Watch Your Attitude!

      I looked at public attitude in two ways. First I assessed how antisemitic attitudes changed, then I assessed how attitudes towards the holocaust shifted throughout. I found, without a surprise, that antisemitism was highest in the 1930s and spiked again in 1939, then in 1941 antisemitism in Flagstaff dropped. In 1950 we see an irregularity and a possible outlier in the data. This trend shows that people were ill-informed and mislead.

      In order to address attitudes towards the Holocaust I came up with four categories. After reading all of the articles I found that major attitudes included disbelief that Jews are being murdered, blaming Jews, belief that Jews are being murdered, and action against those murderers. I read every article and placed it in one of the above categories corresponding to the attitude portrayed in the article. My results were relatively inconclusive. What we can see is that blame spiked in 1939 and again in 1951. Also action had sporadic spikes. One of the most interesting occurrences is that disbelief spikes at the same time belief, action, and blame spikes.

      Attitude changed drastically throughout the course of time. The biggest change we see is that of the shift from high levels of antisemitism to practically none.