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Did Frank Harris Cause the First World War?

A somewhat facetious question, perhaps, to which the answer is firmly in the negative, yet Frank Harris was at one time numbered among those who agitated for a war against Germany. Articles he published in the Saturday Review in the 1890s were so virulent that Wilhelm II himself was perturbed by them. Harris's later opposition to the war, as expressed in his 1915 book England or Germany? is rather better known, and it has not often been noted how radical a change of position it was for him.

George Sylvester Viereck

What follows is apparently an unpublished draft by Frank Harris, one of his "Contemporary Portraits", this of the poet George Sylvester Viereck. It is to be found amongst the papers of Elmer Gertz that are lodged in the Library of Congress. A correspondent sent it to me in 2006(!) and I have only just got round to putting it online.

Viereck was a strange, perverse character who did not help his career by being pro-German in both world wars. Harris admired his poetry but little else about him.