Onward With The Bad Men of 1926
(This is the third part of a four-part series.)
The list continues! (See part 1 and part 2 if you missed them.) Remember, this is an exercise in how evil was perceived in 1926, not now. The reputations of major figures rise and fall over the decades as each new generation evaluates them.
6. Grigori Rasputin
To be considered in the pantheon of evil, you don't have to be a dictator or a remorseless barbarian (although it does help!); you can achieve wickedness through other means. Like Judas Iscariot, moral decay can bring you infamy. Assassinated in 1916, Rasputin was widely perceived as a demonic force that utilized mysticism, sexual deviance, and hypnotic charisma to subvert the Romanov dynasty. Had it not been for him, as some believed, the Romanov family may have survived, thus averting the disaster of the Russian Revolution.
December 1926 marked the tenth anniversary of Rasputin's death. Editorials, buoyed by the recent release of the Romanov letters as evidence of his malevolent influence, detailed how his hypnotic control changed the course of history:
It is exactly ten years since the world was startled by the news that the 'Mad Monk' Rasputin had been killed... his name remains a symbol of the dark forces which undermined the throne of the Tsars and paved the way for the Bolshevik revolution. — New York Times, December 30, 1926
It was just ten years ago last night that the Neva received the body of the most sinister figure in modern history. Today, the names of his assassins are whispered in the cafes of Paris, while in Russia, the legend of the Siberian peasant has been replaced by the colder, more ruthless reality of the Soviet state. — Chicago Tribune, December 31, 1926
5. Mehmed Talaat Pasha
By the mid-1920s, the horrors of the Armenian Genocide were widely known, heavily documented, and condemned in the press. Mehmed Talaat Pasha, the powerful Ottoman Minister of the Interior, was widely viewed as a calculating monster who engineered the systematic deportation, starvation, and extermination of over a million ethnic Armenians. When Pasha was assassinated in 1921 by Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian survivor, his atrocities again filled the headlines.
The Schwarzbard trial and George Horton’s diplomatic exposé, The Blight of Asia, ensured Talaat Pasha’s continued prominence in the public mindset. Additionally, the U.S. Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Lausanne and Fridtjof Nansen’s refugee reports used the memory of Talaat’s massacres and deportations as examples of the Armenian humanitarian crisis. Yet today, his crimes are largely forgotten by the public at large. This shift from the widespread condemnation of the 1920s to today’s relative silence painfully reminds us of how historical memory disappears over time.
4. King Leopold II of Belgium
Whether a figure is contemptible or not depends on who evaluates them. In 1926, the Belgian state had largely succeeded in rebranding Leopold II as the "Master Builder," celebrating the grand architecture of Brussels and the infrastructure of the Congo. On November 15, 1926, the Equestrian Statue of Leopold II located at the Place du Trône in Brussels was inaugurated. Yet only two months later, King Leopold was excoriated by the League of Nations in its 1926 Slavery Convention. Here, Leopold’s Congo state served as the example of what they intended to outlaw.
In addition, André Gide’s African travel dispatches and subsequent book exposed how the institutionalized cruelty of Leopold II still functioned in Central Africa. W.E.B. Du Bois and the Pan-African movement utilized the pages of The Crisis to establish Leopold as the definitive historical benchmark for violence and exploitation. The mutilation of workers, specifically the severing of hands of those who failed to meet impossible rubber quotas, became the enduring symbol of his colonial regime.
This is pretty depressing stuff, but I promised some replacements for the eponymous Hitler slander, so I will return in a few days with the final installment of the top three evil people from 1926.
