“Something Really Very Odd and Singularly Appropriate:” The Fashionable Swastika in the US Before 1939

Abstract

More than a decade before Hitler became the leader of the Nazi party, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Ladies’ Home Journal hit on the perfect insignia for their new “Girl’s Club”: a swastika. This was far from anomalous; an examination of American fashion and lifestyle publications shows that the swastika was a fashionable motif for dress, home decor, and particularly jewelry from the turn of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. Moreover, the swastika continued to be used as a decorative motif even as news of life under the Third Reich was published in American newspapers. This regular use in fashion and consumer goods suggests that Americans did not want to recognize the dissonance between the way that they wore the swastika and the symbol in its German context. This distinction began to disintegrate in the mid-1930s, as conflict over the use of the symbol revealed fracture lines between those affected by its anti-Semitic connotations and those who thought that these connotations were either acceptable or easy enough to ignore. The lifecycle of the swastika in American culture in the first four decades of the twentieth century offers a unique case study of how a sign can gain and lose meaning; after arising as a seemingly superficial fad, the persistence of the motif took on increasingly problematic associations raising difficult questions of how to contend with new readings of old signs.