Josephine Baker’s Secret War By Hanna Diamond Yale University Press, 352 pages, $35 Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw.” If you read any well-informed account of the life of le tout Paris between the wars, you’ll almost certainly run across her name. Before picking up Hanna Diamond’s eye-opening new book, Josephine Baker’s Secret War, all I knew about her was that she was an obscure black American woman who moved to France and almost instantly became a star of the stage — and, occasionally, screen. Yes, she apparently sang effectively, and she was by all accounts a spectacularly original dancer (whose outfits could be shockingly revealing), but aside from those gifts, she was universally described as having a quality about her — an “it” factor — that I’ve never seen anybody elucidate usefully. Instead they’ve made do with labels. Captivating. Alluring. Intriguing. And, yes, sexy. Until now, I had no sense of her whatsoever as a three-dimensional human being: nearly always, when her name is mentioned in cultural histories, it is as a symbol of an era, a legendary embodiment of Jazz Era glamour, a woman of color who, treated as a second-class citizen in Jim Crow America, became in France something close to an object of worship. Viewed from the perspective of a century later, she can seem almost unreal, a figure who, for all her fame, remains something of a mystery. But Diamond has changed that. She has not only given us a full-bodied portrait of Baker but has also assembled an account of a woman who, it turns out, was not only an unusually charismatic entertainer but — believe it or not — a courageous spy for the Allies during World War II. Born in 1906 into a poor family in East St. Louis, Freda Josephine McDonald (she acquired her stage surname from the first of her three husbands), Baker went to New York, danced in a Broadway chorus line, then appeared in a revue in which she was discovered by the wife of a Paris-based U.S. diplomat. Hired to perform in that city, she arrived in Europe in September 1925 and, merely a week later, after doing her “danse sauvage” in the “Revue nègre” at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, was “the talk of the town.” Soon she was dividing her time between performing in music-hall shows and singing in her own nightclub. Beginning in 1928, she spent two and a half years touring Europe and South America, singing her signature tune, “J’ai deux amours,” and winning acclaim everywhere. Returning to France, she branched out to talkies and to French operetta — the latter move cementing what had been an increasing if seemingly improbable tendency to view this black American woman as “a potent symbol of France, its commitment to freedom and the accomplishment of its colonial project.” The very fact that Baker seemed a thoroughly unlikely spy turned out to be a huge plus: wherever she went, nobody ever suspected what she was up to. When the war began in 1939, Baker, impatient to demonstrate her devotion to the country that had made her a star, volunteered to work as a spy for the French. At first Jacques Abtey, a counterintelligence officer to whom she was introduced, flatly rejected the idea, unable to imagine the queen of cabaret as an undercover agent. Soon, however, they were partners in espionage (and, eventually, lovers), operating in cities across unoccupied Europe and North Africa — especially in Spanish and French Morocco. The very fact that Baker seemed a thoroughly unlikely spy turned out to be a huge plus: wherever she went, nobody ever suspected what she was up to. If she needed to travel to a city to engage in clandestine activities, she could arrange a concert date there tout de suite. When she crossed borders, customs officials weren’t interested in seeing her papers or frisking her (if they’d done so, they’d have found sensitive documents pinned to the insides of her garments) but in getting her autograph. And wherever she went — Lisbon, Madrid, Marrakesh, Casablanca, Algiers, Tunis, Cairo, Beirut — there were rich and powerful people who were eager to throw parties in her honor, to which they would invite other rich and powerful people (including German diplomats, as well as Spanish and Portuguese officials with German connections) who, after a drink or two, would seek to impress the world-famous Miss Baker by indiscreetly sharing classified information. And when they didn’t mean to share it, she overheard it. “If they had known!” she said after one soirée. “I was listening! I missed nothing. The Spanish officers were chatty.” They were also generous, granting her a permanent travel visa that made her espionage work far easier than it was for Abtey, who often found himself twiddling his thumbs while Baker moved with ease from one country to another. Before long, Baker was working not just with the French but also with the British and with a corps of Americans who would later form the OSS (and, still later, the CIA) and who were in North Africa to prepare for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion that began on November 8, 1942. Baker’s involvement with them caused her relationship with America, writes Diamond, “to grow and deepen in ways she could never have anticipated.” She, in turn, proved indispensable to the Yanks’ preparations. In a document whose contents Diamond reveals here for the first time, Lt. Paul Jensen, the director of the U.S. counterintelligence unit stationed in Marrakesh, stated that Baker, acting “at great risk to her life,” had been “our No. 1 contact in French Morocco,” her “intimate knowledge of the situation in Marrakech” enabling them to “vitiate the subversive efforts” of local German officials and to “curtail enemy communications.” In addition to providing “the names of Nazi espionage agents in hiding,” Baker helped the Americans to befriend leading members of the Arab community, whose own store of information led to the capture of a German general and the arrest of several hundred German agents. The French praised her too, with one report declaring: “Her devotion is boundless and completely disinterested. With a quick and dynamic mind, Josephine is capable of rendering us great service in the study of the circles of the great Moroccan chiefs, a milieu where she could hardly be better accepted.” Her encounters with the American military, to be sure, had a negative side. Although the GIs generally treated her with great respect, some of the white soldiers spouted racial epithets. Her Arab friends asked her: “How can the U.S. honestly present us with the Atlantic Charter when their policies towards their own nationals are so obviously based on old racist prejudices?” When performing for American troops, Baker took her own little stand against segregation, requiring that at her shows — unlike those of other entertainers — black soldiers were permitted to sit in the front rows. (Baker also made sure to spend time with the black GIs, and even wrote to many of their parents; performing in the U.S. years later, she would be approached by some of those parents, who had brought her letters with them.) Yet Baker chose to look at the bright side of her encounters with the Americans, telling a reporter that she was pleased to have discovered “that all of America is not prejudiced against the Negroes” and that she was “proud and thrilled at the great advancement my race is making in this war.” She now had, she said, two purposes in life: “First, I want to do what I can to win the war and thus perform whatever duty I can for my native land. Second, I want to help those of my own race.” There was, however, one exception to Baker’s plain talk on race and prejudice. While criticizing America’s failings, she stayed mum on France’s. Her friends in the Maghreb sought freedom from France, but Baker’s patriotism made it impossible for her to take their side; on the contrary, in response to requests from above, she did her best “to restrain the most extreme elements within the nationalist movement” in North Africa, and in doing so, according to one observer, “powerfully supported the very precarious situation of France.” By this point her devotion to la belle Republique was palpable to all and sundry: when entertaining French troops, noted a reporter for Variety, “the applause is more, deeper, nearer the heart, than just that accorded a popular artist.” How curious it was, the reporter wrote, that an “unknown colored girl from St. Louis … symbolizes Paris for thousands of Frenchmen.” Baker was, moreover, not just a patriot but a Gaullist: first introduced to the Free French general at a gala in Algiers in August 1943, she went on to become his close friend and frequent correspondent. In Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Hanna Diamond has established one thing for all time: that Josephine Baker was a world-class heroine. In the course of performing her espionage duties, she survived a deadly car accident in Africa, a plane crash off the coast of Corsica, and two near-fatal illnesses that kept her bedridden for weeks at a time. When not entertaining troops in combat zones, she sang to countless patients in innumerable hospitals, and when Allied soldiers liberated Buchenwald, she was on the scene to sing to former prisoners. And her service continued after the war: following the liberation of Paris, Baker, who had returned home as soon as it was possible, was delegated by the French government to play hostess to the Sultan of Morocco with the goal of “mak[ing] him feel good” about North Africa remaining in French hands. Baker’s postwar years brought new triumphs, but also new travails. Visiting New York in 1949, she was refused dinner at the famous Stork Club — an incident that led the newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, who happened to have witnessed it, to make her the heavy, labeling her a Communist and charging that she’d spent the war “wining and dining the Nazis.” In response, Jensen, who in the aforementioned document had called Baker the Americans’ “No. 1 contact in French Morocco,” spoke out in the press, explaining in detail how she’d “risked her life” for America and stating that she was “responsible for his winning the Silver Star.” As it happens, furthermore, another celebrity had been at the Stork Club that night: Princess Grace of Monaco, who, when Baker fell on hard times in later years, gave her a house on the Riviera and, after Baker’s death in 1975, arranged for her to be buried in Monaco. How, you might wonder, could the beloved Josephine Baker have fallen on hard times? The answer is that she overextended herself, expanding her chateau in the rural Dordogne into a tourist resort and, over the course of the 1950s, adopting no fewer than a dozen children from around the world, many of whom she snapped up while on tour. (In an exceedingly inappropriate move that seems thoroughly out of character, she made a public spectacle of what she called her “rainbow family,” putting them on display for visitors to her resort as living emblems of racial harmony.) In 1961, after a long and inexplicable delay, she was awarded the Légion d’honneur and the Croix de Guerre avec palme. Two years later, she spoke at the March on Washington, saying: “I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens …. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee.” Yet even as she challenged segregation in America, Baker persisted in her refusal to bad-mouth France: during the Algerian war (1954-62) her patriotism stayed rock-solid; in May 1968, when left-wing students took to the barricades, she stood up for de Gaulle. And in 2021, forty-six years after her death, she became the first black woman to be inducted into the Panthéon, taking her place alongside the likes of Voltaire, Zola, and Rousseau — a well-deserved honor for a woman whose wartime record, revealed in its entirety for the first time in Josephine Baker’s Secret War, makes it clear that she was, in fact, far more remarkable than even her most ardent admirers imagined. READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: The Sandersons Fail Manhattan Shows How Radicals Have Captured Western Institutions Looking Back at All About Eve Who Was Vernon Duke?

I have just finished re-reading Irving Stone’s historical novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, on the life and times of Michelangelo.  It is a rousing and inspiring book, filled with personages of the Italian Renaissance in all their high aims, their passions, their wickedness, their love, their treacheries, their fast-bound friendships, their soaring genius, their failures.  Lorenzo the Magnificent is here, and the Platonic academy of scholars he gathered about him; the brilliant architect Bramante is here, filled with envy against his Florentine rival; sweet-tempered Raphael is here, and the vain and many-talented Leonardo, and friendly Ghirlandaio with his earthly imagination, and the elderly miniaturist Bertoldo passing on to the boy Michelangelo all that he had learned from Donatello. Popes are here, the pious and the worldly, ever-deceitful Alexander VI, warlike Julius II, fat and self-satisfied Leo X, ascetic Pius III, and more. One of the most baleful developments in higher education, as I now see, is this dissociation of the mind from the hands. Stone did an immense lot of research for the book, as his long bibliography attests, and his careful and accurate descriptions of places and objects, such as the marble quarries at Carrara and the mountain-faces nearby, and the peculiar character of the blocks that Michelangelo chose to work on.  The novel is sprinkled with many translations of Michelangelo’s poetry, quite well done, which Stone said he relied on assistants to produce, as also on others to translate for him various texts and letters written in Italian, French, and Latin. In this way, The Agony and the Ecstasy resembles, in character though of course not in greatness, what Michelangelo and the other artists, architects, and scholars did.  They conceived of vast undertakings, which required comprehensive and acutely specific knowledge of many crafts, and teams of men subordinated both to the master and to the hierarchy of his near subordinates. Even to cover a large wall with fresco painting, regardless of the quality of the work, was a huge project.  When Michelangelo was a boy apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, he had to learn how to mix and grind paints, how to prepare a wall for plastering, what recipes to use for the plaster under different conditions, how to draw up the huge sheets of cartoni, the “cartoons,” and to apply them to the walls as a guide, how to overlay one color with another to suggest depth and shading, and countless other tasks.  When, soon after, he got his first contracts for sculpture, he had to oversee the choice of the marble blocks, relying on expert stonecutters to sever them from the mountain and to transport them safely down.  He needed to build his own forge, requiring assistance from blacksmiths, because he fashioned his own chisels, punches, and files, made to specification according to the peculiarities of the work in hand. He used assistants to purchase materials he needed, such as hundreds of pounds of wax for molding models of what he was going to sculpt.  When he worked in bronze, he needed experts in casting, bell-makers and cannon-makers, who could build controlled fires at extremely high temperatures to cause the metal to pour evenly into the mold.  He built his own scaffolding when he painted the Sistine ceiling, and the scaffold itself was a work of craftsmanship in carpentry and the balance of forces, so built as not to require iron poles as stabilizers punching holes in the ceiling itself and thus spoiling the whole. I don’t suppose it will be controversial to say that such an education as produced Michelangelo is available nowhere in the United States.  I do not know if it is available anywhere in the world.  But at Thales College, where I now teach, we are embarking on an unusual project of recovery, and one I recommend to private high schools, all classical schools, and boys’ schools especially.  Thales is a business college with a firm commitment to a thorough education in the classics and the liberal arts.  The business we stress is in the area of making things. The manufacturer, the craftsman, and the scholar in the humanities should be close friends, even collaborators. Michelangelo learned to read and to write Italian poetry not in the school where his father sent him in his early years; there he learned almost nothing. He learned it by conversing with the scholars that Lorenzo de’ Medici surrounded himself with, from the polymath Pico della Mirandola, the gentle Platonist Ficino, the textual scholar Landino, and the poet and courtier Poliziano.  He also gained his inspiration by close reading of Scripture.  He could not have conceived of the divinity of the human form had he not had that informal but all the more personal and powerful education. He could not have made his conception manifest had he never gotten his hands rough with the matter he worked on.  Nor could he have done so had he not, as everyone else did, run his studio as a business, animated by a team of men, each with his own skills, his responsibilities, and his work in learning, instruction, and execution. One of the most baleful developments in higher education, as I now see, is this dissociation of the mind from the hands.  We end up, for example, with architects who draw abstract designs, but who have never laid a brick, and what they produce is grim and inhuman, as are the glass and steel towers that ruin the character of our great cities, or incompetent in taking ordinary human actions and feelings into account, as was the notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. In the other direction, we end up with masons who are good with their hands, who can build a fine wall, but who know little of the West’s heritage of civic art; whose ideas do not soar, because they have never been shown the dome of human accomplishment to which they might aspire.  Not that the architects, in this respect, are in a much better position, as that same tradition of civic art has been traduced, scorned, or forgotten. I confess that I do not understand the pettiness.  I had an aspiration when I was young.  It was to become a great poet.  I won’t say to what extent I have realized that aspiration, but I have not given it up, as the latest work I have executed, immense in conception, will attest.  My point is that when I was in college, I wanted to immerse myself in the greatest poets of the English language, from all historical eras, and I did just that; and then I moved on from English to Italian, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Latin, and as I grew older and had begun my career as a professor, moving still farther, with many stumbles and interruptions, to Greek, Hebrew, Welsh, French, Spanish, and more.  I wanted to learn from the masters.  I still want to learn.  The poetic Edda, in Old Norse, beckons, as does Os Lusiados, in Portuguese.  When I discover a new meter, as I have in the poetry of Alessandro Manzoni, I feel as an explorer must feel when he climbs to the top of a rise overgrown with trees and tangled bushes, and sees before him an abandoned temple, long forgotten. Imagine then what might happen if we could join again these powerful forces, the passion to know and the drive to make — to make stupendous things, to build a dome for man to reflect the great vault of heaven above.  Why, most of our English teachers themselves have but a passing acquaintance, if that, with such prodigious works of genius as The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost.  They have been given to suppose that such works, from the benighted past, are beneath their attention, or if they do study them, they do so to debunk them, to expose them as incompetent frauds, which they most certainly were not. Maybe it is futile to begin with those who have spent their lives in the academy, unless they have managed against all odds to preserve their love of great literature and art for their own sake.  Maybe we can begin instead with carpenters, masons, metalworkers, and various other craftsmen, with courses of study designed to bring them together and to learn of the great works that the men of old once wrought, not always in wood and metal and stone, but with words also, and thoughts, and deeds.  They, I believe, would be more readily inspired, hungrier to learn, than anybody else in our time.  It is certainly worth trying.  It will be like what Donatello did when he went to Rome, its treasures buried under centuries of earth and debris.  Donatello went there with a shovel. We too have nothing to lose, and a world to begin to recover. READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: ‘Magical Keys’ Are No Substitute for Real Knowledge At the Tip of Your Fingers Keep the End in View

“We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” That is how Vladimir Lenin began his speech to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on November 8, 1917. Mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani in his victory speech quoted not Lenin but Eugene Debs, the five-time Socialist presidential candidate, but like Lenin he outlined his vision of a socialist order for New York. “The future,” Mamdani said, “is in our hands.” The workers — the proletariat — will wield political power. “[W]e insisted that no longer would politics be something that is done to us,” he continued, “[n]ow it is something that we do.” His election, he told his crowd of supporters, ushers in a “new age.” And that new age is the socialist order. The Democratic Party socialists here don’t use all of the terror tactics of the Bolsheviks. But they do use the coercive powers of government … to impose their will on the country. It is noteworthy that most, if not all, of New York’s leading Democratic Party politicians supported Mamdani’s campaign. So did former President Barack Obama, whose victory speech in 2008 proclaimed “This is our moment. This is our time,” and who before the election promised to “fundamentally transform” America. Obama and Mamdani have much in common, including an African-Muslim heritage, an elite education, and a background in community activism. Obama as president, however, quietly, cautiously attempted to fundamentally transform America — and largely succeeded. Under his presidency and Biden’s presidency (largely staffed with Obama appointees), the far left completed their takeover of America’s major institutions and implemented a woke, DEI agenda that, despite President Trump’s best efforts, is still with us. We know what Lenin’s socialist order meant for Russians and the world — secret police, political repression, state-induced famines, show trials, political purges, Gulags. The so-called socialist workers’ state enslaved workers. Lenin was an intellectual who had nothing in common with the working class, yet he claimed to speak for them and to govern for them even while he oppressed them. Mamdani, too, is an intellectual who has nothing in common with working class New Yorkers, yet he, too, claims he will wield power on their behalf. In his victory speech, Mamdani pledged to fight for “Yemeni bodega owners,” “Mexican abuelas,” “Senegalese taxi drivers,” “Uzbek nurses,” “Trinidadian cooks,” and “Ethiopian aunties.” The socialist anthem, after all, says, “The international shall be the human race.” Lenin’s socialist order was in reality the dictatorship of the proletariat. Karl Marx predicted that the dictatorship would end when the classless society emerged, but Lenin and his Bolsheviks had no intention of establishing a classless society. Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be the ruling class — the nomenklatura that exercises political power and enjoys privileges denied to other classes. The socialists of the Democratic Party — Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Bernie Sanders and, yes, Barack Obama — are ideological soulmates of Lenin. They, too, want to construct a socialist order. The Democratic Party socialists here don’t use all of the terror tactics of the Bolsheviks. But they do use the coercive powers of government and their control of institutions to attempt to impose their will on the country. The Obama-Biden governments used the administrative or “deep” state and lawfare to attack their political opposition, while some far-left state and local officials followed suit. News reports indicate that their lawfare is under scrutiny by a grand jury in Florida. Socialism is one of the great evils that emerged in the 20th century, as in country after country the state assumed more and more power. The American political philosopher James Burnham, who flirted with socialism in the 1930s, saw the emergence of a new ruling class that ushered in what he called the “managerial revolution” which in all countries expanded the “scope of activities of the state” and consequently the power of governments to control the “most important economic, social, political, and cultural institutions of society.” The managers he predicted, would try “to increase their relative power and privilege” over the citizens they rule. The great British historian Paul Johnson made the growth of state power one of the major themes of his masterful history of the 20th century, Modern Times. Johnson noted “the impressive speed with which the modern state could expand itself and the inexhaustible appetite which it thereupon developed both for the destruction of its enemies and for the exercise of despotic power over its own citizens.” Socialists like Lenin, he wrote, had an “unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind.” We have seen what attempts at construction of the socialist order can do to our country during the Obama and Biden presidencies. We will now see what attempts at construction of the socialist order will do to New York. It won’t be pretty. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Reagan–Thatcher, Trump–Takaichi, and Cold War II MacArthur Returns to the Philippines: Remembering October 20, 1944 Taiwan and Trafalgar: Lessons From the Past for Today’s US Navy  

Nine men who identify as women were awarded “Women of the Year” by Glamour UK. The men, many of whom are models, were recognized as “dolls.” (RELATED: Science Has Finally Come For Transgenderism)  The Spectator P.M. Podcast hosts Ellie Gardey Holmes and Lyrah Margo analyze the “Protect the Dolls” initiative and criticize the absurdity of the award. They also express disappointment with the selections of Rachel Zegler and Rachel Anne Accurso, otherwise known as “Ms. Rachel,” as the recipients of the award in the U.S. for their support of the “Free Palestine” movement. (WATCH: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 121: Rachel Zegler Ruined Snow White)  Tune in to hear their discussion! Read Ellie and Lyrah’s writing here and here. Listen to the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Spotify. Watch the Spectator P.M. Podcast on Rumble.

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During a tense Oval Office exchange in September, President Donald Trump didn’t mince words for ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl. “ABC is a terrible network, a very unfair network, and you should be ashamed of yourself,” Trump told Karl. “Frankly, you’re a terrible reporter. You know it, and so do I.” Karl had asked Trump a question about free speech, which sparked the president’s criticism—and a chance to brag about ABC’s public apology and $16 million payment to settle a defamation case with Trump. “For you to stand there and act so innocent and ask me a question like that,” Trump replied to Karl. “But look, you paid a big price because you were dishonest, Jon. The reason I won that lawsuit was because you were dishonest.” Karl, who has known and covered Trump for over 30 years, described the encounter during a Daily Signal interview Thursday. He also shared what happened after the camera were off and the president had a private moment with the reporter. “I said to him, ‘That was pretty tough, mean, with the live cameras going,” Karl recalled. “And he said, ‘No, you were tough on me.’ And he starts laughing. And so, even when he’s really gone after me, it doesn’t last long.” Karl is the author of a new bestseller, “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America,” which offers the reporter’s behind-the-scenes insights into the 2024 presidential campaign. Karl’s three-decade relationship with Trump, which began when he was a young reporter at the New York Post in 1994, provided him with a unique perspective—and direct access to the president. Despite their well-documented public sparring matches, Karl revealed a more nuanced dynamic when he’s one on one with Trump. In the book, Karl wrote about a call he placed to Trump following the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt. The audio version of Karl’s book even includes real-life audio from his phone calls with Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon. Comparing him to other presidents he’s covered, Karl highlighted Trump’s unique ability to command a room. The book provides frame-by-frame analysis of the Trump-Biden debate, contrasting Biden’s shuffling entrance with Trump’s calculated positioning—reminiscent of a WWE wrestler commanding the crowd before entering the ring. “Americans like strong. They will choose strong and wrong over weak and right,” Karl noted, quoting former President Bill Clinton while describing how Trump dominated the debate before a single question was asked. The book’s title, “Retribution,” reflects what Karl identifies as the central motivation of Trump’s campaign. Karl contends the numerous prosecutions against Trump were instrumental in fueling his political resurrection. Looking ahead, Karl discussed the future of the GOP post-Trump and whether any Republican will be able to harness MAGA’s enthusiasm for Trump. Karl’s goal with “Retribution” was straightforward: to document the most important election of our lifetime while telling the story of “a hell of a campaign” for history. The post What Jonathan Karl’s Behind-the-Scenes Reporting Reveals About Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.