Grey Falcon and the Union Man: Miloje Sokić Collection of the Clippings from the American Press 1941–1945

Abstract

Miloje Sokic, a journalist whose family owned the Pravda newspaper, spent war years in the United States, where he gathered a collection of press clippings that illustrate well American attitudes towards the war in the Balkans. The collection reveals enthusiastic support for the Chetniks in the first two years of the war, and then the pendulum swang toward Partisans. In these clipping one can follow two immigrant groups. The one around Konstantin Fotitch, the Yugoslav Ambassador, nurtured the image of heroic Serbian resistance as illustrated by Rebecca West and Ruth Mitchell. The other, around Luis Adamic, presented Yugoslav Partisans as a piece of a progressive multi-cultural America in the Balkans. Adamic’s strategy won because it was politically more astute, but also because the immigrants from the former Habsburg lands outnumbered those of Serbian origin at a ratio of 3 to 1.