KIPLING JOURNAL March 2021
KIPLING’S SWASTIKA : “DEFILED BEYOND RECOGNITION”
by DAVID ALAN RICHARDS
[David Alan Richards, Vice-President of the Kipling Society, is the author of the definitive Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography (2010)]
A new collector of Kipling’s books searching for treasures on the online auction site eBay is sometimes startled to find in the description “includes Swastika”. What is Kipling doing using a Nazi symbol? The answer, of course, is that Kipling was not; he was using one of the oldest of mankind’s symbols of good fortune – a symbol which had the misfortune to become “ineradicably linked with Hitler” with the result that, as the editor of the Kipling Journal noted sadly in 1984, “the assumption that Kipling approved of Nazi Germany will probably linger on, at a thoughtless or superficial level.” [1] It emphatically should not; Kipling was among the first to warn against the rise of the Nazi party, and to abandon the use of the swastika. The backstory of Kipling’s use of the symbol on the covers of his books, and his abandonment of it, is a long one, and the subject of this article.
The swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol of good luck. As an Austrian schoolboy, Hitler would have constantly viewed the swastika up on the walls of his school, as well as in his choir school at Lambach Abbey. [2] When he later chose the hooked cross [3] – the Hakenkreuz, black on a white circle on a red background – as the emblem for his new political party, he did so as German intellectuals of that era believed the early Aryans of India to be the prototypical white invaders and the cultural ancestors of the German people. “What Hitler did was to add the swastika symbol (of a conquering ‘race’) to the colors of Bismarck’s flag, and Germany was rebranded as a nation whose central mission was conquest and colonization.” [4]
Kipling came upon the swastika in earlier and different contexts, largely Indian and probably mediated through his father’s interest in Indian arts and crafts, though he would at times offer his own guidance and theories. The pronunciation of the word itself needed explanation to his first English-speaking, American audiences. According to Kipling, in a letter of instruction sent in 1904 to Edward Bok, publisher of the Just-So Stories in the Philadelphia-based magazine the Ladies Home Journal, it was to be pronounced to rhyme with “car’s ticker.” [5] Earlier, in 1897, in a letter of thanks to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel P. Langley, for receipt of a copy of Thomas Wilson’s The Swastika (1896) [6], he had offered a sort of Just-So Story for the symbol itself: “It is a matter in which I take a good deal of interest and after reading it I have sent it on to my father. My own heretical view is that the Swastika was almost the first pattern invented by primitive man on the first occasion on which he stepped on two twigs crossed in the mud and the buds at each end indicated the turn-over of the ends [drawing of twigs in swastika pattern] something like this.” [7]
What the word meant was also subject to debate. Sir George Birdwood, who had been an administrator in India and the Keeper of the Indian Museum in London, in his swastika-adorned book of essays, SVA (London, 1915), described the word as “Sanskrit, and composed of the words svasti, ‘well-faring,’ and tiku, ‘ticket,’ ‘mark’… svasti being composed of the Sanskrit equivalent of the Latin esto, ‘be thou,’ ‘let him be,’ and su, ‘good’…” [8] More concisely, the word means “good to be.”
John Lockwood Kipling’s illustrations, though, seem key to Rudyard’s use of the swastika. Early in his career as a published author, Kipling decorated the covers of his books with the work of his artist father, who often used Indian iconography in his drawings. First in India, through his publisher A. H. Wheeler, and then, as his fame grew, with his British and American publishing houses, Kipling used three Indian symbols in particular as ornaments on the covers, the elephant head, the lotus blossom, and the swastika, often in combination, and all drawn by his father. This informal practice would later be copyrighted.
A Ganesh-and-lotus-in-trunk design was first used, as a complement to the main illustration for the particular book, on the lithographed front wrappers of Kipling’s Indian Railway Library (first appearing in 1888–1889, with many reprintings to follow). These paperbacks were priced at one rupee each and sold at railway news-stands all over India, from Soldiers Three through Wee Willie Winkie. [9] Ganesh or Ganesha was a popular figure in southern India during the Chola kingdom (985–1200 A.D.) Ganesh is the son of Shiva, one of the main deities of Hinduism, and his image became popular because he was the first god invoked at the beginning of worship or of a new enterprise – such as the sale of the first collections of Rudyard’s short stories.
In 1894, Lockwood was asked to illustrate Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab: Told by the People. His full-page drawing for “The Tale of Two Brothers” depicted that story’s temple elephant making obeisance to a successor, as tradition required on the death of a monarch: its head is covered by a large rug, bearing a thick-armed swastika. [10] In his own book, Beast and Man in India, published three years before in 1891, Lockwood had written that the “auspicious image” of the “wise and humorous god” (Ganésa, Ganésha, Ganésh, or Ganpati) is also placed “on the first page of Hindu ledgers and day books” – so that the future economic year might be “good to be.” [11] Describing it as the mystic sign of Ganesh, Lockwood linked “the svastika” with “the cross fylfot of our Western heraldry and the hermetic cross of Freemasonry, traceable from Troy town to China.” (The fylfot is the English symbol equivalent to the swastika, left-facing, except for the modern version found in modern heraldry texts, but with truncated limbs; the word’s etymology is that it was used to fill empty space at the foot of stained glass windows in medieval churches.) [12] In early Hindu texts, the swastika is a wheel with four spokes, to the ends of which burning torches are attached. When the wheel is rotated in a clockwise sense, in accord with the clockwise movement of the cosmos, the flames stream out so as to form the “Good Swastika.” If the wheel is rotated in an anti-clockwise sense, against the universal movement, the flames stream out so as to form the “Bad Swastika.” [13] In Beast and Man in India in 1891, Lockwood Kipling sketched the Good Swastika. [14]
Five years later Frank N. Doubleday, then working for Charles Scribners’ Sons, persuaded Rudyard to agree to the first clearly authorized collected edition of Kipling’s works to appear in either England or the United States.[15] Rudyard, always alert to what today is called “branding,” then suggested to Doubleday that his father develop a “conventional totem – perhaps a lotus or my old trademark the elephant’s head with a lotus in the trunk”[16] for what was to be styled the “Outward Bound Edition,” ultimately published in thirty-six volumes and ending only in 1937 with Rudyard’s posthumous autobiography, Something of Myself.
Lockwood’s letter of 30 October 1896 to Doubleday (echoing in part the language of Beast and Man in India) survives: “I…beg to forward a clay sketch of the elephant head which [Rudyard] wishes to have engraved on a small scale as a kind of totem on the title pages of all the vols…In actual fact it is a ‘Ganesha’ – a version of the ‘svastika’… sign for the elephant-headed god of auspicious beginnings, which in some form or other is over most Hindu doorways & at the beginning of all Hindu tradesmen’s books.”[17] The Scribner’s prospectus pronounced that “The set will represent the very highest quality of the printer’s and binder’s art”.[18] Such an enterprise required distinguished ornamentation, and Lockwood’s design was reproduced as a raised ivory medallion on the front cover depicting an elephant’s head bearing a lotus in its trunk with a floating swastika at its eye level, bordered by two concentric gold circles. Sitting finely against the edition’s reddishbrown cloth, it was the center of attention on the salesman’s dummies with text excerpts carried for the next three decades by Doubleday’s agents to show prospective subscribers.[19]
From 1899, this same medallion, with a swastika in the upper left quadrant, appeared in gold on the red cloth covers of the Macmillan trade (“Uniform”) editions of Kipling’s books [20], and as well on Macmillan’s red leather English Pocket Edition titles (twice, on the front cover and again on the spine between the title and the author’s name). [21] These, along with the American Pocket (Manuscript) Edition, are the volumes of Kipling still ubiquitous in used book stores and eBay. In 1988, at Christie’s in New York, Mrs. Cary W. Bok auctioned her husband’s circular terracotta relief plaque of Lockwood’s Ganesha lotus-bearing device, a gift from Rudyard, with its free-standing swastika, together in a lot with a lace tablecloth from the Boks’ home, featuring the word “Swastika” in the name panel in its center.[22]
Because Kipling had no copyright protection for his early works published before the United States Congress passed the Chase Act on 1 July 1891, he was plagued by “pirate” publishers who, without payment of royalties to the author, could publish Departmental Ditties, Plain Tales from the Hills, and the Indian Railway Library series of titles, all appearing before the legislation’s effective date, under their own imprints.[23] To combat this, and even though it would compete with the simultaneously-published Outward Bound Edition, Kipling agreed that Doubleday & McClure could publish their own cheap edition of his collected works in 1899 at $15 per set for 15 volumes, with 20,000 sets printed, the authenticity of which was attested by its spine legend “Authorized Edition” (a phrase not used in the text block). In the publisher’s advertising copy, Kipling wrote in the third person that he had “arranged for the issue of an inexpensive copyrighted 15 vol. edition of his works” with the hope “that it will be accepted by the public in the face of the many cheap and inaccurate collections which have been issued without Mr. Kipling’s knowledge or permission.” The cover ornament for this series was Kipling’s signature in monogram within a circle enclosing his signature and a swastika, blind-stamped on the front cover, giving the edition its name, the “Swastika Edition.” [24]
However many copies of the Swastika Edition may have been purchased by those impressed by Kipling’s authorization (he complained to his copyright attorney Augustus Gurlitz in June 1901 that his “American sales have dropped from 50% to 75% during the past two years”[25]), the enterprise backfired in another way. Kipling had brought a suit against a competitor, G. P. Putnam’s “Brushwood Edition,” claiming copyright infringement: the justices in Kipling’s appeal of the lower court’s adverse decision also decided against the indignant Brit, noting that in bringing out the Swastika Edition through Doubleday, Kipling was guilty of just such unfair competition against his own Outward Bound Edition as he had alleged against Putnam. [26]
Shortly thereafter, by application filed on 17 December 1900 by his New York lawyer Gurlitz, who had brought the case against Putnam, Kipling sought and received a trademark for the use of the Ganesh from the United States Patent Office, registered as Trade Mark No. 35,770 on 15 January 1901. As Kipling explained in his application, accompanied by facsimiles of Lockwood’s drawings, the elephant appeared
with different expressions and in different positions. I have sometimes used it, as shown, accompanied by a reproduction of my autograph and having a lotus flower held by the trunk and also inclosed [sic] in a circular design and with a representation of a Svastika; but the style and surroundings and accompaniments is unimportant, and these may all be omitted or changed at pleasure without materially affecting the character of my trade-mark, the essential feature of which is the representation or picture of an elephant’s head.[27]
His use of the swastika went beyond trademarks: in 1902, in his fullpage drawing for “The Crab That Played With The Sea” in Just-So Stories,[28] his only self-illustrated book, Rudyard pictured a “stone under the Man’s foot” bearing “a magic mark,” a swastika.[29] Later editions of the stories blotted out the mark on the stone, but left the text description unaltered, puzzling readers.
The elephant’s head, then, might always have been said to be the main symbol, in Rudyard’s mind. Certainly, the details of the swastika’s representation seem not particularly to have concerned him. In a letter of 15 July 1930 to Maurice Baring, pasted into his copy of Stalky & Co. (now in the Colt Kipling Collection, Library of Congress), Kipling noted that the swastika “is auspicious (if properly drawn) for trade, good-fortune, and such like,” as he had learned in India from his father. The “properly drawn” swastika is the gammadion or “right-turning” version, most correctly labeled the crux gamatta dextrovorsa. But Kipling also used the sauvastika, “left-turning swastika,” or crux gammata sinistovorsa. Both versions are imprinted on the first edition of Stalky & Co. (1896).[30] Moreover, he had told Bok in the letter of 1904, “I believe there are two sorts of Swastikas…one is bad, the other is good, but which is which I know not for sure” (emphasis added).[31] In a letter of 28 December 1935, he wrote to a fellow Freemason (recollect that Lockwood had identified the symbol as, among other things, the “hermetic cross of Freemasonry”): “As to the Swastika I’ve always known it as a sign of good luck which Indian traders put at the front of their ledgers every New Year. So I took it for my registered trademark. I don’t think it makes much odds which way the horns of it turn. I chucked the design when it was used by foreigners.”[32] In Japan, the conventional sign for temples, as in maps and guide books, is the Manji or anticlockwise swastika. Rudyard must have observed these when, arriving in Japan in 1889 from India, he wrote about being struck by echoes of the older Indian religion that he came upon in Buddhist temples.[33] The author’s publishers seem also not to have known (or particularly cared about) the difference, even for the sake of consistency. Many volumes of Macmillan’s Uniform Edition exhibit the Bad Swastika together with the Ganesh head on the front board, and the Good Swastika together with a reproduction of Kipling’s signature on an introductory page.[34]
Kipling was, by contrast, very concerned about the rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany, being among the first to warn of the dangers.[35] His hostility to German power from the beginning of the First World War onwards was intensified by the loss of his son John at the Battle of Loos, and he believed all reports of German atrocities (some of which were true, of course). Writing to Frank Doubleday on 21 August 1918, he suggests that Germans should always be referred to by the pronoun “it” in the Doubleday firm’s books.[36] Like his fervent admirer Winston Churchill, he observed Adolf Hitler’s steady ascent with growing alarm. Published in The Morning Post for 23 May 1932, Kipling’s poem “The Storm Cone” warning of the coming threat (“This is the tempest long foretold- : Slow to make head but strong to hold”) appeared two months before the Nazi Party gained 230 seats in the Reichstag. In that London paper’s edition of 13 November 1933, his poem “Bonfires on the Ice” appeared on the very same page as the article headlined “Germany Says ‘Yes” – Overwhelming Victory for Herr Hitler,” reporting the plebiscite which supported Hitler’s decision to withdraw from the League of Nations.[37]
Keenly aware of the Nazis’ formal adoption in 1920 of a symbol he had used since before the twentieth century began, Kipling had – well before these verses – seemingly become increasingly dismayed with the implications of books’ employment of the swastika by 1930. The Trade Mark Journal for 17 December that year, published by the British Patent Office, contained his three applications for registration of the Elephant’s Head in three styles in Class 39, which covers books and bookbinding. Filing on 1 October 1930 from Bateman’s Burwash, Sussex, the applicant Mr. Kipling is self-described as “Author.” The three designs, which were printed as current news in the April 1931Kipling Journal,[38] were two which replicated his father’s no-swastika Ganesha heads from the Indian Railway Library series from back in 1888–1889, and one which comprised the design created by his father for Doubleday’s Outward Bound collected set covers in 1896, but now without the swastika.
And so on 29 May 1933, between publishing his Nazi Germany inflected poems “The Storm Cone” and “Bonfires on the Ice,” Kipling’s literary agent A. S. Watt, at the author’s instructions, wrote to his English publisher Macmillan (with a similar letter to his American publisher Doubleday on 1 June), asking that the swastika be removed from all of Kipling’s books in both countries. Remarkably, the little printing block from Macmillan has survived, its swastika effaced, its surface brighter than the remainder of the stamp.[39]
The author is said to have refused to explain to the press this removal of the swastika,[40] although if he had explained the reason would not necessarily have made good sense to the Great British (or American) Public in 1933. At that date, Hitler’s Chancellorship was still brand new: while as early as 1930 Winston Churchill was convinced of the German’s malign military intentions, he was himself out of office “in the wilderness” from January 1931 until October 1933. Even his stark warning in the BBC broadcast of November 1934 entitled “The Causes of War”, is said, by his biographer Andrew Roberts to have “had little or no effect on a nation that did not want to listen, or contemplate the consequences of his being right.”[41] Still in the future were the photographic images of Berlin swathed in swastika banners for the XIth modern Olympiad of 1936 – Hitler’s Olympics.[42]
Yet, as Kipling informed a correspondent on 28 December 1935, and as he must have felt when taking his decision about it over two years earlier, his trademark was now “defiled beyond recognition.”[43] Limits and Renewals, his final book of collected tales, previously published in April 1932, was the last of the Macmillan trade editions to appear with a swastika; on the next two, the old circular medallion centered on the front boards of Souvenirs of France, appearing in July 1933,[44] and of Kipling’s posthumously-published autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), still featured the elephant head holding a lotus flower in its trunk, but the swastika was gone.
1st image: Cover of Limits and Renewal, 2nd image: Logo block with swastika erased.
From the Richards Kipling Collection at the Beinecke Library, Yale University
In his autobiography, Kipling did not mention his commercial use of the swastika, or his decision to abandon it, but he took one final shot at Herr Hitler, noting sarcastically that “At the present time (autumn ’35) I have also read with interest the apology offered by an American Secretary of State for unfavourable comments on that land by a New York Police Court Judge.” Anti-Nazi dock workers had torn down the swastika banner from the transatlantic ocean liner SS Bremen in New York harbor on 26 July 1935, throwing it into the Hudson River. The judge on the case had compared the swastika to “the black flag of piracy.” Hitler had been outraged, blaming “the insulting of the German Flag” on “Jewish elements”. Hitler’s fury at the incident made him impulsively proclaim the swastika banner as the sole German Flag.[45]
The Kipling Society, formed in February 1927 by enthusiasts who, to the author’s discomfiture, wanted to celebrate his works,[46] took longer to act in the matter of the swastika than the author they so admired. The first issue of its quarterly magazine, the Kipling Journal, had appeared in March 1927 in red card covers liberally decorated with swastikas – 84 of them, forming a thick, four-sided frame rule around the cover text. The membership card featured twin images of Lockwood’s swastikabearing Ganesh, facing each other from opposite sides of the red and blue card[47]; by January 1928, the Society was selling an official badge, at two shillings, obtainable in three styles, “as a pendant, a brooch, or a button for the lapel of one’s coat,”[48] depicting a large swastika across the pages of an open book.
Rudyard Kipling died on 18 January 1936, and in the society’s quarterly journal for March 1936, the frame rule of swastikas which had adorned its cover since the initial issue of exactly eight years before was replaced with a thick black border, enclosing the legend “In Memoriam | Rudyard Kipling | 1865 – 1936.” Kipling after his personal decision on use of the symbol had apparently never pressed the society on modification of its symbolism – he had chosen from its founding, like his Just-So Stories cat that walked by itself, to keep a safe distance from both its meetings and its policies – but his death seems to have effected the change.
In the month of the journal’s next issue, on which that mourning border was replaced by a simple, thin frame rule, it is reported that at the society’s Sixth Meeting of the 1935–36 Session, a “Mrs. Featherstonehaugh raised the question of the desirability of continuing the Swastika in the Badge of the Society,” a question which “after considerable discussion” concluded with referral of the question to be discussed and decided by its Council at the next meeting. Remarks of speakers at the society’s Tenth Annual Luncheon the following day are revelatory of members’ opinions. Dunsterville, in the chair as the society’s president, declaimed in roundabout reference to an unnamed Adolf Hitler:
Then, this swastika business: somebody seems to think they have a sort of option on this. Yet we all know that the latest date is 2,500 years ago, and that fellow certainly pinched it from somebody else; so we should not get excited when somebody else uses our trademark. But there is a lot of feeling because a gentleman on the other side of the Channel has decided to put this on his various documents. I personally cannot work up any excitement. I am trying to, but it does not matter to me in the very least bit. Somebody told me a swastika story the other day: A member of our Society went to Germany with his Kipling badge in his buttonhole and was at once greeted with “Heil, Hitler!” Then there is this story of a lady member of this Society who was walking down Unter den Linden in Berlin and she met a gentleman coming towards her, and he was covered with swastikas. She was not up in politics and went up to him and said: “Hi! Do you belong to the Kipling Society?” He said: “No, I don’t.” So she said: “Then it is not your business to wear that badge. Take it off!”[49]
One of the society’s vice-presidents, Lt. Gen. Sir George MacMunn, also addressed his fellow members on this subject at the same gathering, striking a different note of defiance and directly naming the German dictator:
One point: I would like to strike rather a different note in the discussion of the swastika for which Herr Hitler, as well as Mr. Kipling and ourselves has delved far into time for our time for our emblem. It has been suggested that we should change the emblem. I think the best answer to that is a little story of Mr. Kipling. A good many years ago, on that occasion when he was very ill in the United States [in 1899], the Kaiser sent a telegram of sympathy and good wishes for his recovery. His wife took it to him. Mr. Kipling said, or is said to have said: “Damn his impudence!” I think that really settles the emblem question![50]
The question continued to roil members’ discussions for two more years. A new badge, without the swastika on the open book, was advertised in the Kipling Journal for March 1938, and in the October quarterly issue, the society secretary reported that it “met with much approval” (although the swastika was then still to be found on the society’s official stationery).[51] The cover of the magazine was redesigned with the issue of December 1939, the brick-red cover of the previous October’s issue (with the special, one time legend “First War Number”) now replaced by paper of pale green with a portrait plaque of Kipling at the top, and the image of the new badge, featuring in place of the swastika the society’s founding year “MCMXXVII”. The editor celebrated the change by printing a letter from a pleased member: “We disclaim any interest in politics, but recent history has taught us to dislike the color red, and to mistrust the swastika as a badge. Our new cover eliminates both of these signs of ill omen.”[52] Six and one-half years after Kipling himself, the Kipling Society bid a final farewell to the swastika.
Rudyard Kipling and the Kipling Society had much company in their fondness for the swastika prior to the 1930’s. In the United States, Coca-Cola used it, the Boy Scouts adopted it, and the Girls’ Club of America called their magazine “Swastika.” To the north, Nova Scotia fielded a hockey team called the Windsor Swastikas, and in Ontario, Canada, there is (still) a town named “Swastika.” In Denmark, Carlsberg employed it on their beer bottles, and the symbol can be seen today at the Elefantporten, the Elephant Gate to the company’s Copenhagen brewery, a grand arched portal flanked with four life-size statues of Ganesh bearing large swastikas on their blankets (along with the initials of the four children of the company founder, who commissioned the statues).
The same shape can still be viewed as well in London, on the Royal Academy of Arts building at Burlington House and on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on King Charles Street, and in Washington, D.C., on the window iconography of the Federal Reserve Board Building, completed in 1937.[53] A decade earlier, it was painted inside the nosecone of Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, long before the famed aviator’s January 1941 Congressional testimony urging a treaty of neutrality with Hitler’s Germany. During the First World War, the symbol was used by American Army’s 45th Infantry Division, in tribute to the large Native American population in the south-western United States, and also by the Lafayette Escadrille, with an official squadron insignia showing a Native American wearing a swastika-adorned headdress. It could be seen on Great Britain’s Royal Air Force planes as late as 1939.[54] And western visitors to the Raj Ghat memorial dedicated to India’s Mahatma Gandhi in Delhi, built on the site of his cremation after his assassination in 1948, are startled to see lining the security fence a decorative pattern of swastikas, standing at a 45 degree angle on one leg (although tilted backward, not forward like the Nazis’).[55]
With Hitler’s appropriation of the ancient image, the swastika became in the western world the symbol of fear, of suppression, and of extermination. On 29th February, 1940 the New York Times reported:
In a solemn ceremony, representatives of four Arizona Indian tribes, resentful at Nazi “sets of oppression,” forswore use of the swastika design….The Indians placed a blanket, a basket, and some hand-decorated clothing, all bearing swastikas, sprinkled them with colored sand and set them afire.
Rudyard Kipling, compelled to abandon a long-used, cherished symbol, was not singular in his outrage. And in 2010, the Anti-Defamation League downgraded the swastika from its status as an anti-Jewish hate symbol, saying “We know that the swastika has, for some, lost its meaning as the primary symbol of Nazism and instead become a more generalized symbol of hate.”[56]
• • • • • • •
NOTES
1 George Webb, note to ‘Letter to the Editor’ Kipling Journal, 231September 1984,
p. 37. Webb’s note does not address Kipling’s attitude toward the Germans, except
briefly during Hitler’s rise in the early 1930’s (but see Bazley, Basil, “Kipling’s
Opinion of the Germans,” Kipling Journal, 76, July 1945, pp. 3–4, and Underwood,
F. A. , “The Hun at the Gate: Kipling’s Obsession With the German Threat,” Kipling
Journal 308, December 2003, pp. 23–29). Nor does it address a completely sepa-
rate question, whether Kipling was anti-Semitic (but see Raine, Craig, “Kipling:
Controversial Questions,” Kipling Journal, September 2002, pp. 10–29, which
in an author-described “audited account of Kipling’s racism,” reviews Rudyard’s
attitudes toward both Jews and Germans at pp. 25–29). See also Michael Smith’s
online essay ‘Kipling and the Swastika, which contains several colored illustrations
useful in understanding this article .This, and all other Kipling Journal articles cited
herein, with their illustrations, are accessible at www.kiplingsociety.co.uk.
2 The symbol is chiseled into the Abbey’s monastery portal and again on the wall
above the spring grotto in the courtyard. Grossruck, Johann, Lambach Benedictine
Abbey in the Third Reich in 1938-A monastery in the focus of Hitler’s myth and
swastika legend (Linz: WagnerVerlag, 2011), www.wagnerverlag.at/content/
benediktinerstift-lambach. Hitler’s fascination with the symbol and its associa-
tion with anti-semitism was nurtured by a racist periodical magazine called Ostara
which he read as a young adult: see Kershaw, Ian, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New
York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), endnote 61, p. 648 (here-
after, Kershaw 1).
3 Quoted in “History of the Swastika,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States
Holocaust Museum, https://usmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?Moduleld=10007453 .
On his unmentioned appropriation of the design from a rich supporter, a dentist
who left the party in 1921, see Kershaw 1, pp. 49–51.
4 Dr. Malcom Quinn, University of Arts London, quoted in “Walls, floors and rocks:
England and its swastikas,” BBC News, 14 March 2014, https://www.bbc.com/
news/uk-england-26369329.
5 Kipling to Edward Bok, 29 September 1904, ALS, Syracuse University, in Bok’s
The Americanization of Edward Bok (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), p.
214. In spoken Sanskrit, the “a” has a bit of an “r” sound at its close.
6 Wilson, Thomas, Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol and its Migrations
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1894).
7 Kipling to Samuel P. Langley, 8 March 1897, in Thomas Pinney, ed., Letters Vol. 2:
1890–99, pp. 289–290.
8 Editor’s note, Kipling Journal 215, September 1980, p. 41.
9 Richards, David, Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography (New Castle, DE and London:
Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2010), A14-A19, pp. 23–22 (hereinafter,
Bibliography), these six covers reproduced in facsimile in gray-scale images at
p. A14, also to be found in color as Figs. 14.29 through 14.34 in Bryant, Julius
and Susan Weber, eds., John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and
London (New York, New Haven and London: Bard Graduate Center Gallery and
Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 416–417 (hereinafter, Lockwood Kipling). Proofs
of these covers are now in the Kipling papers at the University of Sussex, that of
Wee Willie Winkie reproduced as Fig. 13.10 in Lockwood Kipling, p. 365.
10 Lockwood Kipling, Fig, 13.26, p. 375, also reproduced in the Kipling Journal,
December 1984, p. 55.
11 Rudyard contributed two poems and verse headings for nine of the chapters, making
this a first edition for the Kipling collector. See Richards, Bibliography, B4, pp.
357–358
12 The established word for this symbol in British English, “fylfot,” as defined in
the Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.), Oxford University Press, http://oed.com/
searchType=dictionary&q=fylfot. One may be found in the porch of the parish
church of Great Canfield, Essex, England, and its stained glass window use can be
seen in Cambridge, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre’s baptismal window, and
in Edinburgh at the Scottish National War Memorial: see generally, Taylor, Stephen,
The Fylfot File: Studies in the origin and significance of the Fylfot-Cross and allied
symbolism within the British Isles (Cambridge: Perfect Publishers, 2006).
13 See images (1) and (2) in Editor’s Note, Kipling Journal 206, March 1980, p. 42.
14 Letter from John Shearman to Kipling Journal 206 March 1980, pp. 41–42.
15 Bibliography, D5, pp. 572–574. Kipling wrote that, “I handed over the American
side of my business to him. Whereby I escaped many distractions for the rest of
my life.” Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 74.
16 Kipling to Frank N. Doubleday, 28 August 1896, in Thomas Pinney, ed., The Letters
of Rudyard Kipling, Vol. 1: 1890–1899 (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press,
1990), p. 248.
17 J. L. Kipling to F. N. Doubleday, 30 October 1896, Frank N. Doubleday and
Nelson Doubleday Collection, box 12, folder 3/36, Princeton University Library,
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton, NJ, quoted in
Lockwood Kipling, p. 398, n. 84.
18 Quoted in Lockwood Kipling, p. 381.
19 The Richards Collection at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript
Library holds four such salesman’s dummies, dated respectively 1897, 1900, 1904,
1910, and 1922, the first dated of which is the first printing/edition of Kipling’s
Preface and Introduction to the projected series, as originally identified by James
McG. Stewart, Rudyard Kipling, A Bibliographical Catalogue (Toronto: Dalhousie
University Press and University of Toronto Press, 1959), item 23, p. 38, and
confirmed in Bibliography, A96, p. 98.
20 Bibliography, D11, pp. 579–589, photograph of Kim (1901) as image A174a in
Grayscale Images and in color on the CD-ROM, and image also reproduced in
Kipling Journal, March 1980, p. 43.
21 Bibliography, D12, pp. 580–581.
22 Christies’ New York, May 20, 1988, Printed Books and Manuscripts, Including
Modern Literature and Science, lot 322, photograph in catalogue. In his cover
letter of presentation, Kipling had written Bok (as quoted in Brown, Edgar, “The
Swastika,” Kipling Journal, 10, July 1929, pp. 4–5): “I am sending…for your
acceptance, as some little memory of my father to whom you were so kind, the
original of one of the plaques that he used to make for me. I thought it being the
Swastika would be appropriate for your [house, which was named] Swastika. May
it bring you even more good fortune.”
23 Richards, David, “Kipling and the Pirates,” The Papers of the Bibliographical
Society of America, vol. 96:1, March 2002, pp. 59–109.
24 Bibliography, D10, p. 579.
25 Kipling to Augustus Gurlitz, 13 June 1901, in Pinney, ed., Letters, Vol. 3: 1900–10, p.
57. In Something of Myself (1937,), he still applauded that effort–“Frank Doubleday
chased the pirates up with cheaper and cheaper editions” – but complained in the
same paragraph that “[b]y and large I should say that American pirates have made
say half as many dollars out of my stuff as I am occasionally charged with having
‘made’ out of the legitimate market in that country.” Thomas Pinney ed. Something
of Myself and other autobiographical writings, Cambridge, Cambrudge University
Press (1990), p. 75.
26 Federal Reporter, vol. 120, p. 637. Attorney Gurlitz’s copyright case archive for
the Putnam litigation is in the Richards Kipling Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Rare
Book & Manuscript Library, which collection also holds a copy of the “Transcript
of Record” before the United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the Putnam
case, the 337 pages of which include both Kipling’s deposition for the original trial
on 22 December 1899 and a further deposition made on 5 October 1900, at pp.
80–122 and 143–50, respectively (as well as a letter from Frank Doubleday’s secre-
tary to Gurlitz dated 17 May 1901, inquiring plaintively “Don’t you think the case
can in some way be pushed through this month, for if it is not it will very seriously
inconvenience Mr. Doubleday’s summer plans”).
27 Watt Archive, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC,
452.51. The appropriation of his signature in facsimile by pirate publishers particu-
larly annoyed Kipling, as he noted to his American copyright lawyer Augustus
Gurlitz: “This seems to me even more important than the elephant’s head, from one
point of view. For thus my own signature can be used to give the public the idea that
it authorizes a grossly inaccurate biography of myself.” Kipling to Gurlitz, 29 June
1901, Pinney, ed., Letters, Vol .3: 1900–10, p. 59.
28 Bibliography, A81, pp. 158–160, and C728, p. 549. The story was first published
in the United States in Collier’s Weekly, as “The Crab That Made the Tides,” in the
issue of 2 August 1902, with pictures by F. M. Drummond, and under the same title
in the United Kingdom in Pearson’s Magazine for August 1902, where the illustra-
tions were not by Kipling but by Lawson Wood. On illustrations for the Just-So
Stories in both their original magazine formats and then as imagined by the author,
see Alderson, Brian, “Just-So Pictures: Illustrated Versions of Just-So Stories for
Children,” in Children’s Literature Volume 20 Annual of The Modern Language
Association Division on Children’s Literature Association (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 147–174, discussing this tale at pp. 153,
172; Alderson makes no comment on the swastika image. Kipling’s daughter Elsie
was to write: “The illustrating of the stories gave their author immense pleasure,
and he worked at them (mostly in India ink) with meticulous care and was delighted
when we approved of the results” (in Carrington, Charles, The Life of Rudyard
Kipling (New York: Doubleday, 1955), p. 396.
29 Remarkably, the swastika in question is the “bad” left-leaning swastika, but perhaps
Kipling’s image was reversed by the printer. Story text and image available in
Wikipedia’s “Just So Stories/The Crab that Played with the Sea,” indexed (with
the same page numbers as the first edition book text) as [174] and [175], https://
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories/The_Crab_that_Played_with_the_Sea.
30 Bibliography, A144 and A145, pp. 133–135.
31 Kipling to Edward Bok, 29 September 1904, quoted in Bok’s The Americanization
of Edward Bok, p. 214. The book’s plates include a photograph of the clay bas-relief
made by Lockwood Kipling (facing p. 214), and, in mutual acknowledgment of its
copyrighted status, Kipling had given Bok explicit permission to reproduce it in his
third-person autobiography (Kipling to Bok, 24 January 1920, Pinney, ed., Letters,
Vol. 5: 1920–30, pp. 8–9.
32 Rudyard Kipling to Harold E. White, 28 December 1935, Pinney, ed., Letters, Vol.
6: 1931–1936, p. 423.
33 Editor’s note in Kipling Journal, March 1985, p. 34.
34 See images (4) and (5) in Kipling Journal, March 1980, at p. 43.
35 See Bazley, Basil M., “Kipling’s Opinion of the Germans,” Kipling Journal,
July 1945, pp. 3–4, and Raine, Craig, “Kipling: Controversial Questions, Kipling
Journal, September 2002, p. 10, at pp. 28–29.
36 Pinney, ed., Letters, Vol. 4: 1911–1920, p. 507.
37 Bibliography, A404 and A418, pp. 309, 317, and Morning Post copy in Richards
Kipling Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library.
38 At p. 23.
39 Mary Bartlett, a craft bookbinder working near Dartington Hall, bought the orig-
inal of the Macmillan block from a dealer at a Society of Bookbinders conference.
For the record of that acquisition, see Michael Smith’s essay on Kipling and the
Swastika www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/facts_swastika.htm, which does not identify
Mary Bartlett except by her profession. The altered block is now in the Richards
Kipling Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library.
[The term ‘printing blocks’ may need explaining. In the era of mechanical type-
setting, each illustration was engraved on a separate block, which would then be
inserted into the text and ‘locked up’ with it before being inked. Ed.]
40 Underwood, F. A., “The Hun At the Gate: Kipling’s Obsession With the German
Threat,” Kipling Journal, December 2003, at p. 27.
41 Roberts, Andrew, Churchill: Walking With Destiny (New York: Viking, 2018), pp.
345, 351, 382.
42 Kershaw, Ian, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York and London: W. W. Norton
and Co., 2000), p. 6 (hereinafter, Kershaw 2)
43 Rudyard Kipling to Harold White, Kipling Collection, Syracuse University, quoted
in Gilmore, David, The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 304.
44 Bibliography, A414, pp. 314–315.
45 Kipling, Something of Myself (1990), p. 73. Endnote 40 on p. 246, gives details of
the case, reported in the New York Times for 7 September 1935, which newspaper
duly reported eight days later that, following a formal German protest, Secretary
of State Cordell Hull had “expressed his regret.” At the time, there was a dual flag
law, by which both the black-white-red horizontal tricolor (previously the flag
of the German Empire) and the swastika flag were simultaneously official flags
of Germany, allowing American authorities initially to claim that no symbol of
Germany had been harmed in the Bremen affair. On 15 September 1935, Germany
changed its flag law, discarding the imperial German flag (which the Nazis on
coming to power had swapped for the black-red-gold flag of the Weimar Republic,
thereby leaving only the swastika flag as the country’s official one). On Hitler’s
personal response, see Bankier, David, The Germans and the Final Solution (Oxford
and Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 45, and Kershaw 2, p. 569
and endnote 214 at pp. 759–760 citing additional German language historical schol-
arship. See also the first-person account in Chapter XIV, “Ripping the Swastika
off the Bremen,” in the memoir of Irish-American labor activist Bill Bailey, The
Kid from Hoboken: Book Two (San Francisco: Circus Lithographic Prepress, 1993),
https://www.larkspring.com/Kid/Book2/2–14.html, accessed 1 September 2020,
which makes it clear that the evening attack on the Bremen’s flagstaff was itself
a privately-organized reprisal mission by leftist/ Communist merchant seamen in
retaliation for the German storm troopers’ treatment of American sailor Lawrence
Simpson, who worked on the United States Lines’ passenger ship Manhattan
which ran from New York to Hamburg. Simpson used his employment as cover
for secretly transporting anti-Nazi literature to a resistance cell operating around
the Hamburg waterfront. Probably betrayed by pro-Hitler German stewards on the
American liner, he was seized and beaten while docking at Cuxhaven at the mouth
of the Elbe, and then abducted and held in solitary confinement in Hamburg, all as
reported by the New York Times, and was facing at least ten years in prison, while
the U.S. State Department was taking a wait-and-see posture. Armed with razor
blades to cut loose the swastika, and carrying in their pockets prayer beads and
crucifixes so they could claim to be Catholics demonstrating against the Fuhrer’s
suppression of German Catholics and other religious groups, while hundreds of
demonstrators on the dock below carried banners and placards reading “Free
Lawrence Simpson. Down with Anti-Semitism. Unite Against War and Fascism,”
a small band of sailors assaulted the swastika-bearing jackstaff, lit from all sides
by the Bremen’s floodlights, when at 9:30 p.m. the departure whistle blew for
non-passengers to disembark. Adding to the confusion, a Jewish detective named
Solomon, attached to the Police Department’s “anti-Red squad” and in hot pursuit
of sailor Bill Bailey and his mates, was mistaken by the German crew for one of the
demonstrators, and beaten until he was unconscious: he could not in his bloodied
state identify the Communist seamen – soon the “Bremen Six”– who had done the
deed. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, raised Episcopalian but with a Jewish mother
(née Coen, born like Hitler in the Austro-Hungarian empire), was infuriated by
Goebbels’ pronouncement that “a thing like this could only happen in an American
city where they had a Jew for mayor,” and when the Germans increased the political
tension by claiming that their consulate was not properly safeguarded, he assigned
ten of New York City’s Jewish detectives and policemen to provide that service.
Then came (Jewish) magistrate Lewis Brodsky’s decision about the “pirate ship.”
46 Lycett, Andrew, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999) pp.
542–543. Writing to his former prep school roommate Lionel Dunsterville (“Stalky”
of Stalky & Co.), within weeks of its founding, Kipling called it “your dam [sic]
society.” Kipling to Dunsterville, 20 November 1927, Sussex University.
47 Kipling Journal 1 March 1927, p. 25, with facsimile.
48 Kipling Journal 7, January 1928, p. 1, with facsimile.
49 Kipling Journal 38, June 1936, p. 62.
50 Kipling Journal 38, June 1936, p. 69. MacMunn had already written one book
about Kipling (Kipling’s Women, 1933), and was to write another (Rudyard Kipling:
Craftsman, 1937). The Kaiser’s surprising but consoling cable to Carrie Kipling
sent during Rudyard’s illness (“God grant that he may be spared to you…” is quoted
in Lycett, p. 313.
51 Kipling Journal 47, October 1938, p. 103.
52 Kipling Journal 53, April 1940, p. 10.
53 While there have been calls for the removal of the swastika motifs carved into
the headquarters building of the Great Britain’s Essex County Council, these other
and more famous structures, with less prominent displays of the symbol bordering
distant windows or located high above street levels on the crowns of pillars
(although the pillar friezes at the Royal Academy are only a few feet above visitor’s
heads – see the picture in the article by Cawley in endnote 10 above), seem not to
have attracted as much public controversy.
54 Campion, Mukti Jain, “How the world loved the swastika – until Hitler stole
it,” BBC News Magazine, 23 October 1914 (https://www.bbc.com/news/maga-
zine-29644591. See generally, graphic designer Steven Heller’s The Swastika:
Symbol Beyond Redemption? (New York: Allworth Press, 2000). https://books.
google.com/?id+V8rU4B1ourwc.
55 Pictured in Rabbi Joshua Hammerman’s article “The Good Swastika” in Religion
News Service, 26 January 2018, https://religionnews.com/2018/01/26/the-good-
swastika/. The Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose met with Hitler and
Himmler when residing in Berlin in 1942–1943 to organize the Indian Legion (the
Azad Hind), a German-trained and -commanded invasion intended to overthrow the
Raj, but its symbol was a leaping tiger, not a swastika.
56 Dicker, Adam, Steve Liman and Nigel Savage, “ADL Downgrades Swastika As
Jewish Hate Symbol,” Jewish Week, 1 June 2010, http://jewishweek.timesofisrael.
com/adl-downgrades-swastika-as-jewish-hate-symbol. Perhaps recognizing this,
Finland’s Air Force Command in January 2017 quietly dropped use of the swas-
tika on its fuselages, present since the force was founded in 1918, shortly after the
country became an independent nation and long before Nazism devastated Europe.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645.
