Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology

by Howard Zinn

  year, with 1,500,000 Jews already dead, the Jewish leader Stephen Wise was informed

  indirectly through a German industrialist that there was a plan in Hitler's headquarters for

  the extermination of al Jews; Wise brought the information to Under Secretary of State

  Sumner Wel es. Wel es asked him not to release the story until it was investigated for

  confirmation. Three months were spent checking the report. During that time a mil ion Jews

  were kil ed in Europe.23

  It is doubtful that al those Jews could have been saved. But thousands could have been

  rescued. Al the entrenched governments and organizations were negligent.24

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  The British were slow and cautious. In March 1943, in the presence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of State Hul pressed British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden on plans to rescue the

  60,000 Jews in Bulgaria threatened with death. According to a memo by Roosevelt aide

  Harry Hopkins who was at that meeting, Eden worried that Polish and German Jews might

  then also ask to be rescued. "Hitler might wel take us up on any such offer and there

  simply are not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them."25

  When there was a possibility of bombing the railroad lines leading into the murder chambers

  of Auschwitz, to stop further transportation of Jews there, the opportunity was ignored.

  It should be noted that the Jewish organizations themselves behaved shameful y. In 1984,

  the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust reviewed the historical record. It found

  that the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a relief agency set up during World

  War II by the various Jewish groups, "was dominated by the wealthier and more 'American'

  elements of U.S. Jewry… . Thus, its policy was to do nothing in wartime that the U.S.

  government would not official y countenance."26

  Raul Hilberg points out that the Hungarian Jews might have been saved by a bargain: the

  Al ies would not make air raids on Hungary if the Jews would be kept in the cities and not

  sent away. But "the Jews could not think in terms of interfering with the war effort, and the

  Al ies on their part could not conceive of such a promise… . The Al ied bombers roared over

  Hungary at wil , kil ing Hungarians and Jews alike."27

  As I read this I recal ed that one of the bombing raids I had done was on a town in Hungary.

  Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself

  brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from

  Hitler and the Nazis, but there is much evidence that Germany's anti-Semitic actions, cruel

  as they were, would not have turned to mass murder were it not for the psychic distortions

  of war, acting on already distorted minds. Hitler's early aim was forced emigration, not

  extermination, but the frenzy of war created an atmosphere in which the policy turned to

  genocide. This is the view of Princeton historian Arno Mayer, in his book Why Did the

  Heavens Not Darken, and it is supported by the chronology—that not until Germany was at

  war was the Final Solution adopted.28

  Hilberg, in his classic work on the Holocaust, says, "From 1938 to 1940, Hitler made

  extraordinary and unusual attempts to bring about a vast emigration scheme … . The Jews

  were not kil ed before the emigration policy was literal y exhausted." The Nazis found that

  the Western powers were not anxious to cooperate in emigration and that no one wanted

  the Jews.29

  A War for Self-Determination?

  We should examine another claim, that World War II was fought for the right of nations to

  determine their own destiny. This was declared with great fanfare by Winston Churchil and

  Franklin Roosevelt when they met off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941 and

  announced the Atlantic Charter, saying their countries, looking to the postwar world,

  respected "the right of al peoples to choose the form of government under which they wil

  live." This was a direct appeal to the dependent countries of the world, especial y the

  colonies of Britain, France, Hol and, and Belgium, that their rights of self-determination

  would be upheld after the war. The support of the nonwhite colonial world was seen as

  crucial to the defeat of fascism.

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  However, two weeks before the Atlantic Charter, with the longtime French colony of

  Indochina very much in mind, acting Secretary of State of the United States Sumner Wel es

  had given quiet assurances to the French: "This Government, mindful of its traditional

  friendship for France, has deeply sympathized with the desire of the French people to

  maintain their territories and to preserve them intact." And in late 1942, Roosevelt's

  personal representative told French General Henri Giraud, "It is thoroughly understood that

  French sovereignty wil be reestablished as soon as possible throughout al the territory,

  metropolitan or colonial, over which flew the French flag in 1939."30 (These assurances of

  the United States are especial y interesting in view of the claims of the United States during

  the Vietnam War, that the United States was fighting for the right of the Vietnamese to rule

  themselves.)

  If neither saving the Jews nor guaranteeing the principle of self-determination was the war

  aim of the United States (and there is no evidence that either was the aim of Britain or the

  Soviet Union), then what were the principal motives? Overthrowing the governments of

  Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo was certainly one of them. But was this desired on humanitarian

  grounds or because these regimes threatened the positions of the Al ies in the world?

  The rhetoric of morality—the language of freedom and democracy—had some substance to

  it, in that it represented the war aims of many ordinary citizens. However, it was not the

  citizenry but the governments who decided how the war was fought and who had the power

  to shape the world afterward.

  Behind the halo of righteousness that surrounded the war against fascism, the usual

  motives of governments, repeatedly shown in history, were operating: the aggrandizement

  of the nation, more profit for its wealthy elite, and more power to its political leaders.

  One of the most distinguished of British historians, A. J. P. Taylor, commented on World

  War II that "the British and American governments wanted no change in Europe except that

  Hitler should disappear."31 At the end of the war, novelist George Orwel , always conscious

  of class, wrote, "I see the railings [which enclosed the parks and had been torn up so the metal could be used in war production] are returning in one London park after another, so

  the lawful denizens of the squares can make use of their keys again, and the children of the

  poor can be kept out."32

  World War II was an opportunity for United States business to penetrate areas that up to

  that time had been dominated by England. Secretary of State Hul said early in the war,

  Leadership toward a new system of international relationships in trade and

  other economic affairs wil devolve very largely upon the United States

  because of our great economic strength. We should assume this leadership,

  and the responsibility that goes with it, primarily for reasons of pure national

  self-interest.33

  Henry Luce, who owned three of the most influential magazines in the U
nited States— Life,

  Time, and Fortune— and had powerful connections in Washington, wrote a famous editorial for Life in 1941 cal ed "The American Century." This was the time, he said, "to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the

  world and in consequence to exert upon the world the ful impact of our influence, for such

  purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."34

  The British, weakened by war, clearly could not maintain their old empire. In 1944 England

  and the United States signed a pact on oil agreeing on "the principle of equal opportunity."

  This meant the United States was muscling in on England's traditional domination of Middle

  East oil.35 A study of the international oil business by the English writer Anthony Sampson

  concluded,

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  By the end of the war the dominant influence in Saudi Arabia was

  unquestionably the United States. King Ibn Saud was regarded no longer as a

  wild desert warrior, but as a key piece in the power-game, to be wooed by

  the West. Roosevelt, on his way back from Yalta in February, 1945,

  entertained the King on the cruiser Qyincy, together with his entourage of

  fifty, including two sons, a prime minister, an astrologer and flocks of sheep

  for slaughter.36

  There was a critic inside the American government, not a politician but poet Archibald

  MacLeish, who briefly served as assistant secretary of state. He worried about the postwar

  world: "As things are now going the peace we wil make, the peace we seem to be making,

  wil be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief … without moral

  purpose or human interest."37

  A War Against Racism?

  If the war was truly a war of moral purpose, against the Nazi idea of superior and inferior

  races, then we might have seen action by the U.S. government to eliminate racial

  segregation. Such segregation had been declared lawful by the Supreme Court in 1896 and

  existed in both South and North, accepted by both state and national governments.

  The armed forces were segregated by race. When I was in basic training at Jefferson

  Barracks, Missouri, in 1943, it did not occur to me, so typical an American white was I, that

  there were no black men in training with us. But it was a huge base, and one day, taking a

  long walk to the other end of it, I was suddenly aware that al the GIs around me were

  black. There was a squad of blacks taking a ten-minute break from hiking in the sun, lying

  on a smal grassy incline, and singing a hymn that surprised me at the moment, but that I

  realized later was quite appropriate to their situation: "Ain't Gonna Study War No More."

  My air crew sailed to England on the Queen Mary. That elegant passenger liner had been

  converted into a troop ship. There were 16,000 men aboard, and 4,000 of them were black.

  The whites had quarters on deck and just below deck. The blacks were housed separately,

  deep in the hold of the ship, around the engine room, in the darkest, dirtiest sections. Meals

  were taken in four shifts (except for the officers, who ate in prewar Queen Mary style in a chandeliered bal room—the war was not being fought to disturb class privilege), and the

  blacks had to wait until three shifts of whites had finished eating.

  On the home front, racial discrimination in employment continued, and it was not until A.

  Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union of black workers,

  threatened to organize a march on Washington during the war and embarrass the Roosevelt

  administration before the world that the president signed an order setting up a Fair

  Employment Practices Commission. But its orders were not enforced and job discrimination

  continued. A spokesman for a West Coast aviation plant said, "The Negro wil be considered

  only as janitors and in other similar capacities … . Regardless of their training as aircraft

  workers, we wil not employ them."38

  There was no organized black opposition to the war, but there were many signs of

  bitterness at the hypocrisy of a war against fascism that did nothing about American racism.

  One black journalist wrote: "The Negro … is angry, resentful, and utterly apathetic about the

  war. 'Fight for what?' he is asking. 'This war doesn't mean a thing to me. If we win I lose,

  so what?' "39

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  A student at a black col ege told his teacher: "The Army jim-crows us. The Navy lets us serve only as messmen. The Red Cross refuses our blood. Employers and labor unions shut

  us out. Lynchings continue. We are disenfranchised, jim-crowed, spat upon. What more

  could Hitler do than that?" That student's statement was repeated by Walter White, a leader

  of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), to an audience

  of several thousand black people in the Midwest, expecting that they would disapprove.

  Instead, as he recal ed, "To my surprise and dismay the audience burst into such applause

  that it took me some thirty or forty seconds to quiet it."40

  In January 1943, there appeared in a Negro newspaper a "Draftee's Prayer":

  Dear Lord, today

  I go to war:

  To fight, to die.

  Tel me, what for?

  Dear Lord, I'l fight,

  I do not fear,

  Germans or Japs;

  My fears are here.

  America!41

  In one little-known incident of World War II, two transport ships being loaded with

  ammunition by U.S. sailors at the Port Chicago naval base in California suddenly blew up on

  the night of July 17, 1944. It was an enormous explosion, and its glare could be seen in San

  Francisco, thirty-five miles away. More than 300 sailors were kil ed, two-thirds of them

  black, because blacks were given the hard jobs of ammunition loaders. "It was the worst

  home front disaster of World War II," historian Robert Al en writes in his book The Port

  Chicago Mutiny. 42

  Three weeks later 328 of the survivors were asked to load ammunition again; 258 of them

  refused, citing unsafe conditions. They were immediately jailed. Fifty of them were then

  court-martialed on a charge of mutiny, and received sentences ranging from eight to fifteen

  years imprisonment. It took a massive campaign by the NAACP and its counsel, Thurgood

  Marshal , to get the sentences reduced.43

  To the Japanese who lived on the West Coast of the United States, it quickly became clear

  that the war against Hitler was not accompanied by a spirit of racial equality. After the

  attack by Japan on Pearl Harbor, anger rose against al people of Japanese ancestry. One

  congressman said, "I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawai now and

  putting them in concentration camps… . Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!"44

  Hysteria grew. Roosevelt, persuaded by racists in the military that the Japanese on the

  West Coast constituted a threat to the security of the country, signed Executive Order 9066

  in February 1942. This empowered the army, without warrants or indictments or hearings,

  to arrest every Japanese-American on the West Coast—110,000 men, women, and

  children—to take them from their homes, to transport them to camps far in the interior, and

  to keep them there under prison conditions.

  Three-fourths of the Japanese so removed from their homes were Nisei—children born in

  the United States
of Japanese parents and, therefore, American citizens. The other fourth—

  the Issei, born in Japan—were barred by law from becoming citizens. In 1944 the United

  States Supreme Court upheld the forced evacuation on the grounds of military necessity.45

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  Data uncovered in the 1980s by legal historian Peter Irons showed that the army falsified material in its brief to the Supreme Court. When Congress in 1983 was considering financial

  compensation to the Japanese who had been removed from their homes and their

  possessions during the war, John J. McCloy wrote an article in the New York Times opposing

  such compensation, defending the action as necessary. As Peter Irons discovered in his

  research, it was McCloy, then assistant secretary of war, who had ordered the deletion of a

  critical footnote in the Justice Department brief to the Supreme Court, a footnote that cast

  great doubt on the army's assertions that the Japanese living on the West Coast were a

  threat to American security.46

  Michi Weglyn was a young girl when her family experienced evacuation and detention. She

  tel s in her book Years of Infamy of bungling in the evacuation; of misery, confusion, and

  anger; but also of Japanese-American dignity and of fighting back. There were strikes,

  petitions, mass meetings, refusals to sign loyalty oaths, and riots against the camp

  authorities.47

  Only a few Americans protested publicly. The press often helped to feed racism. Reporting

  the bloody battle of Iwo Jima in the Pacific, Time magazine said, "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing … indicates it."48

  In the 1970s, Peter Ota, then fifty-seven, was interviewed by Studs Terkel. His parents had

  come from Japan in 1004, and became respected members of the Los Angeles community.

  Ota was born in the United States. He remembered what had happened in the war:

  On the evening of December 7, 1941, my father was at a wedding. He was

  dressed in a tuxedo. When the reception was over, the FBI agents were

  waiting. They rounded up at least a dozen wedding guests and took 'em to

  county jail.

  For a few days we didn't know what happened. We heard nothing. When we

  found out, my mother, my sister and myself went to jail … . When my father

  walked through the door my mother was so humiliated … . She cried. He was