More Fiends

Fifty Speeces and 100 Great Speeches

    Anyone who glances at a bibliography of Alfred W. Lawson's books will note that he penned both Fifty Speeches and 100 Great Speeches, published about a decade apart. One might assume that the latter title is just an expanded version of the earlier; and in one sense, that is true. The bulk of the text of both works are reprints of the editorials from Lawson's newsheet, the Benefactor. Fifty Speeches includes vol. 1 and vol. 2 (to number 23) of the Benefactor, arranged in consecutive order. 100 Great Speeches includes numbers from vols. 1-3, but are not in consecutive order.

    Both books are folio size (in the loose sense of that term), with the binding measuring 17" x 11". The earlier work has 175 pages; the latter has 232. Lawson obviously devoted great attention to the details of both publications, but the similarities end there. Fifty Speeches is the rarer, more interesting work, brimming with content found in no 
other Lawson titles. It is the most complete document archive of Lawson's 1930's social movement, the Direct Credits Society.

    Unlike most of Lawson's works, Fifty Speeches does not contain a lengthy autobiographical section on Lawson's life accomplishments. Instead, the first 63 pages are photos of Direct Credits Society parades, group photos, and individual "officer" portraits. If there was ever a doubt that the DCS was a genuine popular movement, these photos dispell that notion. Most of the group photos and individual photos list members by name--something rarely seen except in the very earliest DCS newspapers.

    On page 63, you can even see the young mother of A. W. Lawson's two children, E. Hosta.

    In the years between the publication of the two books, the DCS movement lost its impetus and fell victim to internal dissention and scandal. Several of the officers depicted in Fifty Speeches were later accused of adulterous relationships; a few of the photos show people who later disagreed with certain actions that Lawson took (especially in regard to support of War Bonds). Lawson himself wanted to deflect the attention drawn his relationship with Hosta (and other young women in the DCS office staff?).

    For these reasons, Lawson did not keep Fifty Speeches in print. He did not suppress its dessimination (in fact, Fifty Speeches is one of the titles sold in an ad found in 100 Great Speeches on page 224), but unlike his other works, massive printings did not keep it in stock beyond the 1940s.

    Collecting Lawsoniana or studying the DCS? Fifty Speeches is essential!

That Distinctive Lawson Font

I've heard it said by more than one person that Alfred Lawson's books can be spotted from fifty feet away by the distinctive all-upper-case sans-serif bold font used for all his cover titles. Case in point:

[In this example, the author credit lettering uses a different font than the title itself.]

I've tried to identify these using some online tools, but none resulted in a perfect match. The title font above is very close to a variant of Futura Extra Bold. See commercial example at:

MyFonts

It has a very 1930s feel to it, which is probably not a coincidence. Futura was designed in 1927 by Paul Renner using simple geometric shapes, inspired by the Bauhaus style. Futura Extra Bold,  however, was not released until the 1950s, so Lawson's Humanity Publishing Company was using something else. Actually, I see where Humanity Publishing used at least three different fonts for cover titles and inside title pages, all geometric sans-serif.

Like so much else about A. W. Lawson's writings, it turns out that his preferred fonts have a contextual link to the times he lived in.

Collectible Lawson Publication: Direct Credits for Humanity (magazine)

One of the rarer and more collectible Alfred W. Lawson publications is the magazine Direct Credits for Humanity, published by Lawson's Humanity Publishing Company between June, 1932 and mid-1935. As far as I know, 5 issues were published, each about 32 pages. By my reckoning, it predates the earliest issues of Lawson's Direct Credits Society newspaper, the Benefactor, by almost two years.

Although the content is still most editorials/speeches by Lawson, Direct Credits for Humanity also has news about, articles by, lists of, and profiles of dedicated DCS officers. Very little of this is found in later Lawson DCS publications, other than in the photographic sections of his books.

 

The content of the magazine also demonstrates that Lawson, from the very beginning of the DCS, harbored no ambitions for an independent political movement. The DCS was all about pressuring elected officials--whatever their party affiliation--to adopt the Direct Credits platform for economic reform.

In Late September, 1931, Lawson had incorporated the Passenger Compartment Company in Wilmington, Delaware (where many companies filed their incorporations.) Sometime between late 1931 and June of 1932, Lawson had moved to Detroit, founded the Humanity Publishing Company, published Creation and Direct Credits for Everybody, and came out with the first issue of Direct Credits for Humanity magazine in June, 1932.

Detroit was already fertile ground for the vilification of "financiers." During the 1920s, Henry Ford's newspaper The Dearborn Independent made overt references to "financiers" being an international Jewish cabal. Lawson never made any obvious anti-Semitic statements, but his Detroit readers would have recalled Ford's attitudes.