Christopher Cerf and Henry beard’s “Let’s get America out of dutch” reads as if it had been written today. The pages almost feel sticky from the crazy xenophobia and hatred expressed by the writer. Pamphleteers of this sort were the precursors of today’s foaming-at-the-mouth radio and television hosts.
H
enry Beard and I decided to produce a parody of hate literature for the April
1973 “Prejudice” issue. We had in mind the type distributed by groups such as the National White People’s Party to warn unsuspecting Americans that Jews, Blacks, Communists and/ or Catholics (to name just a few) were relentlessly conspiring to overthrow Western civilization. In order to avoid the appearance of defaming those groups the hatemongers had targeted in the first place, we would select the most benign and unthreatening national group we could find and outline, in searing and vitriolic detail, the heinous threat they represented to “all we hold dear.” In those days, Henry and I loved to bat around ideas for Lampoon pieces at Original Joe’s, a restaurant in the East Sixties. We went to Joe’s to figure out who should be the target of our screed. It wasn’t as simple as we’d expected. The Belgians? Other than fattening us up with their waffles, what could we accuse them of doing to us? Finally, we hit upon the Dutch. “They’re cutting all our doors in half,” I noted. “God knows what they bake in those ovens of theirs,” Henry responded. And so it went for the next couple of hours until, fortified by numerous glasses of Heineken (or “Dutch swill,” as we had already come to call it), we stumbled out onto Second Avenue with more than enough material to fill the inaugural issue of the Americans United to Beat the Dutch (A.U.T.B.D.) newsletter. Our parody might not win awards for its subtlety and restraint, we realized, but we were confident that it could make our readers laugh without being offended. Unfortunately, we were wrong about the “offended” part. Publisher Jerry Taylor, a man of great skill and graciousness, had been courting Time magazine’s adver-
tising manager for months and had finally convinced him to place a series of ads in the Lampoon. But, as luck would have
“Perhaps I did overreact,” he allowed, and he agreed to begin
it, Time’s media buyer was Dutch, and when he received his
advertising again in the next available issue. But unbeknownst
copy of the “Prejudice” issue, complete with Henry’s and my
to Jerry, Henry and I had been shamelessly shaping the left-
A.U.T.B.D. article, he was anything but amused. “They called
overs of our seemingly infinite supply of anti-Dutch material
my queen a dike!” he sputtered at Jerry, and he promptly can-
into a second A.U.T.B.D. newsletter (see cartoon on the page to
celled his entire Lampoon campaign.
your left). In May 1974, only days after Time had returned to
The story doesn’t end there. Week after week, phone call
the fold, our sequel hit the stands. Needless to say, the news-
after phone call, Jerry worked patiently on getting Time’s ads
weekly immediately withdrew its ads once again. And that
back into the Lampoon, and finally the media buyer relented.
time, alas, they never returned. —Chris Cerf
CHRISToPHeR CeRF
73