This time the Defender did not defend Il Duce but responded with an attack on Italian immigrants and the Mafia in the United States.
It is fortunate to be forewarned that we may be prepared to meet our new responsibilities. But at the present time we are not so much concerned about the president 100 years hence as we are in guarding against those foreigners that invade our country bringing with them insidious desire to live by pelf and plunder through what appears to be a traditional instinct of throwing bombs, and committing massacre and murder.31
It is possible that Mussolini’s comments may be the reason that—for all the compliments—there seems at times to be a wry, backhanded quality to Prescott’s reporting on the Italian leader. However, the majority of the time his tone is glowing:
As soon as you reached Italian soil you realized that the new Italy of Mussolini is something that the world might as well make up its mind to recognize as one of the greatest nations on the earth. There is construction going on everywhere. . . . On your train are two Fascisti guards—the Black Shirt troopers of Mussolini. They are on every train in Italy for the purpose of keeping order. In former years, B.M.—Before Mussolini—all types of thieves and beggars infested the trains of Italy. . . . [The Guards] not only keep order, but they also keep a weather eye for political busy-bodies, who might be inimical to Il Duce’s regime.
Of passing a barracks, Prescott says:
Black Shirt boys from 10 to 17 years of age, wave merrily as we pass. Mussolini takes ’em young, treats ’em kind and teaches ’em plenty. They come out believing that Italy is the greatest nation on earth.
In Venice, he writes:
Out in the harbor an Italian warship and cruiser lay at anchor, an object lesson by the far-sighted Mussolini to the thousands of visitors who are bound to see. Little black-shirts almost take [over] Venice. They are given this tour free. When they grow up these chaps, most of them very poor, will most certainly remember the Fascist regime which made this fairyland vacation for them a reality.
Apart from Mussolini, Venice is the magical city that most tourists experience, and Prescott carefully describes its strangeness for the benefit of his readers:
There is no question that Venice is a topsy turvy land. It is everything the books tell you that it is. It’s crazy. It’s different from anything that you have ever seen. It is almost unbelievable even after you have seen it. Water washes right up the steps of the hotels and houses—no joking. And you cannot wade in that water either. For it is an average of 15 feet deep. So Venice is no toy water city. Every boat and gondola that it has is really needed.
He explains that one can tour the city on dry land as well:
You can walk over much of the town by following these back streets which are connected by some 450 bridges, which span the smaller canals. And it is quite a little jaunt through these narrow streets, which are only 8 or 10 feet wide. . . . [Y]ou can readily see that horses and carriages are unknown.
He lists the various luxury goods produced for tourists: leather, lace, porcelain, mirrors, handmade glass, silk, velvet, and Italian linen. The couple attends a concert in St. Marco Square, eat two vanilla ices for $1.20, and ride in a gondola to celebrate their tenth anniversary, where Prescott serenades his wife with the “Barcarole”—the Boat Song. Finally, he summarizes the city:
Such was ancient Venice, started back in the 5th century as a place of refuge from the Huns of Attila. Old are its walls, broken are some of its peaks of beauty, decayed are many of its treasures, but it fires the imagination and touches the heart strings for the fading grandeur that was, and sets you to thinking of the plaintive words of Lord Byron in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”
He then quotes—in its entirety—the third stanza of the fourth canto of the famed epic poem.
Prescott begins the next installment saying, “Leaving Venice is like leaving a party. Everything seems to be an anti-climax after the breath-taking experiences in the city of water.” The next stop is Milan:
It served to confirm our opinion that Italy has been remade under Mussolini. A big vigorous, clean city of wide streets and a million souls. A few years ago it was ridden with beggar[s] and petty larceners. Mussolini has made it the symbol of New Italy—a city of promise and possibilities.
The couple then heads from Milan to Switzerland, and Prescott comments upon the Swiss customs officials waiting on Italian soil, “The mutual peace and happiness of those two nations was something to be enjoyed in this age of jealousy and strife.”
Prescott spends less than one installment describing the couple’s stay in Lucerne, Switzerland. In summary:
Switzerland is a toy country. It is spotlessly clean. It is so tiny that you can ride across it in a few hours. Its inhabitants are kindly, honest, industrious, intelligent, sober, with costumes that look like they were made for the stage.
To help the readers imagine the country, he reminds them of the Black Forest Village at the World’s Fair. He then compares the city of Lucerne with Glacier Lake in the Rocky Mountains. In so doing, he betrays his sensibilities:
Lucerne and its Alps breathe the acme of civilization, refinement and culture. Not only is nature grand, rugged and magnificent, but man has subdued the rough edges, and everywhere you turn are landscaped gardens, comfortable hotels, and cultivated amusements.
This is all there is of Switzerland. Far more interesting is the return to Paris, and Prescott wastes no time getting there.
Beginning the second section of the series that has the travelers in Paris, Prescott writes that African Americans and the French have a great deal in common.
The French are not only cosmopolitan, they are “universal.” They are much like Colored people. For instance, I believe Colored people are the best “mixers” on earth. Any person of any nationality can and will feel close to a person of color under advantageous circumstances. I think the same is true in large measure with the French. . . .
Americans of color will notice this French trait especially, because it is the call of temperamental kinship. The French people are warm, effusive, easily excited, kindly, voluble, very expressive, original, dramatic and easy to make acquaintance. What other nationality, or race can answer this description save our own? Add to that those dark eyes, swarthy cheeks, full features and a hundred different complexions of the French people, and you can see why colored Americans pick France as their favorite spot on earth.
And a final Paris rhapsody:
Ah! Paris by night. Lights, lights, lights across the gay spots that make 42nd and Broadway gasp for the comparison. It was Saturday night. Everyone seemed to be afoot. The hotels bustled with gay merrymakers, the streets teemed, the cafes did their full part to take the load off the sidewalks.
Again Paris in 1934 does not mean Bricktop’s or jazz to Prescott. It means shopping. Virtually the entire installment is about shopping: “Small shops abound. The French tend very strongly to selling one thing at a time. Another characteristic very common in colored people.” He argues that the French have developed their five senses more highly than any people on earth. As proof he points to French perfumes and wines, which satisfy a highly developed sense of smell. The art at the Louvre and Versailles satisfies the French sense of sight. Fine laces and tapestries delight the sense of touch. The French ear can be seen to be “highly developed and educated” by visiting the opera and the academies of music. The sense of taste is obvious: French is synonymous with fine. He reminds his readers not to “expect too much of Paris.” It is not “bright and new all over.” However, “Paris has its way about it of warming itself into your heart. You will leave it but you can never forget it.”
In his last installment, Prescott summarizes the places the couple visited. London was the “greatest”; Oberammergau, the most “sacred”; Venice, the “most startling and surprising”; Vienna, the “most cultured and civilized”; Lucerne, the “most beautiful”; and Paris, the “most gay and interesting.” The British, he adds, are “the most stable people in the world.”
Prescott also uses his summary to address the effects of the Depression. He notes that England seems economically healthier than any other country, including America:
Poverty as we see it in the United States was at a minimum. There were no extraordinary flashes of prosperity: and, on the other hand, there were not the throes and depths of economic ruin. The English are an even-keel people.
He writes that France, Italy, and Switzerland do not seem to be suffering economically as badly as the United States. He clarifies this point by saying that the people there lead a simpler life, and while they have fewer luxuries, their financial position is more secure. His summarization continues.
But please remember that France is on the gold standard and has the richest national treasury today; that England had her depression five years ago and is now well on the road to recovery; that Switzerland, through industry, thrift and a marvelous ability to mind her own business always manages to keep abreast of civilization; and that Italy, under the lash of Mussolini, is enjoying an unprecedented era of building and manufacturing prosperity.
Germany and Austria alone, of the countries of Western and Central Europe, are having economic and financial troubles that have reduced their populations to misery. This sad situation is largely due to the political unrest of these nations rather than to a fundamental breakdown in their economic fabrics. Hitler rides Germany like the Old Man of the Sea, and Austria flounders helplessly in a morass of political intrigue and governmental indecision.
He then makes the point vital in much of the travel writing published in the Defender.
In these two countries you notice and miss the personal liberty that is such a much vaunted privilege in America. In Germany and Austria you have a distinct reaction that the average American has a better lot at home. But in the other more or less normal countries of Europe we did not find the wild advantages of living in the United States of which Americans are wont to boast.
And he summarizes the color issue.
Unquestionably the American of color is far, far better treated in Europe than in the United States. Certainly an individual, as an individual, would be better off there, provided he could provide himself a means of livelihood. . . . [W]e did not see prejudice in England, but we are forced to admit that it must exist in acute quantities because of the complaints of Colored people more familiar with the country than we are. But even in England the prejudice is not—could not—be of the same violent, unreasoning nature as to be found in many parts of the United States.
The late Bishop A. J. Carey, in talking to an English statesman over there, asked, “How does your little country hold in such subjugation two giants like India and Africa?” “Oh,” said the Englishman, “that’s easy, we keep them fighting among themselves.” In a word, English prejudice is as likely to be a matter of “policy” as not—the deliberate subjugation of color to the purposes of empire.
In France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, prejudice, as we know it, does not exist. If you had seen, as I did, those unbelievably dark Latin Europeans running over every country, you could know that Europe could not have a color line unless it wanted war every day. But the European does not feel as the American does. He does not think of a Colored person as a former slave, but rather as a person of a different skin.
. . . It is speculative, but I venture to say that even large numbers of Colored people in Europe would not engender the same type of prejudice that they now do in America. I do not think they could be as thoroughly absorbed in an economic sense as they now are in the United States and for that reason a large migration (which nobody is thinking of, anyway) would be futile and silly. But on the question merely of prejudice as you and I know it, I do not think the American variety is to be found anywhere except in the States. And I base my belief on just one thing—that the association of the races on a plane of equality does not create resentment, furore, comment or notice in Europe. Which is a pretty fair indication that while they might [not] love the Colored man (any more than they do themselves) yet they do not regard him as a pariah to be shunned and scorned.
Reading these articles seventy-five years after they were written, one is often reminded of the musicals of the era. In many ways, despite the political turmoil, Prescott describes a world where nothing goes wrong and nothing is hard. The living is supremely easy, very dignified, and frequently amusing. How was this received? Did these articles, like the movies, serve as an escape for many readers? Or was the mention of $2.50 for a deck chair or $1.20 for vanilla ice a painful reminder to many Defender readers that this was more than they made for a day’s work? (Even the relatively well-off Pullman porters averaged only $16.92 per week at that time, and domestic workers in the south averaged only $3.50 per week.)32
In terms of the tone of the series, money was no problem. More important, neither was race. The author of these articles was unashamedly a black man, a Race man, though a member of the “light-skinned elite.” In addition to experiencing the world as a rich man, he experienced it as a black man. And he related to a wider African American public that there was a part of the world with no color line. This is the central importance of the Defender’s travel narratives. They exposed the singularity of white America’s race obsession.
Mrs. McCrory expressed it very succinctly a year earlier, “I wish it were possible for large numbers of our people to come to Europe just to get this larger vision—just to see the lack of color prejudice in the white race in its native home. . . . More than ever we are convinced that color prejudice in America is artificial—it has been deliberately cultivated.”33 Through international reporting and travel narratives, the Defender built a citizenry informed about essential international news of the day, but more important, it provided its readers with an alternate reality—one that proved through lived experience “that color prejudice in America is artificial.” There could be no more powerful news to impart.
1. These articles appear to have been misnumbered, so while the paper reports nineteen installments with a final “extra” article containing tips for planning a trip abroad, there are in fact only eighteen articles in the series itself. For even more news on the women’s time in Europe, Roberta G. Thomas also wrote a separate column called “A Little about Everything,” and many of these are also about her experiences in Europe.
2. Chicago Defender, July 20, 1912, 8.
3. “Bar Approves 2 for Municipal Bench Position,” Chicago Daily News, April 3, 1943, 2.
4. Harold Smith, “Anti-Dies Vote Rises to Plague 2 Congressmen,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 18, 1940, S1.
5. Wayne Thomis, “Congress Foes to Enter Final Drive This Week,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 31, 1940, S1.
6. “Refuses to Seat Negro Named to Bench by Green,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 27, 1941 9.
7. “Induct Prescott as Judge; G.O.P. Stages a Rally,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 25, 1942, 16.
8. George Tagge, “Negro Is Slated by G.O.P. for Circuit Court,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 28, 1950, 9.
9. Gene Smiley, “Recent Unemployment Rate Estimates for the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of Economic History 43, no. 2. (June 1983): 488.
10. Chicago Defender, May 26, 1934, 10.
11. Robert W. Rydell, “Century of Progress Exposition,” in Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, 2005, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/225.html.
12. “Chicago during the Great Depression,” module 3, chapter 2, History of Chicago from Trading Post to Metropolis, External Studies Program, University College, Roosevelt University, http://web.archive.org/web/20090316062717/http://www.roosevelt.edu/chicagohistory/mod3-chap2.htm.
13. Tracey Deutsch, “Great Depression,” Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, 2005, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/542.html.
14. Christopher Manning, “African Americans,” Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, 2005, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/27.html.
15. William Gillett, “Some Observations Made on Sailing to Europe,” Chicago Defender, August 5, 1933, 10.
16. Except, it seems, Germany. A musician named Joe Cork had been contracted to play in Berlin for a season, but, according to Ivan Browning in “Across the Pond,” Cork was back in Montmartre in mid-June “having received a short notice from the police to ‘clear out’ after working three weeks.” Chicago Defender, June 16, 1934, 9.
17. Roberta G. Thomas and Flaurience Sengstacke, “Find Architecture of Denmark Very Interesting,” Chicago Defender, February 4, 1933, 11.
18. Roberta G. Thomas and Flaurience Sengstacke, “Find Paris Is True to Reputation for Beauty,” Chicago Defender, March 4, 1933, 10.
19. Presumably, the “Night of Long Knives,” June 30–July 1, 1934, when Hitler’s SS purged the SA (Sturmabteilung), the original paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party.
20. The Rambler, “Streets of Paris,” Chicago Defender, September 30, 1933, 11.
21. Defender articles on the subject include “Hitler Expels Africans from Germany in Race Hate Tilt; Orders Black Race to Follow Jews Out in Nazi Drive,” April 15, 1933, 1, and Pembroke Stephens, “How Jews Fare under Hitler Regime; Noted English Correspondent Reveals Inside Facts of Horrors Perpetrated by Germans on Defenseless Minority Groups,” June 16, 1934, 10.
22. Roberta G. Thomas and Flaurience Sengstacke, “American Express Is Aid to Tourists,” Chicago Defender, December 24, 1932, 11.
23. Roberta G. Thomas and Flaurience Sengstacke, “Bremen Holidays Prove Delightful,” Chicago Defender, January 7, 1933, 10.
24. Thomas and Sengstacke, “American Express,” 11.
25. Gillett, “Some Observations Made,” 10.
26. Rambler, “Streets of Paris,” 11.
27. Deutsch, “Great Depression.”
28. Cable to the Defender, “Mussolini in Secret Pact with Africa,” Chicago Defender, April 24, 1926, 1.
29. “Italian Dictator Warns White Race; Gives Alarm after Being Misinformed Mussolini Listens to Propagandists,” Chicago Defender, October 6, 1928, A1.
30. “Mussolini Seems to Be Worried,” Chicago Defender, April 7, 1934, 14.
31. Ibid.
32. Edward Berman, “The Pullman Porters Win,” Nation, August 21, 1935, 217, New Deal Network, http://newdeal.feri.org/nation/na35217.htm (accessed November 11, 2011); Phyllis Palmer, “Black Domestics during the Depression: Workers, Organizers, Social Commentators,” Prologue Magazine, Summer 1997, National Archives and Records Administration, http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/domestics-in-the-depression.html (accessed November 11, 2011).
33. Rambler, “Streets of Paris,” 11.
“Patrick B. Prescott Begins Series on Trip Abroad,” October 13, 1934, 1.
“The Prescotts Learn a Few Things about Steamship Travel,” October 20, 1934, 5.
“The Prescotts Learn about Travel Aboard Ship,” October 27, 1934, 5.
“Traveler Reveals Facts Gained by Trip Abroad,” November 3, 1934, 5.
“Travelers Find England Being Influenced by American-made Moving Pictures,” November 10, 1934, 5.
“Real Thrills Come to US Citizens Touring England for the First Time,” November 17, 1934, 11.
“American Travelers Finally Land on Soil of France; and Prescott Finds Himself Boyishly Excited over Country,” November 24, 1934, 5.
“Prescotts Reveal European Thrills; Tourists Agree That France Is without Color Prejudice, Americans Find Complete Equality in French Republic,” December 1, 1934, 5.
“Prescotts Compare Fatherland with Romantic France,” December 8, 1934, 5.
“American Travelers Tell of Trip to Europe; ‘Passion Play’ in Germany Thrills Mrs. Prescott,” December 15, 1934, 5.
“Tourists Continue Trip through Old Country; Prescotts Leave Scene of ‘Passion Play’ for Calmer Spots,” December 22, 1934, 5.
“Travelers Leave Vienna for Land of Mussolini; Greatly Impressed by Picturesque Fascist Italy,” January 5, 1935, 5.
“Tourists Get First Hand Facts on Swiss Culture,” January 12, 1935, 5.
“Paris Stores Hold Interest of U.S. Travelers,” January 19, 1935, 10.
“Prescotts End Series about Travels to Europe; Sum Up Experiences in Final Article,” January 26, 1935, 12.
Buni, Andrew. Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974.
Farrar, Hayward. The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892–1950. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1998.
Griffin, Farah J., and Cheryl J. Fish. A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing. Boston: Beacon, 1998.
Hogan, Lawrence D. A Black National News Service: The Associated Negro Press and Claude Barnett. Haworth, N.J.: St. Johann Press, 2002.
Wright, Julie Adesina. The Role of International News in the Black Press. Boston: Boston University, 1983.