Fear Itself (99 page)

23
Wayne S. Cole, “America First and the South, 1940–1941,”
Journal of Southern History
22 (1956): 37, 38, 43, 47. See also Wayne S. Cole,
America First: The Battle against Intervention, 1940–1941
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953), p. 31.

24
Virginius Dabney, “The South Looks Ahead,”
Foreign Affairs
19 (1940): 178.

25
The following paragraphs draw on the excellent article by Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?,”
Journal of Southern History
58 (1992): 668, 671, 674, 675, 676, 673, 677.

26
Cited in Hermann Rauschning,
The Voice of Destruction
(New York: Putnam, 1940), p. 69.

27
Margaret Mitchell,
Vom Winde verweht
(Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1937).

28
John Haag, “
Gone with the Wind
in Nazi Germany,”
Georgia Historical Quarterly
73 (1989): 279–304.

29
“That night, Goebbels had invited guests to watch David Selznick’s
Gone With the Wind
, a film not yet released, but which Goebbels admired for its depiction of a morally strong armed Confederacy.” See Peter Fritzsche,
Life and Death in the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 182.

30
These were circumstances he had witnessed after his own regiment had been captured. See Hans Habe, “The Nazi Plan for Negroes,”
Nation,
March 1, 1941, p. 233.

31
Ibid., p. 234.

32
Germany’s active propaganda program directed at the United States paid particular attention to the South, but it also directed its appeals more broadly. A curious example is Charlie and His Orchestra, a band located in Berlin that broadcast familiar swing and jazz songs to the United States, with their lyrics altered, over shortwave radio. A striking example is their rewriting of Ella Fitzgerald’s 1938 recording of “F.D.R. Jones” (also famously sung by Judy Garland), whose middle stanzas observed:

It’s a big holiday everywhere

For the Jones family has a brand new heir

He’s the joy Heaven sent

And they proudly present Mister Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones

The Nazi version was adjusted to make more than one point:

It’s a Hebrew holiday everywhere

All the Jewish family has a brand new heir

He’s their joy Heaven sent

And they proudly present Mister Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones

These lyrics can be found today on white-supremacy Web sites.

33
Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s,” p. 670; the report by Pierre van Paassen appeared in the May 4, 1934, issue of the
Atlanta Constitution.
“By 1937,” Glenda Gilmore reports, “Germans imagined the Klan as the perfect launching pad in the United States. That year Baron Manfred von Killinger, the Nazi general counsel in San Francisco, directed a woman using the alias Mrs. Leslie Fry to buy the Ku Klux Klan outright. At least part of her seventy-thousand dollars in purchase money came from the German Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. She planned to unify domestic Fascist groups under the KKK cross and recruited a member of the Silver Shirts, an organization that attracted many former Klansmen, to approach the KKK’s Imperial Wizard. The FBI chased her out of the country before she could succeed.” See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore,
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 172.

34
For discussions, see Julian M. Pleasants,
Buncombe Bob: The Life and Times of Robert Rice Reynolds
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 158–79; Irish, “Foreign Policy and the South,” p. 309. Reynolds chaired the Senate Military Affairs Committee. In July 1943, with the country at war, he proclaimed, “I was an isolationist, and I am a thousand times more isolationist today than I was before we became engaged in this war.” Cited in Alexander DeConde, “On Twentieth-Century Isolationism,” in
Isolation and Security,
ed. DeConde (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1957), p. 5.

35
These instances are cited in Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s,” p. 685.

36
Charleston News and Courier,
February 4, 1938.

37
Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s,” p. 669. There were some southern chapters of the German-American Bund in Memphis, Tennessee; Miami, Florida; Shreveport, Louisiana; and San Antonio and Taylor, Texas; the German veterans organization newspaper, the
Texas Herald,
in Taylor, praised the Third Reich and promoted anti-Semitism. But overall, “the German-American community in the South simply did not support the
Bund
, and most of that community’s newspapers, such as the
German Echo
in Miami, Florida, attacked the Nazi regime” (p. 681).

38
Ibid., pp. 685–86.

39
“Out of tune with the sentiment of his constituency, Senator Reynolds found it inexpedient to seek re-election in 1944.” See V. O. Key Jr.,
Southern Politics in State and Nation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 363. It should be noted that Reynolds was returned to office in 1938 with 64 percent of the vote, having first been elected in 1932 by a 68–32 margin. Clearly, it was his extreme isolationism that cost him his career. His successor, the Democrat Clyde Hoey, secured 70 percent of the vote in 1944.

40
Grill and Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s,” p. 688.

41
Ibid., pp. 669, 683, 684.

42
Ibid., p. 693. The black press, by contrast, regularly and bitterly returned to this theme, with obvious justification. When the nation’s most important black paper, the
Pittsburgh Courier,
published an article by George Schuyler, the well-regarded African-American journalist, in response to the report by Hans Habe, it underscored how “the Nazi plan for Negroes approximates so closely what seems to be the American plan for Negroes.” The relatively liberal
Richmond Times-Dispatch
quickly rejoined. It is “dangerously misleading,” even “absurd,” it stated, to treat these instances as counterparts. Segregation, it argued, “is essential for the well being of the white race.” Cited in ibid., pp. 690, 688.

43
George B. Tindall, “The Central Theme Revisited,” in
The Southerner as American
, ed. Charles Grier Sellers, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 114.

44
John Hope Franklin, “As for Our History . . .” in
Southerner as American,
ed. Sellers, Jr., p. 18.

45
On the South’s internationalism after World War I, see Dewey W. Grantham Jr., “The Southern Senators and the League of Nations, 1918–1920,”
North Carolina Historical Review
26 (1949): 187–205. For a discussion stressing the episodic character of southern internationalism, see DeConde, “The South and Isolationism,”

46
John Temple Graves,
The Fighting South
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943), p. 5.

47
Ibid., pp. 246–47.

48
Irish, “Foreign Policy and the South,” pp. 312–13.

49
Anthony Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson and the Rise of Militant Interventionism in the South,”
Journal of Southern History
65 (1999): p. 775.

50
Ibid., 778–83.

51
Jackson Daily News,
August 15, 1918, cited in ibid., p. 804.

52
Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson and the Rise of Militant Interventionism in the South,” pp. 806, 807.

53
What John Calhoun had said about slavery resonated as an animating feature of the mid-twentieth-century southern system: “With us,” he told the Senate on August 12, 1849, “the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” Cited in Harry V. Jaffa,
A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 283.

54
The most comprehensive treatment remains Robert A. Divine,
The Illusion of Neutrality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). For overviews of the prewar period, see Waldo Heinrichs,
Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Richard M. Ketchum,
The Borrowed Years, 1938–1941: America on the Way to War
(New York: Random House, 1989); David Reynolds,
From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt’s America and the Origins of the Second World War
(Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2001).

55
For a discussion, see Dallek,
Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy,
pp. 103–08; he notes how the impending Italo-Ethiopian war helped shift the administration’s views about neutrality legislation.

56
Ernest C. Bolt,
Ballots before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Peace in America, 1914–1941
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977), pp. 152–85.

57
The law was underpinned by an intellectual rationale that had been advanced by Charles Warren, an international lawyer who had been assistant attorney general of the United States from August 1914 to April 1918, when the United States entered World War I. His widely read April 1934 article in
Foreign Affairs
argued that technical neutrality was not enough; the experience of that war had shown that such formal and thin neutrality risked producing situations that could lead to military participation, however unwanted. Impartiality was insufficient; active policies of abstention and prevention were required. See Charles Warren, “Troubles of a Neutral,”
Foreign Affairs
12 (1934): 377. The 1935 Neutrality Act closely tracked his specific proposals. The next issue of the journal carried a sharp rejoinder by Allen Dulles, who later served as the director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles argued, “We should not delude ourselves that like Perseus of mythology we can put on neutrality as a helmet and render ourselves invisible and immune to a world in conflict around us.” See Allen W. Dulles, “The Cost of Peace,”
Foreign Affairs
12 (1934): 578.

58
More broadly, Roosevelt’s views about foreign affairs in the 1930s remain opaque and contested among historians. A useful, if now dated, overview can be found in Brian McKercher, “Reaching for the Brass Ring: The Recent Historiography of American Foreign Relations,” in
Paths to Power: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations to 1941
, ed. Michael J. Hogan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 176–223.

59
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at San Diego Exposition,” October 2, 1935, in
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
vol. 4 (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 410.

60
The committee reported its findings on February 24, 1936, after hearing from more than two hundred witnesses at ninety-three hearings. Nye’s career was marked by a passion for agrarian reform and a suspicion of big business. A thoughtful consideration can be found in Wayne S. Cole,
Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962). The committee’s chief investigator was Dorothy Detzer, the head of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF); her key aide was Alger Hiss. See Woito, “Between the Wars,” p. 113; Divine,
The Illusion of Neutrality,
pp. 66–67.

61
At San Diego, Roosevelt had noted, “It is not surprising that many of our citizens feel a deep sense of apprehension lest some of the Nations of the world repeat the folly of twenty years ago and drag civilization to a level from which world-wide recovery may be all but impossible.” See Roosevelt, “Address at San Diego Exposition,” p. 410.

The nay votes were cast by two Democrats—Peter Gerry of Rhode Island, and John Bankhead of Alabama. Of the fifteen senators who did not vote, three were from the South: Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, Harry Byrd of Virginia, and John Overton of Louisiana.

62
Congressional Record,
74th Cong., 1st sess., August 20, 1936, p. 13782.

63
This worry was articulated most strongly by Democratic senators Thomas Connally of Texas and Thomas Gore of Oklahoma. See ibid., August 23 and 24, 1935, pp. 14283, 14433.

64
Ibid., 2d sess., February 17, 1936, p. 2247.

65
Ibid., p. 2256.

66
Ibid., March 19, 1936, p. 4055.

67
This “I Hate War” speech in Chautauqua, New York, on August 14, 1936, did cautiously place limits on the administration’s stance. “We are not isolationists except insofar as we seek to isolate ourselves completely from war” was how he put the point, adding, “We must remember that so long as war exists on earth there will be some danger that even the Nation which most ardently desires peace may be drawn into war.” See William D. Pederson,
The FDR Years
(New York: Facts on File, 2006), p. 352

68
New York Times,
January 6, 1937. Most of this shipment, which left New York a day before Congress acted, was sunk by Nationalist forces some ninety miles from Spain in early March. See
Washington Post,
March 9, 1937.

69
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 1st sess., January 6, 1937, p. 73.

70
Ibid., p. 74.

71
Ibid., pp. 92–93.

72
The single negative vote was cast by John Bernard, a Farmer-Labor representative from Minnesota.

73
Washington Post,
January 8, 1937.