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An age-old technique for mobilizing a populace to fight a war is to so thoroughly demonize the enemy that the conflict becomes seen by the public as a moral battle rather than a political one. This technique was used to maximum effect in America during World War I, when for the first time the U.S. was engaged as a late entrant in an overseas war, a war that many Americans wanted no part of. Accordingly, the Germans were recast as Huns to whom all sorts of atrocity tales were attributed, and suddenly everything Germanic became anathema. In response, German-Americans sought to avoid being branded as disloyalists, traitors, or spies by declaring themselves to be Dutch or anglicizing their names, and common items with German names were retitled: sauerkraut became victory cabbage, hamburgers turned into liberty sandwiches, and hamburger steak was henceforth known as Salisbury steak. And a young comic named Julius Marx, who came from a German family and was touring America in a vaudeville show with his three brothers, altered the persona of his stage character from German to Yiddish and finally to American. Julius would later became nationally famous as Groucho, one of the celebrated Marx Brothers. This renaming frenzy didn't carry over to World War II, in large part because the Germans did such a thorough job of demonizing themselves, but one result of the Nazi era in Germany was the long-lasting stigmatization of the names Adolf and Hitler. Thousands of people bearing those names changed them in order to avoid any association with the notorious German dictator. So, when Marx Brothers fans eventually learned that although Harpo Marx had always stated his real first name as Arthur, he had actually been born Adolph Marx, they naturally assumed he had changed his name for a similar reason. But in fact, that assumption was an erroneous and anachronistic explanation for a transition that had actually taken place many years earlier for unrelated reasons. Explanations for why the comedian who would later become world-famous as Harpo adopted the name Arthur vary, ranging from the claim that he had been nicknamed Ahdie early on and simply preferred that name to Adolph, to the notion that he sought to avoid an association with a notorious show business lawyer bearing the homophonous name of Adolph Marks: Whatever the precise reason for the name change, it undeniably occurred long before Adolph (Harpo) Marx would have had occasion to hear of Adolf Hitler, as Robert S. Bader noted in his history of the Marx Brothers on stage: Newspaper reviews of Marx Brothers performances also document that Adolph was identified as Arthur at least as early as 1913. Thus Adolph Marx's name change demonstrably took place long before the world had heard of an Austrian named Adolf Hitler, well before the outbreak of World War I (much less World War II), and even years before the momentous day when the comic was first tagged with the moniker of Harpo.
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