Beyond Belief (23 page)

An article by J. Edgar Hoover in
American Magazine
typified the stories which appeared on the fifth column. In boldface type the editors alerted readers to the “tremendous import” of the message contained therein:

Factories sabotaged . . . ships burned . . . machines smashed . . . trains wrecked . . . . In a war of utter ruthlessness the Fifth Column is on the march . . . . Saboteurs are striking at America. This article by the Chief of the G-men is . . . couched in cautious language. But if you read between the lines you will get its tremendous import.
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Those not capable of reading “between the lines” found it easier to grasp the “tremendous import” thanks to a series of subsequent articles in the magazine on the same topic that charged that “aliens” by the thousands were being “coerced into joining the Nazi network” in America. They controlled radio stations which broadcast special messages to spies and had instructions on how to foment a “revolution” in America when the time was right. One of the articles was an exposé entitled “Hitler's Slave Spies in America” relating how a “blitzkreig of blackmail is forcing hundreds of our foreign-born residents into the Nazi fifth column”
where they created a “vast system of espionage, built on threats, robbery and reprisals.”
²⁵

In the summer and fall of 1940 the
New York World Telegram, Pittsburgh Press, New York Post
, and
New York Journal American
were among the papers which ran series of articles detailing how the “fifth column [was] rapidly gaining power” and “swing[ing] into high gear.”
²⁶
There were other syndicated series including one by Bruce Catton which described the “incredible” German propaganda operations which were functioning on “a large scale all across America.”
²⁷

There were some attempts to diffuse the panic by poking fun at the American propensity to see “five columns” everywhere. Walter C. Frame, writing in
America
, counseled in September 1940 that “hunting for Hitlers can be a mania.” Edmond Taylor, also writing in
America
, warned that in France it was fear of “imaginary enemies and inability to see real ones [which] helped destroy the nation.”
²⁸
Some commentators declared fifth-column stories to be the “counterparts in this war of the atrocity stories in the last war.”
²⁹
The climate of fear became so pervasive that even J. Edgar Hoover, who in his 1940
American Magazine
article counseled extreme vigilance against fifth columnists, reversed his position in 1941 and warned against “cooked-up hysteria” and “ugly schemes of vigilantes and fearmongers.” The FBI was then receiving 300 complaints a day regarding “suspected un-American activity.” Hoover decried the formation of vigilante groups to “combat fifth columnists, shoot down parachutists [and] investigate foreign-born citizens.”
³⁰

The November 1940 issue of
McCall's
described how Americans' “passionate preoccupation” with fifth-column activities was producing a nation of spy hunters. Department of Justice officials complained that one of their hardest jobs was “demobilizing amateur sleuths and deflating hysteria.” According to a report prepared by the Department for the Attorney General, the American press was paying more attention to the fifth column than to news of the war. The report contended that “if the fifth column in the United States had hired a million highpowered publicity men to create hysteria . . . they could not have managed better.”
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This wave of panic about spies in America's midst had various repercussions. By July 1940, 71 percent of the respondents to a Roper poll believed Germany had already started to organize a
fifth column in this country. By this point the phrase “fifth column,” the
New York World Telegram
claimed, had reached “giant proportions in the consciousness of the United States.”
³²

Americans were hostile to these pro-German groups' espousal of fascism and Nazism but were not immune to their antisemitic preachings. Various organizations' and individuals' depiction of the Jew as a universally unwanted burden struck a responsive chord in the American public. The American Institute of Public Opinion found that the Detroit-based radio priest Father Charles Coughlin had amassed a substantial listening audience. His radio show, which regularly broadcast attacks on Jews, including material which had originated in Nazi Germany but which Coughlin did not identify as such, had an estimated audience of 15 million, of whom 3.5 million were regular listeners. A majority of the listeners approved of his violently antisemitic message.

Regular listeners approving        67 percent

Occasional listeners approving    51 percent

The columnist Heywood Broun noted that the Jew served many Americans as a convenient “whipping boy.” The preachings of the Nazis on one side and the Bundists and Coughlinites on the other convinced many Americans that their antipathy toward Jews was justified. Surveys taken from 1940 through 1946 show that Jews were almost consistently seen as a greater menace to the welfare of the United States than were any other national, religious, or racial group. In June 1944, with the war in Europe and in Japan still raging, 24 percent of those responding to a poll believed Jews a “threat,” while only 6 percent considered the Germans to be one and 9 percent believed this of the Japanese. (Despite their antipathy toward Jews, Americans strongly disapproved of the Nazis' treatment of them. In the wake of
Kristallnacht
94 percent of those polled disapproved of German persecution of Jews. However, an even higher percent, 97 percent, disapproved of German ill treatment of Catholics.)
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The greatest and most immediate consequence of the focus by the press on spies lurking in America was its effect on attitudes toward refugees.
³⁴
Although Germany undoubtedly attempted to create a climate in America sympathetic to it and to implant spies, there is little evidence—and there was even less at the time—that refugees, particularly Jewish refugees, were involved. Nonetheless the conviction spread that a cadre of spies could be found within refugee circles. Feature stories about the role of the alien spy appeared in major American papers and magazines. Charges made in the daily and periodical press were repeated in Congress. Despite the efforts of liberal journals such as
The Nation
, the charges gained greater currency as 1940 progressed.
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The fall of Europe was attributed to its having been betrayed by those to whom it had offered refuge. An article in the
New York Herald Tribune
claimed that forty-two Nazi agents had been recruited from among “‘half' Jews” and ‘quarter' Jews” from Germany who had been promised an “Aryan” passport for their work.
³⁶
Samuel Lubell, writing in
The Saturday Evening Post
, charged that Nazi agents disguised as refugees had permeated Europe and America as spies. He described a Gestapo school where spies were taught to “speak Yiddish, to read Hebrew, pray,” and even submitted to circumcision to make their disguise complete.
³⁷
According to these articles, America too was now in danger. In June 1940
Life
published a pictorial record of Nazi activities in Asia and the Americas which, the magazine claimed, was proof that there were “signs of Nazi fifth columns everywhere.”
³⁸

Westbrook Pegler claimed that Norway, a country which had been the object of great sympathy in America, had been stabbed in the back by the German refugees it had befriended.
³⁹
Edwin James, writing in the
New York Times
, reported that Norway had fallen as a result of a fifth column composed of Germans who had been brought to the country as orphans after World War I. Other papers warned of the “alien traitors” who like “termites” were “boring from within.” The
Springfield
(Illinois)
Journal
observed that America “may avoid going to war, but war's backwash is surely coming to America.” When Germany suggested that it might be willing to release “racial and political refugees” from
Europe, a number of papers immediately suggested that this was a way for the Germans to infiltrate the United States with spies.
⁴⁰

Respected figures repeated the claims of the press. The American Ambassador to France, William Bullitt, argued in the summer of 1940 that France had been defeated as a result of its lax immigration policy.

The French had been more hospitable than are even we Americans to refugees from Germany. More than one-half the spies captured doing actual military spy work against the French army were refugees from Germany. Do you believe that there are no Nazi and Communist agents of this sort in America?
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The refugees bore the direct consequences of this hysteria about a fifth column. A “faulty immigration policy” was blamed by public and press for the threat facing America.
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Charges that spies had been found among the refugees were made by Democratic Senator Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina, an archfoe of immigration liberalization. Reynolds warned that the United States was in danger of an “attack by the enemy from within.” In New York, District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey launched an investigation to “spotlight” fifth-column “treachery.” In Washington the House required the fingerprinting of all aliens over fourteen years old.
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The most important step in this sequence of antirefugee measures was a June 1941 ruling by the State Department that refugees who had close relatives in Germany or German-occupied territories could not enter the United States. The ruling was issued after a hearing by the House Un-American Activities Committee in May 1941 at which it had been claimed that no one could be released from a Nazi concentration camp without signing a “pledge that he would serve the gestapo.” The State Department announced that this decision was being taken in order to halt an already existing flood of spies disguised as refugees. It charged that there was such a flood despite the fact that a few months earlier only twelve out of a thousand people requesting visas had been found to be persons “whose presence would be prejudicial to the best interests of the United States.” In addition, the State Department's announcement was ambiguous; it was not clear whether refugees had already committed acts of espionage or had merely been coerced into agreeing to act as agents in the United States.
⁴⁴

Most papers declared that the decision was, in the words of the
New York Herald Tribune
, “readily understandable.” The
Philadelphia Bulletin
was somewhat more hesitant, both because of the lack of substantiating evidence for the State Department's claim and because the vast majority of those who had fled countries occupied by Germany had “the genuineness of their status [as refugees] attested.” It too, however, declared the measure essential for “our national protection.”
⁴⁵
Another paper that was more tentative in its report of the ruling was the
New York Journal American
. It noted that the action had been taken because “alien refugees
may
be subject to pressure through threats against their kin.”
⁴⁶

The
Philadelphia Record
chose a different approach. It stressed the severe repercussions of the ruling on the refugees:

U.S. VISA CURB NEW TRAGEDY FOR AMERICANS' FOREIGN KIN
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The article described the measure as a “severe blow to hundreds of refugees.” It depicted the “tragic portion” and “desperate” situation of all refugees but particularly those who had already begun their “trek to safety” and now found themselves stranded. The
Record's
coverage was unique. Most of the press ignored the human ramifications of the ruling and subscribed to the “refugee equals spy” attitude.
⁴⁸

The liberal press argued that refugees made unlikely candidates for spies because their dress, language, and mannerisms attracted attention. It claimed that to identify refugees as Nazi agents was to yield to German designs. Part of the German objective was to “dump” Jews abroad in order to create confusion and consternation in enemy lands.
The Nation
and
The New Republic
emerged, predictably, as the staunchest defenders of the refugees. They took strong issue with the State Department's story that refugees were serving as spies.
The Nation
challenged the State Department to “cite a single instance of the coerced espionage.”
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No evidence substantiating the charges was ever provided.
The New Republic
believed the ruling to be simply a means of “persecuting the refugee.” It claimed, as had the liberal New York daily PM, that prominent Nazis found few obstacles in their way when they applied for admission to the United States, while “bars have now been raised making it almost impossible for political refugees
to get out of Europe at all.”
PM
accurately blamed the policy on Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long.
⁵⁰

The State Department ruling, coupled with other administrative obstacles, turned the flow of refugees who had entered in the wake of
Kristallnacht
into a mere trickle by the late fall of 1941. The fears of fifth columnists had been generated by the press, radio, newsreels, movies, books, churches, and patriotic groups. Had it not been for the often hysterical preoccupation of the press with spies in the nation's midst, it is doubtful whether 71 percent of those polled in July 1940 by Roper would have answered in the affirmative when asked whether they believed a spy network posed a significant threat. But this campaign against the fifth column also fortified American support for the destroyer-bases arrangement and the Lend-Lease Act. It made it easier for Roosevelt to prepare the country for what increasingly appeared to be an inevitable conflict with Germany. The President was determined to strengthen the antagonism of Americans toward the Reich and their readiness to aid the Reich's enemies.
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