These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  87.Clem Whitaker, “Professional Political Campaign Management,” Public Relations Journal 6 (1950): 19; Whitaker, speech before the Los Angeles Area Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, July 13, 1948.

  88.Bergmeier and Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves, 3, 8–9.

  89.Claude E. Robinson, Straw Votes: A Study of Political Prediction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 46–51. See also John M. Fenton, In Your Opinion: The Managing Editor of the Gallup Poll Looks at Polls, Politics and the People from 1945 to 1960, with a foreword by Dr. George Gallup (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), ch. 1; George Gallup and Saul Forbes Rae, The Pulse of Democracy: The Public-Opinion Poll and How It Works (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940), ch. 3.

  90.Melvin G. Holli, The Wizard of Washington: Emil Hurja, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Birth of Public Opinion Polling (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 41–47.

  91.Holli, Wizard of Washington, 47–48.

  92.Reminiscences of George Gallup (1962–63), Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, 17–22; George Horace Gallup, “An Objective Method for Determining Reader Interest in the Content of a Newspaper,” PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 1928, 1–17, 55, 56; Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion, 54, 5–6.

  93.Reminiscences of George Gallup, 101–15.

  94.Gallup and Rae, The Pulse of Democracy; E. B. White, Talk of the Town, TNY, November 13, 1948; David W. Moore, The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 39.

  95.Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 13; Michael Zalampas, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich in American Magazines, 1923–1939 (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), 43–44; Bergmeier and Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves, ch. 3.

  96.Some representative usages: “Britain Demands Russian Apology for Fake News,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 8, 1932; “Press Parley Acts to Bar Fake News,” NYT, November 12, 1933; “Fake News,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 3, 1942 (this last is an indictment of the OWI).

  97.Quoted in Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 11, 14.

  98.Frankfurter to FDR, in Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928–1945, annotated by Max Freedman (Boston: Little Brown, 1968), 214.

  99.Franklin D. Roosevelt, Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, June 27, 1936.

  100.Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 19; Kataznelson, Fear Itself, 142.

  101.Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 138–39.

  102.Kataznelson, Fear Itself, 166–68.

  103.Quoted in Brinkley, The End of Reform, 166–67.

  104.Reminiscences of George Gallup, 117–18; “Polls on Trial,” Time, November 18, 1940.

  105.Reminiscences of George Gallup, 120, 70–80; George Gallup, Public Opinion in a Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939), 5, 15. Roper as cited in Igo, The Averaged American, 121.

  106.“Hurja Poll,” Time, May 25, 1939; Gallup, Public Opinion, 1, 10.

  107.Igo, The Averaged American, 169; Amy Fried, Pathways to Polling: Crisis, Cooperation and the Making of Public Opinion Professions (New York: Routledge, 2012), 68, 71, 73, 76–77, 146n7.

  108.For example, “America’s Town Meeting of the Air: Personal Liberty and the Modern State,” YouTube video, 59:27, from a radio broadcast on December 12, 1935, posted by “A Room with a View” on November 9, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= jE6zSfGbzLE; “America’s Town Meeting of the Air—Does America Need Compulsory Health Insurance?,” YouTube video, 59:50, from a radio broadcast on January 15, 1940, posted by “YSPH1” on February 27, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKa2dY gqd68; Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 149; Jamieson, Presidential Debates, 88.

  109.Joel L. Swerdlow, Beyond Debate: A Paper on Televised Presidential Debates (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1984), 27; Jamieson, Presidential Debates, 99.

  110.Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport, The Psychology of Radio (New York, London: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 20.

  111.Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21–24, 126–27.

  112.Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 135.

  113.Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 84–86.

  114.“Prof. J. H. Holmes of Swarthmore Declares That Laws Should Be ‘Altered More Easily,’” NYT, December 28, 1931, 12; Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, 276.

  115.“Hoover Lays Supreme Court Cornerstone,” NYT, October 14, 1932.

  116.James F. Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes: The President, the Supreme Court, and the Epic Battle over the New Deal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 40.

  117.Ibid., 225, 235, 243, 246.

  118.Ibid., 254–56.

  119.Ibid., 258–64.

  120.Cushman, Courtwatchers, 108–9, 130; James MacGregor Burns, Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 143, 143; James Mussatti, New Deal Decisions of the United States Supreme Court (Los Angeles: California Publications, 1936), v.

  121.Burns, Packing the Court, 144; Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes, 307.

  122.Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes, 301.

  123.Quoted in Brinkley, The End of Reform, 19–20.

  124.Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, March 9, 1937; Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes, 317, 324.

  125.Alan Brinkley, “Introduction,” American Historical Review 110 (2005): 1047; Simon, FDR and Chief Justice Hughes, 327.

  126.H. L. Mencken, “A Constitution for the New Deal,” American Mercury, June 1937, 129–36. And see Robert G. McCloskey, The American Supreme Court (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 149–50; Laura Kalman, “The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the New Deal,” American Historical Review 110 (2005): 1052–80.

  127.Quoted in Brinkley, End of Reform, 65, 66, 22.

  128.Bergmeier and Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves, 23.

  129.Dan D. Nimmo and Cheville Newsome, Political Commentators in the United States: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997), 135–39.

  130.Audio excerpts can be found at “The Munich Crisis,” Old Time Radio, http://www.otr.com/munich.html

  131.Quoted in David Clay Large, Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s (New York: Norton, 1990), 355.

  132.Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey, “Telling ‘the Electrified Fable’: Experimental Radio Drama, Interwar Social Psychology, and Imagining Invasion in The War of the Worlds,” senior thesis, Harvard College, 2013.

  133.Quoted in Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 247.

  134.“23-Year-Old Author Aghast at Hysteria His Skit Created,” Atlanta Constitution, November 1, 1938.

  135.Quoted in Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 226–27.

  136.Dorothy Thompson, “On the Record,” November 14, 1938, as quoted in Kurth, American Cassandra, 283. And see Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

  137.Franklin D. Roosevelt, Excerpts from the Press Conference, November 5, 1938.

  Twelve: THE BRUTALITY OF MODERNITY

  1.“World of Tomorrow, 1939 World’s Fair,” YouTube video, 9:27, from a newsreel from 1939, posted by “PeriscopeFilm,” May 12, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H cfgvzwaDHc.

  2.James Mauro, Twilight at the World of Tomorrow: Genius, Madness, Murder, and the 1939 World’s Fair on the Brink of War (New York: Ballantine, 2010), xx; “Metro, The Westinghouse Moto-Man,” YouTube video, 3:47, posted by “RobynDexterNSteve,” April 2, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soO9CR1NiZk.

  3.Mauro, Twilight at the World of Tomorrow, xxi, 142–54; E. B. White, “The World of Tomorrow,” in One Man’s Meat (Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House, 1997), 58–64 (quotation, 58).

  4.Mauro, Twil
ight at the World of Tomorrow, xxiii–xxiv.

  5.Ibid., xx; The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy (New York: Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, 1938).

  6.Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1995), 18.

  7.Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (New York: Atheneum, 1967), 29, 41, 32.

  8.Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 398–99.

  9.Quotations from Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 134, and Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 392–93.

  10.Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 429; Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on Appropriations for National Defense,” January 12, 1939; Albert Einstein to FDR, August 2, 1939, reprinted in William Lanouette with Bela Silard, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 211–13; Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson Jr., The New World, 1939–1946 (A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, in 2 vols.) (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 1:20.

  11.Quoted in Daly, Covering America, 243.

  12.Katznelson, Fear Itself, 282, 286.

  13.Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), especially Appendix I: “The Question of Anti-Semitism and the Problem of Fascism.”

  14.Katznelson, Fear Itself, 56–57; Kurth, American Cassandra, 285–88.

  15.Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 87.

  16.Katznelson, Fear Itself, 276–77; “The War of 1939,” Fortune, October 1939.

  17.“The War of 1939,” and “The Fortune Survey: Supplement on War,” Fortune, October 1939. And see also Sister Mary Gertina Feffer, “American Attitude toward World War II during the Period from September 1939 to December 1941,” master’s thesis, Loyola University, 1951, 35–64.

  18.Lindbergh quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 433.

  19.Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 448; Vandenberg quoted in Patel, The New Deal, 50.

  20.Meacham, Franklin and Winston, x–xv, 44–46, 246 (quotation).

  21.Churchill quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 441.

  22.Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at University of Virginia, June 10, 1940.

  23.Willkie-McNary Speakers Manual, Campaigns Inc. Records, Box 1, Folder 53; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 459.

  24.Dorothy Thompson, “On the Record,” New York Herald Tribune, October 9, 1940.

  25.U.S. Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 571–72; Statement by the Secretary of State on the Tripartite Pact, September 27, 1940.

  26.Pendleton Herring, Presidential Leadership (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1940), as quoted in Katznelson, Fear Itself, 8.

  27.Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, December 29, 1940.

  28.The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States During World War II, ed. Robert A. Hill (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 2.

  29.FDR to Winston Churchill, January 20, 1941, Churchill Additional Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, UK; Churchill as quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 213.

  30.Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 214.

  31.Henry Luce, “The American Century,” Life, February 1941.

  32.Quoted in Max Wallace, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 259.

  33.Brown, Manipulating the Ether, 108–9; Wallace, The American Axis, 279.

  34.Goodwin, No Ordinary Time, 214; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 474–75, citing NYT, March 12, 1941.

  35.Katznelson, Fear Itself, 313–14; Wallace, The American Axis, 274–75, 277, 289, 291; Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy, 12.

  36.Quoted in Bacevich, The New American Militarism, 14–15.

  37.Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship (New York: Random House, 2003), 105.

  38.Ibid., 107–20; FDR and Churchill, Atlantic Charter, August 14, 1941; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4–6.

  39.Meacham, Franklin and Winston, 130.

  40.Ibid., 131.

  41.Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation, December 8, 1941; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, December 9, 1941.

  42.Elaine Tyler May, “Rosie the Riveter Gets Married,” in The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II, ed. Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 130; Patel, The New Deal, 261.

  43.Patel, The New Deal, 262.

  44.John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1976), 91–94; Alan Brinkley, “World War II and American Liberalism,” in Erenberg and Hirsch, The War in American Culture, 315; Patel, The New Deal, 262; John P. Broderick, “Business Dropping Off as Wage Scales Rise,” Wall Street Journal, October 1, 1942.

  45.Katznelson, Fear Itself, 337–39; Stone quoted in Alan Brinkley, “The New Deal and the Idea of the State,” in Fraser and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal, 103.

  46.Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America, 124–48; Michelmore, Tax and Spend, 11–12; Thomas L. Hungerford, “Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945,” Congressional Research Service, September 14, 2012.

  47.Patel, The New Deal, 262–66; Katznelson, Fear Itself, 346–47.

  48.Jytte Klausen, “Did World War II End the New Deal? A Comparative Perspective on Postwar Planning Initiatives,” in The New Deal and the Triumph of Liberalism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 197.

  49.Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 2–3.

  50.Blum, V Was for Victory, 21–24.

  51.Edmond Taylor, The Strategy of Terror: Europe’s Inner Front (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940), 9, 211.

  52.Blum, V Was for Victory, 30; Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems, 1917–1952 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 13.

  53.Quoted in Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 11–12.

  54.Office of Facts and Figures, Divide and Conquer (Washington, DC: Office of Facts and Figures, 1942), 3.

  55.Kurth, American Cassandra, 159; Dorothy Thompson, “Problems of Journalism,” 1935, quoted in Michael J. Kirkhorn, “Dorothy Thompson: Withstanding the Storm,” [Syracuse University Library] Courier 22 (1988):16.

  56.Quoted in Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 23.

  57.Archibald MacLeish, A Time to Act: Selected Addresses (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 23–31.

  58.Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 42; Blum, V Was for Victory, 27, 22–23.

  59.Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2, 43–48.

  60.Quotations from Blum, V Was for Victory, 31–45.

  61.Divine, Second Chance, 48; Meacham, Franklin and Winston, xviii.

  62.Divine, Second Chance, 49–51, 63, 72, 104, 119.

  63.Quotations from Daly, Covering America, 272–74.

  64.Quoted in Blum, V Was for Victory, 67.

  65.Katznelson, Fear Itself, 327–28.

  66.Ibid., 339.

  67.Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II: Images by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Other Government Photographers (Chicago: Cityfiles Press, 2016)—quotations, 24–25; Jasmine Alinder, Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), ch. 1; Linda Gordon, “Dorothea Lange Photographs the Japanese American Internment,” in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the C
ensored Images of the Japanese American Internment, ed. Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro (New York: Norton, 2008), 5–45.

  68.Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943); Mitchell T. Maki, Harry H. L. Kitano, and S. Megan Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 35.

  69.Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944); Maki et al., Achieving the Impossible Dream, 35–38.

  70.Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 554–56. The letter to Roosevelt is reprinted in Hill, The FBI’s RACON, 1–2.

  71.Blum, V Was for Victory, 184–185. Baldwin quoted in Hill, The FBI’s RACON, 30.

  72.Pauli Murray, The Negro Woman in the Quest for Equality (New York, 1964); Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 157–61; Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 123.

  73.Bayard Rustin, interviewed by Ed Edwin, January 24, 1985, New York, New York, published as The Reminiscences of Bayard Rustin (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press, 2003), 2: 43–6.

  74.William H. Hastie and Thurgood Marshall, “Negro Discrimination and the Need for Federal Action [1942],” in Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminiscences, ed. Mark V. Tushnet (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001), 80.

  75.77 Cong. Rec. 7457 (1942).

  76.Declassified in 1980, the report was published in full in 1997 as The FBI’s RACON. Hoover’s June 22, 1942, memo to field agents is reprinted in an addendum, 622–24.

  77.Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 63, 66–69.

  78.Pauli Murray, “Mr. Roosevelt Regrets (Detroit Riot, 1943),” in Dark Testament and Other Poems (Norwalk, CT: Silvermine, 1970), 34.

  79.Rosenberg, Jane Crow, 157–61.

  80.Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944; Katznelson, Fear Itself, 196, 221–22.