Henry Cord Meyer


Henry Cord Meyer was an American historian specializing in modern European and Central European history. He was an expert on the politics and economics of airships in the post World War I period.

Biography

The only child of German immigrants Henry H. and Sophie Meyer, Henry Cord Meyer was born on 12 February 1913 in Chicago, Illinois. After his father died in 1920, Meyer and his mother moved first to Eldora, Colorado; Meyer grew up in Colorado Springs. Meyer earned his B.A. degree at the University of Colorado in 1935; he spent one year as a student at the Konsular Academy in Vienna before continuing his studies in the United States, receiving his master's degree at the University of Iowa, and his PhD from Yale University in 1941.

Career

Meyer was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy at the start of World War II and was recruited by William Donovan to serve as a commissioned officer in the Office of Strategic Services, joining other historians performing intelligence work. As one of the planners for the 1943 Operation Torch invasion of Northern Africa, Meyer researched port capacities and possible landing sites. He returned to academia after the war, joining the history faculty of Pomona College as a specialist in Central European history. While at Pomona, he received the 1956 George Louis Beer Prize for his 1955 book, Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1815-1945. He was a 1960 Guggenheim Fellow, studying German and East European History. Leaving Pomona in 1964, Meyer was a founding member of the History Department at UC Irvine. Late in his career, Meyer became an authority on the political and economic history of dirigibles, studying rigid airship travel from its early development by the Schütte-Lanz and Luftschiffbau Zeppelin companies; he also researched the history of the U.S. Navy's airships, including the USS Shenandoah, the USS Akron and the USS Macon, and studied the British Air Ministry's dirigible program, including the R100 and R101 airships. He conducted an extensive correspondence with figures involved with airship travel and mail service and interviewed survivors of the Hindenburg disaster.
In 1974 Meyer contacted director Robert Wise regarding the production plans of the film The Hindenburg and was granted access to the production during filming. Interviewed in 1976, Meyer said that the film’s dramatic narrative – that anti-Nazi sabotage of the Hindenburg was the cause of the disaster – was not historically accurate. He argued that in 1937 there was no organized anti-Nazi resistance in Germany.
Meyer was a prolific scholar, publishing many articles and book reviews in his career; he was the author of seven books. His research interests included German history since 1815, European history since 1848, 19th and 20th century European diplomatic history, and German-Slav relations in the 19th and 20th centuries. His later research included work on the emotional and psychological aspects of slogans and images as they relate to perceptions about national identities; he also investigated the phenomena of political manipulation of technology. In his last work, Airships in International Affairs 1890-1940, Meyer collaborated with airship expert John Duggan. Considered by many an expert on the propaganda use of the airship, Meyer was not averse to sharing his knowledge and expertise with other airship scholars. At his death, Meyer was planning a book on airship political documents and working on his memoirs.
Meyer died on September 30, 2001 in Claremont, California.
In 2002, Meyer's extensive airship research papers and photograph collection were donated to the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives.

Selected bibliography