Obviously some kind of an in-joke, since he was neither Swedish nor Jewish. A nickname given him by fellow-students isn’t exactly genealogical evidence.

The 1940 census has them from Poland, which is why I decided upon “Austrian Poland” – Galicia probably.
The family were clearly keen to assimilate, so I expect you are correct that the author’s mother was uninterested in her partly Jewish ancestry.
I would be surprised if the daughter were equally so, given how useful such ancestry is these days.

Very unfortunate that the german americans were treated as they were after they had contributed so much to this country in culture, education, engineering, etc. The nicest neighborhoods in chicago were all german built areas. The near north side was german and the street names are still german names. It was the best area in chicago to live years ago. Maybe america will find the Puerto ricans, Mexicans and Africans more to it’s natural tendacies.

Thank you, Old Palo Altan — Not sure if this is the source you used as well, but it looks like the 1930 UScensus provides us with the answer:

This Peter Procknik (born about 1905)’s parents were named John and Ester Procknik, born in “Austria” circa 1876 and 1882, listed by the 1930 census-taker as immigrating in 1900 (which was around the time of their marriage, the father’s second and the mother’s first; this suggests to me they were possibly married in Europe shortly before leaving for America). Both John and Ester Procknik were listed as unable to read and write English, native language Yiddish listed for both, and both resident aliens (not naturalized citizens) still in 1930, after thirty years in America, which is also somewhat surprising in its own right.

No other native Yiddish speakers on this census sheet in 1930 (i.e., their nearest neighbors in Raynham town, Bristol County, Mass.); the majority of their neighbors appear to be of New England ancestry back to at least the mid-19th century (an individual’s parents birth places are listed on the 1930 census, and there are people as old as b.1860 on the Proknicks’ census sheet with parents born in New England). The neighbors have names like Ramsey, Hall, and Rogers; two families of Swedish origin and one of English-Canada origin. Nor only no Jews, not even any ethnic-Catholics. This was a WASP stronghold at the time. The wiki for Raynham, Massachusetts, suggests the place may still be 95% white today.

I had assumed a boy given the name “Peter” would be a Christian, but I don’t expect (m)any Christians would be native Yiddish speakers, so that settles it. Maybe this “Peter-Christian” assumption is a wrong one, or maybe he was a convert to Christianity (a modest trend at the time) and took the name in the early 20th century. In any case, these Proknicks were highly assimilated to WASP New England culture already a century ago, and their daughter Marilyn (mother of the author of this Karl Muck book) may have had little to no Jewish identity at all, with our author inherited New England Protestant identity on even this Procknik line.

Don’t post that on American Renaissance. They firmly believe England is solely populated by direct descendants of the Anglo Saxon invaders. With a few recent Indian and African newcomers.

see my comment #43

Except Eisenhower’s nickname was “the terrible Swedish Jew” in his West Point yearbook.

Ancestry.com to the rescue: the Procknicks were Austrian Polish Jews; very unusually, they were farmers in Massachusetts. Peter (a carpenter in 1940) married a Canadian Anglo, so our author is only one-quarter Jewish, and of the sort which would not have given her any kind of advantage socially.

Her Burrages are, if at all, only distantly connected to A C Burrage. They were drapers in Weston, Massachusetts for two generations at least. Our author was fascinated and understandably perhaps rather jealous of the wealth and fame of her namesake. Her fascination with the Boston Brahmin class is understandable, and she has turned it to good use, but a part of it she is not.
Given the sad decay of that class today, she suffers no loss.

Yes. I can’t imagine myself mingling and having solidarity with hidebound, porcine slacker crackers on one end or effete Beamer driving Clintonians.

Most Americans don’t realize that Anglo-Saxons were Germans who immigrated to England!

The Anglo-Saxons were indeed Germanic invaders of Britain in the 5th century. But current genetic research shows that “…the majority of Britons are Celts descended from Spanish tribes who began arriving about 7,000 years ago.”

https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle-2-15039/we-re-nearly-all-celts-under-the-skin-1-1141420

Houston 1992, I sort of hazily recall an anecdote about a British labor leader pre-WWI publicly complaining that British-made telephone receiver housings were cheaper than German-made housings then being imported into the UK. Why, he wondered, weren’t British-made housings being bought?

The author of the history noted sharply the German-made housings were imported completely outfitted with internal electromechanical components, while the British labor leader was simply pointing to the hollow British-made housing without any internals.

Han versus Hun? You’re right. I don’t know how you balance the relevant interests. As an ordinary American, I don’t want to be “played” into thinking the Chinese are “evil” when all they’re doing is exploiting economic opportunities opened up for them by Western elites for their–the elites’–reasons. At the same time, I have packaged fish in my freezer marked “product of China” and “product of India”, and I don’t feel great about putting a Gulf Coast or New England guy out of a job.

I never argue with stupidity. It’ll only drag you down to its level and beat you with experience.

Solid book review/article. Thank you, Fordham T. Smith.

_____________

Some supplementary info on the book’s author which may be of use/interest:

Melissa Dawn Burrage
Twitter handle: @newenglandgirll

– Born 1962 in Middleboro, Massachusetts, to Philip and Marilyn (nee Procknik) Burrage [born 1935/6 in Mass.] — While the mother’s maiden name, Procknik, could indicate partial Jewish ancestry (at least one famous, googleable Procknik/Prochnik is definitely Jewish), Marilyn’s parents’ names, Helena and Peter (both born circa 1905), indicate likely Ellis Island, Central/East European Christian stock (also, browsing the Acknowledgements section of the Karl Muck book, there is nothing there that indicates anything like a Jewish identity and much to indicate a secular-Christian, WASP identity);
– 1984: BA, Music, Keene State College [New Hampshire];
– circa 1990: married to Thomas Goodwin of Massachusetts; they reside in Weston, MA;
– Sept. 1992: First children, boy and girl twins, born (one dies 2015 in car accident); another daughter is born ca. 1995; the children use parents’ surnames hyphenated; all three became talented musicians and performed together around New England;
– Fall 1998: Begins studies at Harvard Extension School;
– 1998 to 2000s?: Writing consultant (adjunct) at Harvard University Extension School;
– 2004: Graduates from Harvard Extension School with MA in History (children at ages 9 to 12), from which she receives prize for best social science thesis (“Albert Cameron Burrage: An Allegiance to Boston’s Elite through a Lifetime of Political, Business and Social Reform,â€� investigates the activities of A.C. Burrage (1859-1931), lawyer, politician, mining entrepreneur, horticulturalist, and philanthropist”);
– 2008 to 2014: Doctoral studies at the University of East Anglia [UK] (American Studies); Dissertation title: “Caught on the Changing Cultural Battleground: Dr. Karl Muck in World War I Americaâ€�;
– 2010s?: “In her spare time, she is (slowly) restoring an antique sea captain’s home on Cape Cod;”
– June 2019: Publication of her Karl Muck book (presumably a popular-audience version of the 2014 dissertation);
– As of late 2019: “[W]orking on a second biography of a Boston Brahmin capitalist in the American West.” (2010s quotes from her profile at the Cape Cod Writers Center). This may refer to Albert Cameron Burrage, the subject of her 2004 thesis, and presumably either an ancestor or first-order relative of an ancestor.

_______________

I would offer a word of praise for Melissa Burrage in this way: While she could have easily had MA and PhD in hand ten, fifteen, years earlier, she put it all off to get married and raise three children. She deserves respect for this, as by circa the 1980s there was much pressure on smart young women to go for broke with career first, family last.

She continued her creative work after the children were raised. Her youngest daughter left home in or about August 2013 for college, and in the six years since that time, Melissa finished her PhD, published an impressive book, and has made progress on a second.

Your surly reply would seem to suggest that you must think of yourself a latter-day Ernest Newman, Boris Asafiev, H. H. Stuckenschmidt, or Virgil Thomson. So, please, I defer humbly to you and your erudition: Prove me wrong.

Utter complete stinking bullshit you vile evil liar.

They’ve been wreaking havoc for centuries.

https://browse.startpage.com/do/show_picture.pl?l=english&rais=1&oiu=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2Foriginals%2Fc1%2Fc3%2F27%2Fc1c327cced2607a0ddf81d4939ab78be.jpg&sp=981d5f9cee76f8feaeda82b5720c3a5f&t=default

What an interesting, informative article! I plan to save it. Thanks to Ron Unz for publishing it here; I would never have seen it otherwise.

Our Supreme Allied Commander was said to have been of Jewish German descent (((Eisenhauer))).

Only by idiots.

His mother was a member of the group that later adopted the names Jehovah’s Witnesses. My grandmother was a friend of hers.

His father is from quite a long line of Pennsylvania Dutch.

Musicians’ unions did not really become mainstream in the orchestral world until later in the 20th century. In Muck’s time a conductor or general music director had a lot more power to hire and fire than they do now. Their positions are largely ceremonial now and it shows in the orchestral playing of today: Precision without articulating anything. In fact, unions have probably been among the major reasons for the dimming of interest in classical music. Their sundry onerous rules, for example, regarding recordings and transmissions thereof make it financially impossible to venture into any kind of recording project of the sort taken for granted by the likes of Eugene Ormandy, Fritz Reiner, Charles Munch, George Szell, et al with their American orchestras.

Some quibbles with this article…

Under [Karl Muck’s] leadership, the BSO became the nation’s leading orchestra…

The BSO certainly became one of the top orchestras. However, his efforts were aided enormously by the work of his predecessor Arthur Nikisch, perhaps the most famous conductor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In addition, Leopold Stokowski and Frederick Stock had in Philadelphia and in Chicago respectively already built ensembles that arguably were not only among the best in the US, but surpassed all but a handful of European ensembles.

Despite [Burrage’s] hypermodern moral posturing…

How is this any different from the moral outrage of the society ladies she describes in her own book? Then as now, white women are the most insufferable scolds and hairshirts of all.

You cant separate ideology from race. Every race has it’s own inclination to it’s own racial characteristics that is reflected by its racial ideology

It’s too late for lesson learning. We should have learned our lesson in ww1. and stayed out of ww2. The mistakes have been made and the results have been catastrophic. No turning back now.

Baloney. We gained nothing from entering ww1.

when the chips are down, we should all remain with our own.

And exactly who is “our own”?

The Dissident Right?

No thanks.

If you want to unite as Right-wingers or as Fascists go knock yourselves out (literally).

But if you want to equate “Right” with White then you deserve to be crushed to death like the bugs that you are.

All kinds of good things come from White people.

But nothing good will ever come from the Right – ever.

We don’t have enough problems that we have to contend with morons who insist on equating ideology with race?

So he busted musician’s unions, did he. Well, then, I’m glad he’s dead. Fuck him.

Curious that so far no one has mentioned just how magnificent a conductor actually Muck was. His version of Parsifal, available on CD from I think Naxos is a supreme revelation of the difference between a good conductor like, say, Karajan, and a sublimely great one like Muck.

That Adolf Hitler recognised Muck’s greatness is no surprise: his profound knowledge and understanding of Wagner is just one marker among many of the cultural superiority he enjoyed over those who shared the historical stage with him.

As for those wonderful Boston Brahmins: they were too late and then too hesitant to stop the destruction of everything they had accomplished and held dear (Boston itself, its clubs and museums, Harvard, their own high and dry religion (the Unitarian), etc.) but at least their wiser members had seen it coming and rightly named the enemy: the unassimilable immigrant, from the Catholic Irish to the Polish Jew.

Our country would be a very different place had “eternal vigilance” ever been more than a vain aspiration.

“We can learn from those mistakes.”

We have not, up to the present time…..

And remember, the Stalinists were much worse than anyone accused the Germans of being. Thereby vindicating both General Patton and Adolf Hitler. All the sufferings of the Cold War and the many millions of deaths in both World Wars, because America chose the wrong side in both wars. The propaganda of the lying mainstream media, and blackmailing of some of out politicians, brought that about. We can learn from those mistakes.

The Brits dragged America into the first World War to destroy Germany as a rival; the Americans pushed Britain into the second World War to destroy their rival, Britain.

Terrific ar.ticle

Yes, exactly.

Han versus the Hun

Any good link to data on how large were theUK trade deficits with US (food) and Germany ( manufactures, chemicals , pharmaceutical perhaps ? How do those compare with ours to China ? I would bet China is running a far larger surplus in% terms than Germany ever ran with UK.
Certainly, there would have been little or no IP transfer to Germany via universities etc versus what the US is doing by letting the Han dominate the grad school enrollment

It seems that Karl Muck wasn’t the only musician arrested and interned as an emery alien during WW I. Another conductor, Ernst Kunwald of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra was also arrested.

In fact so many other musicians were arrested that Karl Muck was able to conduct a full symphony orchestra when he made his last performance at the Interment camp at Fort Oglethorpe , Georgia

It is highly likely that those musicians were denounced by their artistic rivals in order to gain advancement

Just one item about the Statue of Liberty. Its association with Emma Lazarus’ later ode to immigration has eclipsed the original meaning of the great monument. French sculptor Bartholdi named his creation “Goddess Liberty enlightening the world.� He conceived the idea for the statue on July Fourth 1865 to commemorate the suppression of the slaveholder insurrection two months earlier; Lazarus’ poem was not added until1903. Bartholdi proposed to give the statue to the people of America as an enduring monument to their successful struggle to preserve the world’s sole experiment in republican self-government.

Americans of 1865 understood it was their responsibility to maintain the free institutions of their republic as an example to the world, not to function as an asylum for its poor and downtrodden. It was the world’s peoples’ task to fight free government in their own homelands, not to relocate to ours. While Europe’s despots cheered the collapse of America’s first republic in 1861, there was an immense outpouring of support among the common folk for the Union and the hope for democracy in their own nations that it inspired. Mindful of the 1848 republican revolutions that convulsed the Old Word, British and European rulers dared not endorse the Confederate oligarchy, lest they trigger a new round of class warfare in their own restive kingdoms.

Mass immigration of non-English speaking people was allowed for the first time in the corrupt laissez-faire Gilded Age that followed the Civil War because the victorious northern capitalists needed vast supplies of cheap labor to do the hard manual and industrial work that Americans did not wish to do, having fought a costly war to abolish the most grotesque form of exploitation of labor, and which four million ex-slaves could no longer be compelled to do without wages.

it’s quite amazing that nothing similar happened only two decades later in WWII

Oh it did, we just changed the target race to the Japanese, as like Dan states, the German race had been sufficiently castigated in the previous war, never to recover.

Our Supreme Allied Commander was said to have been of Jewish German descent (((Eisenhauer))).
And yes, we know with which blood line he sided with.

You must hope that no one actually listens to you on that video as you have been very careless with fact. ” WW1 was a childish squabble amongst heartless Royals” is just comic book stuff. And to say “the war dragged on for two more bloody years” after President Wilson got war declared suggests no familiarity with the subject at all. (It was 18 months).

“When those who controlled the media realized that Germany was an economic threat . . .”.

Alfred, my understanding is cheap American grain and cheap German manufactures (after 1870) put the squeeze on British elites. I don’t think the Kaiser and his diplomats understood how adept British elites transformed those farty, parochial Prussians (see, e. g., Theodor Fontane’s novels) into an epochal threat to civilization.

“By World War II it [Germanophobia] had essentially totally eviscerated German-American culture and political strength.”

Dan, that’s pretty much my understanding, too. There’s a sort of remnant German-American culture in those countryfied singing and dancing clubs, but you’re not going to see, for example, an energetic German-American book discussion group focusing on 20th century literature and history.

This extremely ugly Muck story seems to me of a piece with Ron Unz’s essay on the Japanese-Americans’ properties being divvied up by opportunists during WWII. War and the need for solidarity brings out the scoundrel in some people, who use conflict as cover for their personal agendas. We talk about that a lot here.

Better to have Tribal homosexuals like Lenny Bernstein, Tilson Thomas and James Levine running the musical show. They are somehow ‘cleaner’. LOL Disgusting what has happened in the classical music world. It’s mostly Jewish money selling the product, anymore.

One of my great-grandfathers was a German who went to England long before WW1. He married an English lady. He was a surveyor and his name was König. He had to change his name to “King”

The British royal family was called Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and changed that to Windsor in 1917.

The Germans were very popular in the England of the 19th century. They had saved the British at Waterloo and they had trashed the French a bit later. The French were always the historic enemies of the English (not of the Scots).

When those who controlled the media realized that Germany was an economic threat – the “Entente Cordiale” came into being with the French. The Germans were savagely portrayed. The pubs that were called the “Kaiser’s Head” changed to the “King’s Head” The Kaiser visiting Morocco on his yacht became a “cause celebre” – on par with the MH-17 false flag.

In some ways, Europe was more “multi-cultural” in those days than it is today. But because White people look similar, this is not so obvious.

Germany had recently beaten France in 1870 and become a big deal in the 1890s, Christmas trees and Kindergarten. So you could also look on the Anglo-Saxon enmity as a result of primal sibling jealousy. “How dare my little cousin Kaiser Wilhelm think he is my equal!” thought the Brits. Then elites of the two countries were related by blood, Great Britain could not bear their little cousin Germany becoming a great continental power so simple jealously ran, like a glowing green vein of irritation thru a lot of the British elite.
And so the lies and propaganda machine went to work…..’they impale Belgian babies on bayonets’…’the Boche are ethno and racist’. This last accusation was the pot calling the kettle black. Great Britain had been led by Disraeli in mid century, a PM and novelist who was a self proclaimed  ethnocentrist.
In 1847 Disraeli had Sidonia, one of his novel’s characters, proclaim to the world, “All is race, there is no other truth”
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/04/complicated-jewishness-benjamin-disraeli
And so little cousin Germany simply took the racism and Social Darwinism, so fashionable in Britain in the late 1800s, and way way too bluntly and honestly, Germany started acting upon the precepts taught by her older and bigger sibling Britain. The resultant world condemnation showed the Germans had gotten too big for their lederhosen and they learned the hard diplomatic truth that ‘Honesty is the worst policy.’

I don’t think America entered WW1 because it was racially led by an elite whose ethnicity was much more British than Germans. No, Germany had to be stopped from becoming an unbeatable world superpower and by 1917 it was obvious that only America could do that.

By the begining of WW2, American money and technology (see Wall St And The Rise of Hitler by AP Sutton) , along with German reorganisation for greater revenue raising powers by central government had made it an even stronger contender for world power than under the Kaiser.

The whole of the problem with the American elite is that they are making too much money to admit that China is the new Germany, wining by a mercantilist blitzkrieg and it has to be stopped even if that causes economic pain, The Deep State part of the establishment think their futile secret intelligence service games with Russia are still the most significant thing happening in the world.

The remnants of America’s still virulent World War I germanophobia had taken its toll. By World War II it had essentially totally eviscerated German-American culture and political strength. A job well-done by the Anglo-American establishment!

If only we could do the same to the Latinx……

[It’s very bad behavior to leave the same long and off-topic comment on several different threads and may get most of your future comments trashed. Maybe you would be happier departing for some other website.]

this passage should be met with some sadness regarding the hidebound chauvinism whites used to have toward other whites. This attitude will have to be discarded entirely for whites to have enough solidarity to thrive in the next century

The author can’t have it both ways. The difference between a Dutchman and a Jersey-Shore-type is at least as far as between the latter and non-Whites.

This short documentary mentions German-American persecution during World War I, and the massive numbers of draft dodgers. It also notes problems with the British royals German roots, including the fact the Kaiser was a first cousin and buddy of the King of England. Most Americans don’t realize that Anglo-Saxons were Germans who immigrated to England!

Video Link

Logan:

The remnants of America’s still virulent World War I germanophobia had taken its toll. By World War II it had essentially totally eviscerated German-American culture and political strength. A job well-done by the Anglo-American establishment!

Given the vitriolic hatred of Germans in WWI, it’s quite amazing that nothing similar happened only two decades later in WWII. Best demonstrated by the family name of the #1 General of the Allied forces in Europe.

One of the best articles to appear on Unz.