Fear Itself (79 page)

38
For an excellent consideration, see Sarah T. Phillips,
This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

39
A nuanced treatment can be found in Alan Brinkley,
Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); especially useful is the balanced discussion in Appendix I, “The Question of Anti-Semitism and the Problem of Fascism.” A contemporary view of the status of anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s is provided in Carey McWilliams,
A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).

40
Stephen Spender,
Forward from Liberalism
(London: Gollancz, 1937).

41
Franz Neumann,
The Democratic and the Authoritarian State
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957), p. 236.

42
R. J. B. Bosworth, “Explaining ‘Auschwitz’ after the End of History,”
History and Theory
38 (1999): 84.

43
Harold Laski, “The Challenge of Our Times,”
American Scholar
8 (1939): 387, 391.

44
Michael Howard, “A Thirty Years War? The Two World Wars in Historical Perspective,”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
3 (1993): 177.

45
Richard Vinen,
The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation
(London: Allen Lane, 2006); Hanna Diamond,
Fleeing Hitler: France 1940
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). In June 1940, as the Third Republic government abandoned Paris, fully “a quarter of the French population was on the run.” By the time the Germans arrived in Paris, only some three-quarters of a million of its three million residents remained in the city. See Geert Mak,
In Europe: Travels through the Twentieth Century
(New York: Vintage, 2008), pp. 356, 357. Retrospectively, the Vichy government portrayed “the exodus as a journey through suffering to patriotic enlightenment. . . . Pétain’s genius in the wake of defeat was to insist not on the humiliating nature of the occasion for the government and the military but on the hardships of the exodus for the millions who had been on the roads.” See Jeremy Harding, “In Order of Rank,”
London Review of Books,
May 8, 2008, pp. 16, 17.

46
I am indebted to Matthieu Leimgruber for directing me to this text, and for his translation.

47
Gilbert Murray,
Liberality and Civilization: Lectures Given at the Invitation of the Hibbert Trustees in the Universities of Bristol, Glasgow, and Birmingham in October and November 1937
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 59.

48
Mak,
In Europe,
pp. 379–80; J. G. Ballard,
The Drowned World
(New York: Liveright, 2012).

49
Mark Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
(London: Allen Lane, 2008).

50
Timothy Snyder, “The Forgotten Holocaust,”
IWM Post
97 (2008): 26–27. See also Timothy Snyder, “Holocaust: The Ignored Reality,”
The New York Review of Books,
July 16, 2009, pp. 14–16; Omer Bartov, “Eastern Europe as the Site of Genocide,”
Journal of Modern History
80 (2008): 557–93. Bartov designates this area as marked by “sites of forgetting” (p. 557).

51
Peter Fritzsche,
Life and Death in the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 200, 196–97, 195.

52
For discussions, see Michael A. Barnhart,
Japan Prepares for Total War
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Meirion Harns and Susie Harries,
Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army
(New York: Random House, 1991); Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, eds.,
The Japanese Wartime Empire, 1931–1945
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

53
David Riesman, “Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition,”
Public Policy
4 (1942): 46.

54
Niall Ferguson,
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West
(New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 503.

55
Jeremy Black,
War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450–2000
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 258.

56
In February 1945, “U.S. Air Force General Curtis ‘Iron Ass’ LeMay, ably assisted by a young statistician named Robert McNamara, decided to ‘bomb and burn em till they quit.’ He was talking about the citizens of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka, and scores of other cities and towns, culminating in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” See Ian Buruma, “The Cruelest War,”
New York Review of Books,
May 1, 2008, p. 24.

57
In terms of the 1941 typology of Hans Speier, World War II can be characterized as an example of “absolute war,” an “unrestricted and unregulated war . . . characterized, negatively, by the absence of any restrictions and regulations imposed upon violence, treachery, and frightfulness.” See Hans Speier, “The Social Types of War,”
American Journal of Sociology
76, no. 4 (1941): 445. Not all observers thought the shift to civilian victimization to be morally more heinous than warfare conducted in more traditional ways. In a startling essay, for example, George Orwell observed in May 1944 that as “war is not avoidable at this stage of history, and since it has to happen it does not seem to me a bad thing that others should be killed besides young men.” See George Orwell, “As I Please,”
Tribune
, May 19, 1944, p. 603. This essay was a rejoinder to Vera Brittan’s pamphlet
Seed of Chaos,
in which she had bravely condemned “obliteration” bombing for subjecting “thousands of helpless and innocent people in German, Italian, and German-occupied cities . . . to agonising forms of death and injury comparable to the worst tortures of the Middle Ages” (cited in Orwell, “As I Please,” p. 602).

58
Well before the killings began, Wolf Jobst Siedler described the reaction of his fellow Germans to November 1938’s Kristallnacht: “On the very evening of the burning of the synagogues, an event which brought the Eastern Europe of the Middle Ages into the Germany of the twentieth-century, everywhere in the cities of our country festively clad people went to operetta, theatres, and symphony halls, and that, six hours after the deportation wagons left the station platforms in Berlin, the trains for the seaside left also.” Cited in Clive James,
Cultural Amnesia:
Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), p. 716.

59
Eric Hobsbawm,
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991
(New York: Pantheon, 1994), p. 51.

60
      Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night

we drink it and drink it . . .

61
John Morton Blum, “World War II,” in C. Vann Woodward,
The
Comparative Approach to American History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 320. Also note A. J. P. Taylor’s assessment that “if the Americans would not divide the world with the Russians, the only alternative would have been to impose a free Eastern Europe on the Russians in 1945 by superior force. This was . . . too logical for the Americans. They hoped vaguely for a Russian change of heart. . . . This was a clash between two fundamental conceptions of the world—the one logical and ruthless, the other benevolent and muddled and undefined.” See Taylor,
Europe: Grandeur and Decline
(London: Penguin, 1967), p. 318.

62
Tony Judt,
Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
(New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 40.

63
Leszek Kolakowski,
My Correct Views on Everything
(South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005), p. 133.

64
Howard W. Odum, “Orderly Transitional Democracy,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
180 (1935): 37–39.

65
Joseph P. Kennedy,
I’m for Roosevelt
(New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936), pp. 102, 103.

66
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Radio Address on Electing Liberals to Office,” November 4, 1938, in
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
vol. 7 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 585–86.

67
Walter Lippmann, “The American Destiny,”
Life,
June 5, 1939, p. 47; reprinted in Walter Lippmann,
The American Destiny
(New York: Life Magazine Press, 1939), p. 4. Lippmann on the New Deal has to be read with caution, given his strong anticollectivist views and his preference to reinvigorate laissez-faire. See his polemic,
Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1937).

68
Lewis Mumford,
Faith for Living
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), pp. 56–57. Mumford was particularly exercised by the lead role Communists had been playing within the country’s Left during the popular-front moment that had been initiated in 1935. “The truth,” he wrote, “is the liberals no longer dared to act. In America, during the period of the United Front, the liberal accepted the leadership of a small communist minority, fanatical, unscrupulous, deeply contemptuous of essential human values, incredibly stupid in tactics and incredibly arrogant in matters of intellectual belief; they accepted this leadership simply because the communists alone among the political groups had firm convictions and the courage to act on them” (pp. 57–58).

69
Harold Lasswell, “The Garrison State,”
American Sociological Review
46 (1941): 459, 467.

70
Riesman, “Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition,” pp. 47, 46, 45, 51, 93, 90, 96.

71
Morris Raphael Cohen,
The Faith of a Liberal
(New York: Henry Holt, 1946), p. 448. See also, Horace Kallen,
The Liberal Spirit: Essays on Problems of Freedom in the Modern World
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948).

72
The Kennedy and
Fortune
citations are from Leuchtenburg, “The Great Depression,” in Woodward, ed.,
Comparative Approach
, p. 311.

73
Paul Meadows, “The New Tasks of the Liberal State,”
American Journal of Economics and Sociology
7 (1948): 257, 263.

74
For thorough histories, see Clay Blair,
The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950–1953
(Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003),
David Halberstam,
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
(New York: Hyperion, 2007), which includes a useful discussion of the dismissal of General MacArthur and of the congressional hearings that followed.

75
Richard Hofstadter, “The Patrician as Opportunist,”
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made it
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 352.

76
Nathaniel Peffer, “Democracy Losing by Default,”
Political Science Quarterly
63 (1948): 322, 321, 328.

77
Archibald MacLeish, “The American State of Mind,”
American Scholar
19 (1950): 406.

78
Robert Musil,
The Man without Qualities
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1953), p. 8.

79
Reinhart Kosselleck, “Crisis,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
67 (2006): 358. This essay brilliantly follows the concept, tracing a lineage from the way the ancient Greeks utilized it to connote the need to choose between stark alternatives to present usage, which is focused on special historical moments that connote the intensification of time and the actual or potential end of an epoch, tending toward something significantly different.

80
Hans Morgenthau, “The Evil of Politics and the Ethics of Evil,”
Ethics
56 (1945): 1–18.

81
“Intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradictions” is how Edward Said describes the “late style” of musicians, writers, and artists. See Edward W. Said,
On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain
(New York: Pantheon, 2006), p. 7. For Said, such a style combines a sense of ending with an acute alertness about the present.

82
Alvin Johnson, in
Political and Economic Democracy
, ed. Max Ascoli and Fritz Lehmann (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), p. 7.

83
Hans Simons, ibid., p. 192. Other contributors to this volume reporting on the 1935–1936 General Seminar include the public finance specialist Gerhard Colm, who later served on President Truman’s Council of Economic Advisers; the social policy expert and psychologist Frieda Wunderlich; the economic theorist Eduard Heimann; the economist and sociologist Emil Lederer; and the sociologist Hans Speier. See also Eduart Heimann,
Communism, Fascism or Democracy?
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1938).

84
This New School seminar continues today.

85
Thomas Mann,
The Coming Victory of Democracy
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), pp. 15, 48, 52–53, 43, 24–25.

86
Arendt described the orientation of the refugees as “thankful but unhappy.” Cited in James,
Cultural Amnesia,
p. 566.

87
For discussions of this exceptional group, see Laura Fermi,
Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930/1941
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); H. Stuart Hughes,
The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930–1965
(New York: Harper & Row, 1975); Anthony Heilbut,
Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present
(New York: Viking, 1983).