Family Forum / Marriage / Marriage / March 2007

name

didn't

I agree with the last statement, but am not so sure about the other two (as
being "typical" or not).

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If you go to another part of that site and type in "Adolph," you can see
that while never a hugely popular name, the biggest decline in
popularity occurred between 1910 and 1940, most likely related to an
overall decline in the use of "ethnic" names during that period. If you
mouse over any part of the graph, you can see a popup that shows the
overall rank of the name among all names for that particular decade.

It looks like Hitler didn't completely fall off the charts until the
1970s. I think there are a couple of factors in play there.

The first, noted in another blog entry I found written by the same
babynamewizard blogger, is that in 1950, there continued to be a number
of parents, grandparents, favorite uncles, and so on, named Adolph. So,
despite the connection with the dictator, for many Adolph Hitler was not
the only Adolph they knew. In other words, the immediate one-to-one
correlation that we experience between "Adolph" and "Adolph Hilter" had
not yet been forged. As the name decreased in popularity and fewer and
fewer non-Hitler Adolphs were part of people's lives, the association
between the first name and Der Fuhrer became more total.

Second, I think we tend to put on our present-day glasses when we think
about historical personages: in other words, we assume that in 1950
people viewed Adolph Hitler in precisely the same way that we do today.
However, my impression is that while people in the 1950s surely viewed
Hitler as a bad person, he was not yet such an overwhelming cultural
icon as he is today. Nor, do I think, was he yet viewed as the epitome
of all evil, deserving of a place in the innermost circle of Hell.

Compare the connotation of Adolph/Adolph Hitler with Joseph/Joseph
Stalin. While most would cringe at naming a baby "Adolph," most wouldn't
think twice about naming a baby "Joseph." Why is that? Arguably, Joseph
Stalin showed every bit as much callous disregard for human life as
Adolph Hitler. Unlike Adolph, though, Joseph continued to be associated
with a vast range of Josephs beyond Stalin, from Jesus's earthly father
to hundreds of thousands of Uncle Joe's. The name also "sounds American"
and has never ranked lower than #13 in the list of most popular baby
names. In addition, Joseph Stalin never came to be viewed as quite the
same cultural icon of evil that Adolph Hitler did.

And, of course, there was and is a minority in this country that admire
Adolph Hitler--and not just avowed members of the Aryan Nations.

This business of trends in naming is an interesting example of one of
the ways that historians today are attempting to construct new "cultural
histories" of attitudes, beliefs, and ideas among the masses--who left
more traces in the historical record than was once assumed. The number
of historical censuses that have been digitized is growing by leaps and
bounds these days, as is the ease with which historians can analyze
them. This makes it relatively simple to track something such as the
popularity of a birth name.

One historian I've worked with has headed up a project digitizing
historical census records for Guadalajara, Mexico. (Spain and her former
colonies, whatever else you may think of them, were way ahead of their
time when it came to producing bean-counters and mountains of
paperwork.) A different historian working in the same city had looked at
the popularity of the name "Guadalupe" (the patron saint of Mexico,
which has very strong nationalistic/anti-colonial tones) during the
early 1800s, right before the Mexican Wars of Independence, based on
baptismal records. But based on the census records, it seems like a lot
of babies recorded as Guadalupes were not being called by that name when
the census-takers came around. Why? Because, he speculates, in 1800,
there was a groundswell of nationalistic sentiment that would lead to
the wars of independence, and lots of babies were named Guadalupe. But
when the bullets were flying between 1810 and 1820, when whose side you
were on could be a matter of life and death, a lot of those Guadalupes
started using their middle names to avoid that strong association with
the rebel cause! A baptismal name, in some ways, represents the parents'
ideals, while the census name reflects a much more pragmatic usage.

So, to turn this back on the original question: it'd be interesting to
look at trends in the use of Adolph after 1945 not just in terms of
birth records submitted to the SSA, but in terms of the names people
used in daily life. My guess? A lot of kids named Adolph started using a
variant, or some other name, in the decades after WWII.

And then I found this one:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

which rather suggests that it is the other way around.  I was a Ham Radio
operator.  The swastika was around before Hitler. A QSL Card (the card we
use to confirm contacts) from about the 1930's with 2 large swastikas on it
was shown in a magazine.  As the author pointed out, they had nothing to do
with Hitler; he simply chose an existing symbol.  But he still got trounced
for showing it.

Doug L.