Double Exposure

Last month in Scotch Plains, N.J., a shoestring firm called Flanders Hall published a 115-page book called The 100 Families that Rule the Empire. Purportedly, it exposed the planet's best-known interlocking directorate--the British upper classes. Inadvertently, it exposed another, more modest, but significant.

The book was written by one Giselher Wirsing, editor of Munich's Muenchner Neueste Nachrichten. It was publicized as "a literary bombshell of Non-Intervention" by Prescott Dennett, Washington's one-man pro-Nazi Columbia Press Service. Its preface was by lynx-eyed George Sylvester Viereck, who gets $1,000 a month as "adviser and literary stylist" for the German Library of Information (official propaganda agents) and as representative for the Neueste Nachrichten. Questioned, Stylist Viereck first said, "I am in an uncommunicative mood," later admitted that he arranged for the book's publication and put up the money for it.

Head man and whole show at Flanders Hall is smooth-faced, 25-year-old Sigfrid Hauck. When the firm was incorporated in the fall of 1939, a WPA job had folded under him. He now lives in a comfortable new house. Of 16 Flanders booklets, mainly bitterly Anglophobic, he has unloaded some 22,000 copies at prices ranging from 35-c- to $2 retail. He expects soon to publish titles "by some very prominent and patriotic Americans," says "I am a great admirer of Wheeler, Lindbergh and men of that caliber."

To inquisitive pressmen, Stylist Viereck crooned: "I am not anti-British." In his preface, he grates that Britain's Parliament is "hagridden by a few families welded together by ties of gold and blood," that the Empire is "the greatest graft on earth, the juiciest melon that was ever cut." Since the British aristocracy has long prided itself on providing Britain with leaders the book has no great trouble in elaborating on this theme, adding even a genealogical chart.

Says young Sigfrid Hauck: "I have great plans and great hopes. . . . When I get a bestseller, we'll build a garage."

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