Those Angry Days

by Lynne Olson

  “I do not believe I did, Senator.”

  “That Hamilton Woman?”

  “I did not see that.”

  “Man Hunt?”

  “I think not.”

  “Sergeant York?”

  “I think not.”

  “Escape?”

  “Would you tell me a part of the story so I could try to remember?”

  “Confessions of a Nazi Spy?”

  Nye might have seen that one, he said, but he had it confused with I Married a Nazi: “For the life of me I could not tell you which was which.”

  It soon became embarrassingly clear that Nye had not seen or could not remember any of the films he and his isolationist colleagues found so objectionable, with the sole exception of The Great Dictator. McFarland had skewered Nye, the Hollywood Reporter later wrote, “like a censor working on Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

  The one-sided verbal duel between McFarland and Nye set the tone for the rest of the hearings. The isolationist senators clearly had not done their homework and, as a result, were made to look ridiculous. Unprepared to discuss the movies they had targeted, they also were vague about their objectives for the investigation. Their ineptness worked to fuel the suspicion that the only reason for the hearings was to gain publicity for the isolationist cause.

  Willkie, for his part, circumvented Clark’s attempt to silence him by making frequent whispered comments to reporters, who wrote down everything he said and then put the remarks in their stories. He also grabbed a microphone several times to make off-the-cuff remarks to the subcommittee. On the hearing’s third day, he pointed out that it had not produced any legislation thus far, which was, after all, the ostensible reason that the probe was being conducted.

  Unsurprisingly, the hearings were doomed to failure. Willkie’s talk of attempted censorship resonated with newspapers across the country, many of which condemned what they dubbed a witch hunt. According to the Buffalo Courier-Express, the hearings were “a frontal attack on the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression.” In exasperation, the Milwaukee Journal asked of the senators: “Do they want some pro-Hitler films produced? Do they want some anti-defense films shown? Just what is it they want?”

  Even America First thought the hearings were a disaster. “Certain aspects of the investigation are so unsavory that I question the advisability of publicizing it any further,” Ruth Sarles, the group’s Washington director, wrote to a colleague.

  Faced with a firestorm of ridicule and criticism, the subcommittee abruptly adjourned after the first week. The hearings were never reopened.

  HOLLYWOOD’S VICTORY OVER THE isolationists emboldened those working there to remain in the forefront of national debates over contentious political issues. As David Welky has noted, the industry’s activism against the dictators in the prewar years was its “political coming out party.” From then on, leading Hollywood figures would have no qualms about making their voices heard on major national and international matters.

  Having helped nudge public opinion toward the view that America must enter the war, the movie industry worked closely with the Roosevelt administration for the conflict’s duration. Many of its members actively campaigned for the president’s reelection in 1944, and studio heads produced movies that the administration encouraged them to make, such as Mission to Moscow, which sang the praises of America’s crucial wartime ally, the Soviet Union.

  For years, the film community had been everything that conservatives in Congress and elsewhere despised—predominantly to the left in its political orientation and unabashedly pro-FDR and pro–New Deal. It’s not surprising, then, that after conservatism made a comeback following the war and FDR’s death, one of its first targets would be the film industry.

  With the Soviet Union shifting from ally to antagonist and the first chill of the Cold War sweeping over the country, the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee would launch an investigation of Communist influence in Hollywood. The probe would result in the jailing and blacklisting of writers, directors, actors, and producers, most of whom had cut their political teeth in Hollywood’s prewar campaigns against the dictators. Anyone who had ever marched against Hitler or Mussolini was at risk of losing his or her livelihood. This ice age would last more than a dozen years, damaging and ruining hundreds if not thousands of lives.

  CHAPTER 24

  “SETTING THE GROUND FOR ANTI-SEMITISM”

  Soon after the Senate movie hearings began, Charles Lindbergh handed his wife a copy of a speech he was about to give at an America First rally in Des Moines. As Anne Lindbergh read it, her anxiety mounted with every page. She knew, however, that any concern she expressed would probably have little effect. Although she was the only person Lindbergh trusted enough to read and comment on drafts of his speeches and articles, he often did not follow her advice. “There were many times when I wanted him to change his speeches,” she later recalled. “There were many things I wish Charles had not said.”

  She had, for example, urged him in May not to call for “new policies and new leadership” for the country, arguing that such language would be interpreted as advocating insurrection. He ignored her counsel, and, as she predicted, his speech was roundly condemned. Similarly, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, she advised him not to make his inflammatory remarks about preferring a U.S. alliance with Britain or Germany to one with the Soviets. Again, he disregarded her plea. He didn’t care what other people thought. He believed his case was sound, and that’s all that mattered.

  This new speech, in Anne’s view, surpassed all the others in its provocation. This one, she told him, would ignite a whirlwind. But nothing she said made a difference. Increasingly sensitive and suspicious, Lindbergh was convinced that the Roosevelt administration was trying to silence him. He was also sure that America was about to get into the war, and he was determined to fire one last salvo before Washington shut him up for good.

  Feeding Lindbergh’s persecution complex were Harold Ickes’s unrelenting attacks on him, each new assault more blistering than the one before. The interior secretary was obsessed with the idea that Lindbergh was plotting to take over the country. Of his bête noire, Ickes wrote Roosevelt: “His actions have been coldly calculated with a view to obtaining ultimate power for himself—what he calls ‘new leadership.’ ”

  Having studied Lindbergh closely, Ickes decided he was most likely to touch a nerve by hammering away at the flier’s 1938 acceptance of a medal from Hermann Goering. In speech after speech, he referred to Lindbergh not by name but as “the Knight of the German Eagle.” On July 14, 1941, Ickes delivered his most brutal assault yet, accusing “ex-Colonel Lindbergh” of visiting prewar Germany because of his affinity for Nazism and of lying when he said he had traveled there at the request of the U.S. military. Lindbergh, Ickes declared, was devoted to the Hitler regime and the medal it gave him: “He preferred to keep the German Eagle. The colonelcy in our Army he returned to the President of the United States.” Lindbergh, Ickes added, was “a menace to this country and its free institutions.”

  Both Charles and Anne Lindbergh were deeply angered by Ickes’s attack, which Anne called “full of lies and calumny and false insinuations from beginning to end.” In the past, Lindbergh had not responded to Ickes’s sallies, but he finally had had enough. Convinced that Roosevelt was behind them, he decided to complain to the president. “Nothing is to be gained by my entering a controversy with a man of Ickes’s type,” he wrote in his journal. “But if I can pin Ickes’s actions on Roosevelt, it will have the utmost effect.”

  In a letter to FDR, which he also released to the press, Lindbergh outlined the circumstances of his trips to Germany and Goering’s presentation of the medal. The U.S. military, he said, had asked him to assess German aircraft developments, and the U.S. ambassador had urged him to come to the stag dinner at which the Luftwaffe chief had surprised him with the decoration. “Mr. President,” Lindbergh declared, “I give you my word that
I have no connection with any foreign Government … I will willingly open my files to your investigation.… If there is a question in your mind, I ask that you give me the opportunity of answering any charges.” He added that he thought Ickes owed him an apology.

  He failed to get one. The only response from the administration was a note from press secretary Steve Early dismissing his letter, which had been featured on newspaper front pages across the country, as a cheap publicity stunt. Ickes, for his part, was delighted that his goading had made Lindbergh “squeal,” underscoring the flier’s vulnerability and political naïveté. “For the first time, he has allowed himself to be put on the defensive,” Ickes exulted in his diary.

  At the same time, the secretary’s slash-and-burn tactics received heavy criticism of their own. “Free speech is no longer free speech if character assassination from the highest places is to be the penalty for its exercise,” an Omaha, Nebraska, newspaper editorialized after Ickes’s July 14 address. “If the Ickes manner of settling a dispute were to be adopted, then we should all be out fighting each other with hatchets.”

  The interior secretary was deluged with letters, many of them denouncing his vitriol. Among them was a long, passionate missive from Miles Hart, a Democrat from Oswego, Kansas, who said he opposed Lindbergh’s isolationism and believed that America must go to war. Nonetheless, Hart wrote, Lindbergh had every right to say what he believed, and “we have a right to listen to him without being bothered by the outbursts of those who would have us shun his opinions for extraneous reasons.… You do not answer his arguments by calling him a fool.… You’ve plenty of good arguments to refute his assertions. Why not use them?”

  Hart went on to say that he resented “this business of questioning the motives of every man who happens to disagree with the administration.… The American people are faced with great problems. We cannot solve them in an atmosphere of hysteria and personal vituperation. We must have all the facts given to us and then be permitted calmly and reasonably to decide what we should do.… You and your associates, including Mr. Roosevelt, have fiddled long enough. The city burns, and it’s time you cast away your entertaining diversions and went to work to put out the fire.”

  LINDBERGH HAD BEEN PLANNING his September speech for six months before he delivered it. In several previous addresses, he had mentioned what he called “powerful elements” that were trying to propel America into the war but refrained from naming them. Convinced now that U.S. involvement was “practically inevitable” and that “an incident to involve us might arise on any day,” Lindbergh decided he must identify those “powerful elements” in a last-ditch step to alert Americans to the danger they posed.

  The three groups he singled out as “war agitators” were the Roosevelt administration, the British, and American Jews. He reserved his sharpest criticism for the president and his men, and in a long speech, he devoted only three paragraphs to Jewish influence. But, as Anne knew, these were the comments that would set off the storm.

  Lindbergh began his remarks about the Jews by saying he understood why they wanted America to get into the war and defeat Germany. Nazi persecution “would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind could condone” what was happening to the Jews in Europe.

  Nonetheless, Lindbergh said, American Jews must realize that if the country did enter the conflict, they would be among the first to feel the consequences, which, he indicated, would include a violent outbreak of anti-Semitism in the country. “Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength,” he said. “History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation.”

  Insisting he was attacking neither the Jews nor the British, Lindbergh said he admired both groups. His objection lay in the fact that leaders of “both races … for reasons … which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we must also look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.” Jews, Lindbergh went on, posed a particular “danger to this country” because of “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”

  After reading the speech, Anne, sunk in “black gloom,” pleaded with him not to give it. It was perfectly acceptable to criticize the Roosevelt administration and the British, she said, but didn’t he realize that his remarks about the Jews were “segregating them as a group,” thereby “setting the ground for anti-Semitism”? Just as the Nazis had done in Germany, he was branding Jews as a separate race, whose own agenda was antithetical to the interests of their country. According to Lindbergh’s rhetoric, they were Jews first, Americans second. In short, they were “the other.”

  When Anne told Lindbergh that his remarks would be interpreted as “Jew-baiting,” he argued that he didn’t mean to do that and that he certainly was not anti-Semitic. With both comments, Anne agreed. “I have never heard my husband tell a Jewish joke,” she wrote a friend. “I have never heard him say anything derogatory about a Jew.” Nonetheless, she asserted, his speech was “at best unconsciously a bid for anti-Semitism” and that “the anti-Semitic forces will rally to him, exultant.” She declared that she would rather see America at war than “shaken by violent anti-Semitism.”

  Baffled by Anne’s outburst, Lindbergh rejected all her arguments. The only reason he was making the speech, he told her, was to identify for the American people the forces behind the propaganda leading the country into war, with the hope of inoculating the public against war fever. Instead of trying to rouse passions, he wanted Americans to look at the situation dispassionately.

  Years later, Anne described to an interviewer “the terrible row” she had had with Lindbergh over the Des Moines speech. “He just didn’t believe me,” she said. “He simply couldn’t see” what she was saying. Tone-deaf to nuance and the sensitivities of others, he felt that the views he held were invariably correct and that he had a right—indeed an obligation—to express them, no matter the consequences to himself or others. Lindbergh regarded such stubbornness as courage, not hubris. Explaining once why he had no desire to enter politics, he declared: “I would rather say what I believe when I want to say it than to measure every statement I make by its probable popularity.”

  There’s no question that Lindbergh’s own dark view of America colored his belief that U.S. Jews would face an upsurge of persecution in wartime. Tolerance and individual freedom, he told friends, were fast disappearing in the country; he predicted “a bloody revolution” if war broke out, with “upheavals of great violence in the nation.”

  At the same time, his anti-Semitism, however unconscious it may have been, was clear. He firmly believed that Jews had a disproportionate and unhealthy influence on American life, particularly in the press, radio, and movies. “A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos,” he wrote in his journal in April 1939. “And we are getting too many.” In July 1941, he told an acquaintance that Jewish influence in the media would “end with their undoing. Instead of acting in the interests of their country and of the majority of their audience, they are acting in the interest—or presumed interest—of their race.”

  Such views were hardly uncommon in America at the time. William L. Langer, a Harvard historian who later co-wrote a two-volume history of American foreign policy in the four years leading up to Pearl Harbor, made much the same point in a 1939 lecture at the U.S. War College. “You have to face the fact that some of our most important American newspapers are Jewish-controlled, and I suppose if I were a Jew, I would feel about Nazi Germany as most Jews feel, and it would be most inevitable that the coloring of the news takes on that tinge,” Langer said. Singling out The New York Times, whose owners were Jewish, Langer declared that the paper gave “a great deal of prominence” to “every little upset that occurs in Germany (and after all many upsets occur in a countr
y of 70 million people).… The other part of it is soft-pedaled or put off with a sneer. So that in a rather subtle way, the picture you get is that there is no good in the Germans whatever.”

  In the 1930s and early 1940s, overt anti-Semitism was a distinctive feature of life in the United States, as it was in a great many countries. Not until after World War II and the revelations of the Holocaust did most elements of U.S. society consider open anti-Jewish prejudice to be unacceptable.

  The influx of millions of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had contributed heavily to the spread of anti-Semitism in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since bigotry traditionally flourishes in times of economic instability and unsettling social change, it’s not surprising that the Great Depression and its accompanying turmoil provided another fertile seedbed for intolerance toward Jews. “Economic hardship was taking its toll,” noted the Anti-Defamation League’s Arnold Forster. “People needed a scapegoat for their Depression miseries.”

  No social class in America was immune to the virus of anti-Semitism. It infected Wall Street lawyers along with rednecks, well-regarded statesmen as well as populist extremists. At a 1939 lunch in Washington attended by prominent State Department officials and members of Congress, the discussion turned to the Jewish refugee issue. One of the guests—a former Baptist minister turned congressman—jocularly said: “I don’t often criticize the Lord, but I do feel that he drowned the wrong lot in the Red Sea.”

  Most major U.S. colleges and universities, including virtually all the Ivy League schools, had strict quota systems for the acceptance of Jews. The relatively few Jews who were admitted often found what Kingman Brewster called a climate of “subliminal anti-Semitism.” As Yale students, Brewster, McGeorge Bundy, and a few others sponsored a campaign in 1938 to help German Jews immigrate to the United States. The response from fellow Yalies was disheartening. As Bundy wrote in the Yale Daily News, “An all-too-large group has said: ‘We don’t like Jews. There are too many at Yale already. Why bring more over?’ This is not an argument. It is an expression of intolerance and prejudice.”