Some Additions To We All Love A Mystery

This was first published in 2007, but I've since revised it ever so slightly and I've added a "Word History." The photo below was added 1-28-22.

 Anna Anderson had a fair number of supporters during her lifetime. If I remember correctly, however, opinion polls over the years showed that the overwhelming percentage of the public did NOT believe she was the Tsar's daughter, and this was well before any Romanov remains were unearthed or any DNA testing was conducted. As I noted in the main story, she had some very wealthy supporters who were her outright benefactors, providing housing, clothing and financial assistance, and at times, a pretty high lifestyle.

By the early to mid 1990s, when DNA testing had shown that Anderson was not the Tsar's daughter, the remaining supporters were just devastated. There was disbelief in the test results, as well as suspicions that testing samples had been planted in some way by Anderson's Romanov opponents. That's understandable. Some people had been very committed to Anna Anderson's cause, and to have that cause totally disintegrate brought about a common human reaction, denial. I don't doubt for one minute the sincerity of the affection that many of her supporters had for her, but at times, our emotional attachment to a cause can smack our own self esteem, when that cause comes crashing down. Certainly I'd have to believe that was the case with many of Anderson's supporters. While they protested the test results, they had to feel that they had been deceived by Anderson and that kind of thing leads to people questioning their own judgment. When Richard Nixon was re-elected as president in 1972, he received tens of millions of votes. Just about a year and a half later, with the Watergate scandal on the front page of every newspaper, it was tough to find anyone who admitted to voting for him.

 Now, was Anna Anderson just a flat out fraud? The bottom line answer would have to be that she was. When she dropped the grenade in the munitions factory, and the one worker was killed, and she herself was badly wounded, she was given much psychiatric treatment, but when she was released from the hospital, the doctors declared that she was not "cured" of her emotional troubles. As I mentioned in the main article, thereafter, she was treated at various other times in her life for mental instability. So, what am I getting at?

I had an acquaintance who passed away a couple of years ago. I won't go into the details, but he "claimed" to be fairly well off financially, to have property in Beverly Hills, and to have worked at a particular job for many years. For those of us who were around him, we could neither prove nor disprove his story, or stories, if you will. When we make friends, we like to know something about those friends, and we like to feel some sort of trust with our friends. In this case, most of us did not believe the guy's story (most of us still liked him very much, although a few felt deceived and they were angry). The reasons are not really important, but my feelings were always that he started out telling a bit of an exaggeration about himself, and that the story eventually just got out of hand, and I guess you could say, that it took on a life of it's own. He had gone so far with the story, that he would have been humiliated to have to recant. I've always felt sorry for him, in that he wanted so much to be something that he wasn't. Now, all of us have exaggerated (or downplayed) something about ourselves, and if exaggerating were a crime, I suppose all of YOU.....okay, all of US would be doing time. Just like Anna Anderson's story, this guy's story just did not always make sense, nor did it fit with his life. So, did Anderson's story just get out of hand, or did she just plain take advantage of gullible folks who wanted to believe that at least one Romanov princess had escaped the Bolsheviks? Remember, as time passed, she didn't have to work, and she lived a very extravagant lifestyle for a time, with wealthy benefactors footing the bill. With that in mind, I want all of you to know that I'm really Ross Perot's long lost son.

This photo of Franziska Schanzkowska, who took the name Anna Anderson, is from Wikipedia and it is in the public domain. It is listed on Wikipedia as having been taken in Berlin in 1922 by an unknown photographer.

WORD HISTORY: 

Canister-This noun for a "cylindrical container, originally metal, but in modern times often of plastic," seems to go back to some Semitic language^ of the Middle East, as Arabic has "qanah" and Assyrian "qanu," both meaning "reed." Ancient Greek had "kanastron," which meant "reed basket," from Greek "kanna"="reed," plus the "tron" ending, which comes from Indo European "-trom," a suffix used to form words to indicate a device or implement. The Greek word was borrowed by Latin as "canistrum," which meant the broader "wicker basket." English borrowed the word, as "canister," from Latin circa 1500. It also came to be used for some artillery shells or other explosive devices, and further for containers for smoke causing agents and for tear gas.

 ^  The Semitic languages are a group of related languages "centered" in the Middle East and eastern Africa, but also spoken beyond those areas. The most common modern Semitic languages are Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew and Tigrinya, but in ancient times Semitic included Assyrian and Phoenician, with Phoenician being spoken in ancient times in the Middle East and in North Africa by the Carthaginians.