RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/html/bullets-and-baseball-fourth-july-16005.html

On Tuesday, July 4, 1950, a New York Giants baseball fan named Bernard “Barney” Doyle was sitting in the grandstands at the Polo Grounds in uptown Manhattan, waiting for a Giants–Dodgers doubleheader to begin. Doyle, a 53-year-old ship’s carpenter and freight worker from New Jersey, had attended early mass that morning to give himself plenty of time for the drive into the city. The showdown between crosstown rivals was sure to be a sellout.

Seated next to Doyle, who had earned a niche in sports history managing the early career of heavyweight boxing champ James J. “Cinderella Man” Braddock, was 13-year-old Otto Flaig, a neighbor’s son. At 30 minutes past noon, as the Dodgers took the field for batting practice, Doyle leaned forward in Seat 3 of Row C in Section 42 and started to say something to young Otto. But before he could speak, he lurched backward in his seat, stone dead.

At first, the ballpark cops suspected a heart attack. Then they noticed the hole in Doyle’s left temple. The game went on as Doyle was carried out of the stadium, though several members of the overflow crowd were said to have scuffled over his empty seat. An autopsy showed that the Giants fan from Jersey had been struck by a .45 caliber bullet. Otto Flaig, who had missed death by inches and whom the cops said complained about missing the doubleheader, did not hear any shots. Neither did anyone else in Section 42. The bullet, detectives quickly realized, must have been fired from Coogan’s Bluff, the rocky escarpment that rose above the western end of the Polo Grounds.

Sometimes called “Tightwad Hill” because thrifty Giants fans atop the precipice preferred a partial view of the ballfield to the price of a ticket, Coogan’s Bluff was home to several apartment buildings on Edgecombe Avenue, which runs along the ridgeline. For two days, detectives scoured the neighborhood and the apartments before a tip led them to a 14-year-old boy named Robert Peebles. They found various weapons in the apartment where Peebles lived, and he confessed to firing the fatal shot. Six months earlier, he told the police, he had found the .45 in Central Park, with one bullet remaining in the magazine. He had been waiting to celebrate the Fourth with a bang. After climbing to the roof of 515 Edgecombe Avenue, he looked down on 49,000 fans jam-packed into the Polo Grounds, aimed the pistol into the air, and pulled the trigger. A few seconds later, 1,200 feet away, Barney Doyle fell dead. Peebles said that when he heard what happened, he threw the gun away. It was never found.

https://www.jewishlinknj.com/features/32233-david-irving-s-great-adventure

A recent report stated that David Irving, who lost a defamation suit against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin publishers who accused him of Holocaust denial, had planned to lead a tour of Holocaust sites in Poland. According to Irving’s website, his 2019 tour begins on September 1 from Warsaw and ends there on September 9. The group will visit the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s primary headquarters on the Easter Front, not far from the town of Rastenburg in East Prussia. They will also tour Hochwald; the nearby bunker of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS; and Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec and Majdanek.

For those who know little about David Irving and Ernest Zündel, who before his death in August 2017 was the leading Holocaust denier in North America, this article will help provide some insight.

In “Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?” Michael Shermer and I wrote, “There is no more paradoxical character in the Holocaust denial movement” than David Irving. He seeks the respect and recognition of the academic historical community, while at times derides them for their failure to recognize the value of his works,” which include “Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden,” “Hitler’s War,” “The Trail of the Fox: The Search for the True Field Marshall,” “Goring: A Biography,” and “Churchill’s War: The German Atomic Bomb.”

He ridicules academic historians for being haughty and verbose, yet this is the manner he projects at times. Of all the Holocaust deniers, he is the most historically sophisticated, even though he has no professional training in history. In a widely quoted interview with Michael Shermer, Irving said “Without Hitler Israel probably would not exist today. To that extent he was probably the Jews’ greatest friend.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/american-history-beginning-of-a-nation/

The aftermath of the revolutionary story, even in brief, is rich and exciting.

Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the July 23, 1976, issue of National Review.

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O! Ye unborn Inhabitants of America! Should this Page escape its destin’d Conflagration at the Year’s End, and these Alphabetical Letters remain legible — when your Eyes behold the Sun after he has rolled the Seasons round for two or three Centuries more, you will know that in Anno Domini 1758, we dream’d of your times. 

So the Boston philomath Nathaniel Ames wrote in his almanac almost two decades before Congress declared the 13 colonies independence from Britain. It had been a century and a half since Captain Newport established at Jamestown the first permanent English foothold; almost as long since Ames’s New England forebears established their “city upon a hill” along Massachusetts Bay. Now, in the mid-eighteenth century, England’s American colonists began to share a sense of special destiny that would later be woven into the fabric of a new American nationalism.

Without this awakening consciousness of the uniqueness of the American experience, the colonists could never have transcended their traditional loyalty to the “English nation.” Their commitment crossed colonial boundaries to embrace the American continent. It is this cultural phenomenon — the emergence after 1750 of a new American self-consciousness — that underlay the American Revolution begun in 1763 and consummated in 1789.

We are commemorating on July 4 of this year the Bicentennial of one event in that tremendous transformation. Independence, however, did not then and there create the American nation. Independence alone, without the existence of a continental political structure, could not have fulfilled the vision Ames articulated 18 years before. It was one thing for a South Carolinian, for example, to feel a sense of common destiny with a citizen of New York. It was quite another for the Carolinian and the New Yorker to come together under a single national government. Separation from Great Britain was one step in the morphology of the Revolution. But the “real revolution,” to use John Adams’ term, consisted in the creation of the United States of America out of 13 highly individualistic English colonies.