You publish a monthly newspaper about collectibles and antiques. A dealer sends in a classified ad that says, ”Nazi war relics with swastika wanted.” Do you print the ad?
As a young American soldier in World War II you salvaged Nazi literature, armbands and swords from German towns. Now you want them out of the house. Do you take the collection to a dealer, knowing a neo-Nazi might buy it?
You own an antiques shop, where a customer spots a 1940s cookie jar shaped like Little Black Sambo. She shakes her head in apparent disgust but says, ”I`ll take it.” You ask why. ”To smash it,” she says. Do you sell her the jar?
Questions of ethics are confronting a growing number of dealers and collectors these days. One reason is that Americans became such passionate collectors in the `80s that everything historical, even derisive objects, soared in value. At the same time, people suddenly were questioning the ethics of owning ivory, furs and other controversial objects.
Today, the more people compete for that Sambo cookie jar-some to preserve it, some to smirk at it and perhaps a rare few to destroy it-the more such questions of ethics surface. No consensus exists, and some people struggle for their answers.
In the first case, the ad for Nazi weapons ran, and no readers complained. ”There are things in our history that no one is proud of,” says Cherie Henn, publisher of Collectors News, the monthly newspaper that ran the ad. ”There are, however, collectors who are interested in memorabilia of those times. In that sense, they`re legitimate collectibles.”
But because of the June 1989 American ban on ivory imports, she makes ivory dealers promise that their merchandise predates the ban. ”We don`t want to do anything that will encourage poaching,” Henn says.
In the second case, the young Jewish soldier, now a New York psychologist, recalled how his outfit dealt with conquered German towns: While some soldiers raided the museums for silver, he took anti-Semitic literature, daggers, books and armbands from the local Nazi headquarters, knowing he was preserving a piece of history.
”I`m not a collector,” says the psychologist, who keeps his memorabilia out of sight and declined to be named (”I`d rather not be identified as having anything Nazi”). ”At one point I thought of selling these things and giving the money to Israel, but I didn`t want to sell them to any Nazi group.”
The third case involved reports in Washington that several vigilantes-one white, the others black-were visiting antiques shops, buying derogatory pieces of black Americana and burning or smashing them in front of the dealers.
”Word of mouth was going around the antiques shops (in Washington) not to sell to these people,” says Stephen Lewis, owner of the Lewis and Blalock collection, about 2,000 pieces of black Americana.
”I hear people saying, `I don`t like it because it`s painful,` ” he says. ”But to destroy it would be like erasing a period of history. How would young people understand what happened?”
Carmen Reese, an Oak Park collector and postal inspector who owns many derogatory pieces, agrees. Her 14-year-old son, Jason, ”loves this collection; he looks for things for me,” she says. ”And he has a sense of black pride.” (See Reese`s story on page 5.)
Everyone knows what happens to those who forget history; that fear is what motivates Lewis and Reese to collect. But people have varying reasons for scouting out and living with ”sensitive” items.
Some started out with a different collection, such as the person who owns 300 old postcards, including a dozen that are racially insulting, or the collector of World War II memorabilia who owns a dagger with a swastika. One longtime arms dealer, William Fagan of Mt. Clemens, Mich., says many weapons connoisseurs would prize a Nazi dagger for its Rennaissance styling. ”Under the Nazis,” he points out, ”some of the finest workmanship took place.”
William Howell is such a collector; he owns Howell Airport in southwest suburban New Lenox and built a reproduction Old West saloon near his home to house nearly 3,000 pieces of war memorabilia. About 50 of his 70 ceremonial daggers were made by the Nazis; he paid $5,000 for one ”honor dagger”
decorated with gold inlay and has another of Damascus steel so rare he compares it to a custom-made lamp by Louis Comfort Tiffany.
”These are pieces of art,” he says. ”The Nazis were very, very ornate people.”
He adds: ”I don`t know of one serious collector who doesn`t think what happened under the Nazis was absolutely deplorable. . . . Jesus was crucified, but because you collect arrowheads from that era doesn`t mean you support his crucifixion.”
Some collectors are scholars who analyze and write about their memorabilia or lend them to historians. Denis Mercier teaches popular culture at the University of Pennsylvania and studies his own collection of black Americana, some of it almost vicious. ”I look at the way blacks have been depicted in the last 100 years,” he says, ”and find various patterns in the artifacts.”
In a paper titled ” `I Know Your Little Pickaninny Heart is White`:
White Superiority in Early-20th Century American Popular Music,” Mercier writes about ”coon songs” written mostly by whites. (Blacks wrote a few for economic survival.) Whites used lyrics and artwork to send a message-to both races-that blacks were trivial, harmless and ”unable to improve their lot.” Sheet music and other collectibles become props for his lectures. ”This is not a white guilt trip,” Mercier says. ”I make no apologies.”
And some people collect the controversial for deeper, more disturbing reasons. One book editor was stunned by the sight of three friends in their early 20s-one pushing a baby carriage-buying a Nazi flag at an Ohio flea market. ”We`re going to hang it in our den,” they explained.
According to psychiatrists, an extremist or neo-fascist might collect swastikas to compensate for terrifying inner feelings of weakness. ”Often he`s a victim of child abuse,” says Bennett G. Braun, a Chicago psychiatrist. ”This is a way of dealing with his hopelessness and powerlessness.”
”These are usually people who hate themselves, who have a tremendously low self-image,” says Chicago psychiatrist Peter L. Giovacchini. ”The memorabilia become external symbols of the hated parts of themselves.”
Samuel Pennington, who edits and publishes the prestigious monthly Maine Antique Digest, says that racism is more mainstream among collectors than most people think. Many ”preservationist” collectors of black Americana, he reports, describe blacks to him in scathing terms.
Pennington agrees that historical, nonracist objects such as manacles and slave auction documents deserve to be saved. He collects ”evidence of the Ku Klux Klan in Maine,” which he allows scholars to examine.
The wrong approach
But he also tells the story of one such scholar, a college history professor who tried to buy a photograph from the collection. ”It`s not for sale,” Pennington told him. But we`re collectors, the professor insisted, pulling out color photographs of him and his wife in Klan robes, riding on horses adorned with Klan regalia.
”I don`t think,” Pennington says dryly, ”they`re preserving the history.
”People make the rather lame excuse that a lot of blacks are collecting the black collectibles,” he says. ”I don`t really believe that. I believe there are a lot of racists out there collecting the stuff.”
He also states that most Nazi memorabilia belongs in museums, not homes.
”I would personally like to see the rest of it burned,” he says.
In the laissez-faire world of collecting, this is inflammatory talk.
”Ethics? What ethics? I don`t give a hoot what anybody collects,” says Harry Rinker, a syndicated columnist who edits the price guide ”Warman`s Americana & Collectibles” (Wallace-Homestead, $14.95). ”I was going to put my plaster skunk with the face of Hitler in my book, but my publisher said no.”
Most collectors and dealers fall somewhere in the middle. A typical dilemma-what to include, what to leave out-faces the authors of price guides, the dozens of thick books on antiques and collectibles that are updated and reissued every year.
A reader who picks up David Lindquist`s ”The Official 1990 Identification and Price Guide to Antiques & Collectibles” (House of Collectibles, $11.95) will find this note under a chapter on weapons: ”I succumbed to my personal prejudices-absolutely nothing to do with Nazi Germany will be found in this section.”
”I think it`s painful enough to think about what happened,” explains Lindquist, an antiques dealer in Chapel Hill, N.C., ”without collecting things that remind you of them daily.”
But readers will find Nazi memorabilia under ”World War II” in Ralph and Terry Kovel`s ”Kovel`s Antiques and Collectibles Price List” (Crown Publishers, $11.95).
”Arm Band, Swastika . . . $30.00,” one entry reads.
”Dagger, Nazi, Eagle & Swastika . . . $215.”
”A lot of people collect them because they`re neo-Nazi,” says Terry Kovel, who is Jewish. ”But others are war collectors and look at the items historically. So we list them. But we don`t list a lot of them. Let`s just say I censor a little bit.”
Kovel also refuses to run pictures of ”vicious” black memorabilia and struggles with her written descriptions. How can she describe an 1880 book titled ”Ten Little Niggers” without using offensive language? She can`t, but she lists few such items. (The book commands $178 to $185.)
Mixed feelings
Some black collectors report mixed feelings about whites who buy these objects. Jeannette Carson of Hyattsville, Md., who promotes black Americana shows and seminars around the country, says she notices at auctions that most white collectors ”bid on derogatory, exaggerated items, while most blacks bid on the historical, more positive items.”
Such items include leg irons, books, slave quilts, photographs, art and inventions-things that speak eloquently or poignantly of black history. More visible are mass-produced advertisements and objects portraying what Denis Mercier at the University of Pennsylvania calls ”the white man`s black man.” ”I don`t say white collectors should not have black memorabilia, because it`s American history, not just black history,” Carson concludes. ”But I do feel that primarily it should be in the hands of black collectors and in black museums.”
Other black collectors, Stephen Lewis included, have no quarrel with whites who collect derogatory images of blacks. Similarly, it is hard to predict how anyone will react to the preservation of Nazi artifacts.
Ruth Ellenbogen Sutton, a Highland Park English teacher, recalls a party where the host, a Glenview father of two, brought out weapons from his collection. One was his prized Civil War sword; another, a Third Reich helmet. Both repelled her. ”My parents are survivors of the war; they lost all their relatives in the war,” says Sutton, who is Jewish. ”But I would no sooner have a piece of Civil War ammunition in my house. I think selling weapons, collecting them, just perpetuates the myth that there is some kind of glory to war.”
Her host, who just added a Civil War bugle to his collection, disagrees.
”Wars are the exclamation points in history,” he says. ”Owning a weapon is like owning a piece of history, instead of a textbook.”
And in the New York City office of divorce attorney Raoul Lionel Felder, who is Jewish, clients can`t miss the shelves filled with World War II items, including four with Nazi signs or slogans.
”The first sign in saying the Holocaust did not exist is removing all signs of it,” Felder says.
”I don`t think these things should be allowed to disappear. People should remember that evil existed.”
