Fear Itself (50 page)

These were but some of the institutional developments that would be part of the era’s legacy, and that would later become long-run features of a crusading global state. Outside public view, the Department of War had been considering how to prepare for future conflicts ever since Congress had passed the National Defense Act of 1920, a law that established an Office of the Assistant Secretary of War (OASW) to guide supply and procurement without disrupting economic mobilization in any future emergency. In 1930, it had drawn up an “Industrial Mobilization Plan.” Updated and revised in 1933, 1936, and 1939, these documents focused on the nation’s industrial capacity and led to ever closer and more “numerous war department contacts with the business community” on much the same model as the NRA had convened for domestic economic affairs during its brief existence. At least fourteen thousand corporate executives and trade association representatives became reserve officers assigned to OASW to help draft the agency’s designs for mobilization and to advance strong cooperation between business and the military.
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Building on this planning impulse, a slew of new national security agencies were fashioned in the run-up to the war. Together with an enlarged Department of War, including its Army and Navy Munitions Board and the OASW planning unit, the Office of Production Management, the War Resources Board, the National Defense Advisory Commission, and the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the federal government inaugurated an “apparatus . . . notable for its sophistication in planning over the long term and on a global scale.”
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It was, remarkably, as if the ABC programs of the domestic New Deal, which had been crafted to deal with an emergency as if the country were at war, had provided a fail-safe model. The sheer range, level of funding, quality of personnel, bureaucratic capacity, and degree of authority possessed by this constellation of institutions dwarfed all prior attempts to build a planning capacity for the federal government, including the establishment of similar agencies during World War I.
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As the United States confronted the war’s rain of destruction and organized depravity, it had to consider the degree to which to respond to its enemies in kind. Facing a coven of dictators with contempt for liberal democracy and with immense capacities to mobilize and fight, three sets of questions loomed large: How should national will, unity, and purpose be maintained and policed? What limits, if any, of the traditional distinction between soldiers and civilians should be retained? How might “democracy’s fight against world conquest”
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be conducted alongside a key ally, the Soviet Union, that also was a brutal dictatorship, and whose unbearably great human sacrifices would be indispensable to the victory against Nazism?

II.

FDR
RECOGNIZED THAT
united, popular support was a condition of decisive military action. “Let me make the simple plea that partisanship and selfishness be adjourned; and that national unity be the thought that underlies all others.”
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“We Americans will contribute unified production and unified acceptance of sacrifice and of effort. That means a national unity that can know no limitations of race or creed or selfish politics.”
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“Every loyal American is aware of his individual responsibility. . . . This great war effort must be carried through to its victorious conclusion by the whole indomitable will and determination of the people as one great whole.”
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With these speeches of September 3, 1939, February 23, 1942, and April 28, 1942, President Roosevelt stirringly rallied the nation with these assertions of national cohesion. His calls were heeded in Congress, which responded by setting aside the conflicts that had dominated prewar debate, when southern members had led the way to preparedness and conscription. Guarded during the war by southern-dominated defense committees (Andrew Jackson May of Kentucky and Carl Vinson of Georgia led the Military Affairs Committee and the Naval Affairs Committee, respectively, in the House, and Bob Reynolds of North Carolina chaired the Senate’s Committee on Military Affairs), the region’s global wishes became the nation’s actions. During the war’s first year, the House cast twenty-two votes that concerned international and military affairs. With one exception—a partisan debate in January 1942 about whether the civilian defense program should be lodged in the Department of War, as the president requested—both party voting and sectional divisions almost entirely disappeared. Typical votes split by lopsided 335–2, 398–0, 315–22, and 345–16 margins.
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The president’s calls for collective mobilization often were accompanied by an undercurrent of concern for internal security and appeals for watchfulness. “Let us no longer blind ourselves to the undeniable fact that the evil forces which have crushed and undermined and corrupted so many others,” he warned on December 29, 1940, “are already within our own gates. Your government knows much about them and every day is ferreting them out.” The problem, he chillingly cautioned, did not lie exclusively with foreign agents. “There are also American citizens, many of them in high places who, unwittingly in most cases, are aiding and abetting the work of these agents.” FDR was careful “not [to] charge these American citizens with being foreign agents. But,” he added, “I do charge them with doing exactly the kind of work that the dictators want done in the United States.”
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The quest for unity and security entailed watchfulness, surveillance, and investigations of loyalty. When disloyalty is suspected, central public principles and protected rights are placed in jeopardy, and the specter of official illiberal illegality is raised in the name of liberal obligation.
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The language of loyalty, implying the possibility of disloyalty, was invoked by the president before the war when he declared an unlimited state of emergency on May 27, 1941. His proclamation called upon “all loyal citizens . . . to give precedence to the needs of the nation,” and “to place the nation’s needs first in mind and in action.”
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The issue of wartime loyalty was not new. During World War I, the quest for internal security had generated fear, and fear had justified stark violations of civil liberty.
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In 1917, Congress passed an Espionage Act that mandated sentences of up to twenty years for individuals who encouraged “disloyalty” in wartime. In November 1917, President Wilson ordered male German-Americans to register at local post offices and police stations; in April 1918, the directive was extended to women. In all, 482,000 ethnic German citizens “filled out forms, submitted photographs and fingerprints, and swore an oath of loyalty to the United States,” and 4,000 were detained, if briefly. Enemy aliens were forbidden to live or work near military installations or arms factories.
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The year 1918 witnessed the enactment of an Alien Act that authorized Washington to deport members of anarchist organizations. The same year, a Sedition Act made it illegal to use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the flag, the armed forces, and the country during the war. There had been little public notice or concern regarding these actions; to the contrary, there was a widespread demand to violate the liberties of German-Americans.
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Immediately following the war, in 1919, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer famously initiated widespread raids on some ten thousand suspected radicals, and he infamously deported 249 individuals on the SS
Buford
to the Soviet Union
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where they did not meet a happy fate.
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In 1918 and 1919, Senator Lee Slater Overman of North Carolina led a subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary that was called on to investigate disloyalty among German-Americans in the brewery industry. Overman swiftly broadened its scope to probe all pro-German sentiments and propaganda. The committee’s attention also turned to Communist subversion, which it identified with German interests. Its report summoned an image of a Bolshevik takeover in America by radical sympathizers of the Russian Revolution’s “program of terror, fear, extermination, and destruction.” Setting a template for future congressional initiatives, it recommended strengthening the powers of the FBI, passing a peacetime law against sedition, monitoring and registering private organizations, and establishing federal control of the foreign-language press.
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In August 1919, the precursor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation, created a General Intelligence Division to monitor radical activity.
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During the interwar years, this type of congressional scrutiny went hand in hand with the growth of federal police powers. Two developments stand out. First was an extension of FBI activities beyond investigations of specific crimes. The Bureau would now take on intelligence gathering and surveillance of potentially subversive groups as a regular responsibility. On August 24, 1936, the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, met with President Roosevelt.
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They were joined by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who asked that an inquiry into Fascist and Communist activities in the United States be undertaken, as these were international in character, with overseas inspiration and direction.
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Endorsing this request, FDR directed Hoover to brief Attorney General Homer Cummings and initiate FBI field office work on subversive activities in conjunction with the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Military Intelligence Division.

Five years before American participation in World War II, Hoover put this program in motion on September 5 (five days before he informed his boss, the attorney general) by ordering monitoring of the fur, garment, steel, coal, and shipping industries, and by scrutinizing newspapers, labor unions, educational institutions, and the armed forces for potential subversives.
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The federal government also began to mount extraconstitutional wiretaps and mail intercepts to disrupt the activities of pro-Nazi groups, especially the Friends of the New Germany (the German-American Bund).
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Less than a week after the German invasion of Poland, President Roosevelt asked the country’s thousands of police jurisdictions to promptly provide the FBI with information about potential subversives, spies, and saboteurs. Hoover was more than well prepared, having sprung into action long before the outbreak of war in Europe. He reported to Congress on November 30, 1939, that with this material as well as the Bureau’s own initiatives, the General Intelligence Division had “compiled extensive indices of individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in . . . subversive activities, in espionage activities, or in any activities possibly detrimental to the internal security of the United States,” including domestic Nazis and Communists.
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Significantly, the Bureau’s investigations, beginning in 1938, also included a special “Negroes” category. Unlike other targets defined by group membership, “the investigations of Negroes, in contrast, were based on color, an entirely different sort of category, and on the assumption that black people posed special loyalty problems for the government.”
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Lurking behind these activities was a racial shibboleth—that enemies can be “separated not by geographical boundaries but by hostile loyalties.”
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During his first term, in 1934, President Roosevelt asked the State Department to report on prospects for sabotage and spying by ethnic Japanese. That analysis had wrongly predicted that “when war breaks out, the entire Japanese population on the West Coast will rise and commit sabotage.”
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Five years later, in September 1939, Roosevelt again singled out Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans for special attention. He commanded the intelligence units of the U.S. Army and Navy to watch those living on the Pacific Coast, and ordered the FBI to track individuals thought to be subversive. “The result was a master list of suspects maintained by the Justice Department,” to which immigration matters had been transferred from the Department of Labor, “known as the ABC list (because individuals were assigned grades of A for ‘immediately dangerous,’ B for ‘potentially dangerous,’ and C for ‘possible Japan sympathizer’).”
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By 1940, Hoover was planning to have the Bureau “act,” as he put it, “as the coordinating head of all civilian organizations furnishing information relating to subversive movements” in the United States, taking charge, he told the police chiefs who gathered for their annual convention in San Francisco, “of all investigative work in matters involving espionage, sabotage, subversive activities.” The Bureau’s field offices, which housed nine hundred agents in 1940 but fully five thousand by war’s end, quickly shifted emphasis from crime fighting to internal security. It trained agents to protect defense plants, recruited workers in most of the country’s industrial factories to “be on the alert for any evidence of sabotage, espionage, or subversive activities” (with the result that many thousands of false leads and rumors were reported), and developed an extensive network of informants, ultimately numbering some seventy thousand, with at least one in each county in the country, drawn primarily from fraternal and veterans organizations.
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By nighttime on December 7, 1941, with the American fleet at Pearl Harbor enveloped in acrid smoke, the FBI detained 770 Japanese nationals it had targeted as dangerous; these raids soon took in one out of every eight Japanese citizens who resided in the United States.
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The second development of the interwar period was the increasing attention paid by Congress to matters of internal security. In 1930, the House voted 210–18 to appoint a special committee to investigate American Communism. Led by New York’s Hamilton Fish, it identified a modest-size organization of twelve thousand dues-paying members, then with little influence, yet it recommended draconian measures. Arguing that more than 500,000 sympathizers who wished to overthrow the political and economic systems of the United States took direction from the Communist Party, it proposed outlawing the Party, annulling the citizenship of its members, denying citizenship to any Party member who had applied for naturalization, deporting alien members, barring from the mails publications that advocated revolutionary Communism, and prosecuting members for spreading false rumors about American banks. It also called on the United States to send inspectors to investigate labor conditions in the Soviet Union. These suggestions were opposed as examples of “hysteria” by the Maine Republican John Nelson but were endorsed by the committee’s other four members—Chairman Fish, West Virginia Republican Carl Bachmann, and its two southern Democrats, Tennessee’s Edward Eslick and Mississippi’s Robert Hall.
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