Fear Itself (15 page)

Later that month, as the Republican Eightieth Congress convened, the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program heard testimony regarding “transactions between Senator Bilbo and various war contractors.” It found that Bilbo had, in fact, profited from such dealings by extracting thirty thousand dollars from three contractors to use in his 1946 campaign. Senator Ellender judged this accusation to be a partisan effort “to capture the nigger vote.”
¹⁷¹
In early February, the Senate put off a decision on Bilbo’s credentials until the Senate physician certified he was physically fit after an operation to remove cancer from his jaw.
¹⁷²
Never well enough to return to Washington, Bilbo died on August 21, 1947. At the burial in Poplarville, the Pearl River County seat in southern Mississippi where Bilbo had been born, some five thousand mourners gathered at the Juniper Grove Cemetery. They were led by Governor Fielding Wright, who would run for vice president on the Dixiecrat ticket the next year, and by Senator James Eastland, like Bilbo a stalwart opponent of black rights. The first of many eulogies was offered by his local pastor, the Reverend D. W. Nix. The senator, proclaimed the minister, had “died a martyr . . . to the real, true principles of American Democracy.”
¹⁷³

IV.

T
HE
N
EW
Deal’s partnerships with Italo Balbo, Iola Nikitchenko, and Theodore Bilbo underscore how policymaking during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations proceeded in an atmosphere of unremitting uncertainty about liberal democracy’s capacity and fate. For an emerging power like the United States, there was no place to hide, no means to keep liberal democracy unsullied in often desperate conditions of economic collapse, total war, genocide, atomic weaponry, and Cold War.

During the period from the rallying call by the new president to confront fear itself on March 4, 1933, to the Nazi invasion of Poland six years later, the New Deal was concerned, above all, with questions of political economy. Could capitalism be rescued? On what terms? With what degree of public support? The core policymakers in this initial phase of the New Deal never thought the USSR or Nazi Germany could provide workable models. But they were drawn to Mussolini’s Italy, which self-identified as a country that had saved capitalism.
¹⁷⁴
No wonder Balbo, with all his military insignia, appeared so appealing. It was not just antiegalitarian figures like the philosopher George Santayana or the poet Ezra Pound who famously celebrated Italy’s Fascist regime. It was not just the breathless masses that thronged the streets at Chicago and New York to welcome the flamboyant Balbo and his fliers. Italy’s administrative reforms and corporatist organization of relationships between the state and economy caught the imagination of such pragmatists and policy scholars in the 1920s as Horace Kallen, the student of ethnicity and pluralism at the New School for Social Research, and Charles Merriam, a leading early behavioral political scientist and a specialist in public administration at the University of Chicago, who found appealing “its experimental nature, antidogmatic temper, and moral
élan.
”
¹⁷⁵
Mussolini also was keenly admired by none other than Hugh Johnson, the former army officer who led the National Recovery Administration in the early New Deal, who distributed copies of Raffaello Viglione’s Fascist pamphlet,
The Corporate State,
to members of the cabinet and hung a portrait of Mussolini in his office.
¹⁷⁶

Desperate for tools and itself in an experimental mood, the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s did not so much adopt a pro-Mussolini stance as seek to associate with Italian Fascism, of course on American terms for America’s own purposes, seeking to find policy models that could be put to use under democratic conditions. Throughout the 1930s, the United States, which continued to have robust cultural ties with Italy (participating avidly in the new 1932 Venice Film Festival, and enthusiastically receiving Italy’s most imposing pavilion at Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition), also broadly admired that country’s combination of optimism and commitment to technology. The United States engaged eagerly with Italy on trade, though it later introduced a copper embargo, as it sought to encourage Mussolini’s comparatively moderate Fascism as a counterweight to National Socialism.
¹⁷⁷
Thus, in the summer of 1936, one year after the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, both Merriam and Louis Brownlow, who had been a city manager in Knoxville, Tennessee, and, with Merriam, one of the founders of the Public Administration Center clearinghouse at the University of Chicago, journeyed to Italy to study modern administrative methods for the President’s Committee on Administrative Management, which FDR had created to recommend a reorganization of the federal government to increase the capacity and effectiveness of the executive branch.
¹⁷⁸
“There is,” its report observed, “but one grand purpose, namely, to make democracy work today in our National Government; that is, to make our Government an up-to-date, efficient, and effective instrument for carrying out the will of the Nation.”
¹⁷⁹
The report failed, of course, to mention the Italian campaign of 1935–1936 that had produced Ethiopian killing fields.

Affectionate as the feelings had been between the Fascist regime and progressive American policymakers, the infatuation did not last, dashing the hopes of ardent American sympathizers like Ambassador Long. With the outbreak of war in Europe and the Pacific, Italy unavoidably moved to the enemy camp. When Hitler reneged on his Non-Aggression Pact with the Soviet Union two years later, Stalin’s regime became America’s most valuable military ally. Ideological principles and liberal commitments became subordinate as a Metternichean sense of Realpolitik came to dominate American overseas policy, a new way of advancing the United States in the world. The United States, accordingly, made common cause with Stalinism at its most ruthless and repressive moment. Joined under the anti-Fascist banner Moscow first proclaimed with popular-front policies in the mid-1930s, the country once distinguished as the deepest enemy of liberal and democratic values was welcomed into an association of nations fighting against Hitler, and defending Enlightenment virtues and liberties.
¹⁸⁰
Anti-Fascism, the erstwhile Communist French historian François Furet recognized,

purged Soviet Communism of much of the antibourgeois aggressiveness with which Lenin had imbued it in order to separate Bolshevism from Social Democracy. . . . To isolate Hitler, the Soviet Union drew closer to the democracies. Being still distinct from them, it was a lap ahead on the path to freedom, which is how the Soviets explained Hitler’s particular hostility to the USSR. . . . By inscribing the Soviet Union at the top of the list of democratic nations engaged in the battle against the Fascist powers, Stalin gained an enormous advantage—a fierce enemy, deprived of the amenities of freedom, identifiable yet ubiquitous.
¹⁸¹

With this advantage, the Soviet Union managed simultaneously to join the defense of democracy from Nazism and its allies while justifying domestic repression as anti-Fascist. After all, a central theme at the show trials of 1936–1938 was the accusation that such leading Party figures as Zinoviev and Kamenev were guilty of collaborating with the Gestapo.
¹⁸²

Thus the placement of the Soviet Union inside the global coalition against Nazism, while drawing a sharp line between Hitlerism and the Enlightenment’s values of liberty and equality, came to be justified not only by sober military realism or, later, by the enormity of the crimes revealed to have been committed by Germany but also by what appeared to be common values. Based during the war on a willful disregard of the means of Soviet rule and on taking no notice of fundamental geopolitical and ideological differences, this alliance did not endure after the collapse of Fascism in its various forms as a viable social order. Seen from this perspective, Nikitchenko’s role at Nuremberg brought to a close the period in which the United States deliberately chose to look the other way in the face of extreme human rights violations. Absent a common enemy, the liberal West again confronted a totalitarian power, this time across an Iron Curtain. The term
Cold War,
when viewed from a remove of sixty years, underestimates the depth of anxiety and violence during the last phase of the Roosevelt-Truman era. As this period was coming to an end, the United States had lost the nuclear monopoly it had maintained only less than a handful of years. Fighting an enervating and brutal war in Korea, the United States, especially through its foreign policy and covert actions, was beginning to build what has proved to be a massive and permanent national security state.

The nation’s fondness for Italian Fascism, once symbolized by Balbo’s tumultuous reception, and its toleration of Soviet hypocrisy under the banner of anti-Fascism, signified by Nikitchenko’s seat on Nuremberg’s bench, would prove ephemeral. Both were based more on instrumental realism than on deep or enduring affiliation.

Bilbo and his fellow southern Democrats, by contrast, made up an essential and permanent part of the New Deal, for they commanded votes required for any of the domestic and international programs advanced by Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to become law. The Jim Crow South was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without. If we are to understand the world in which we currently live, we must examine the very real lingering effects of that New Deal alliance with those politicians whose views Bilbo expressed, albeit in extreme form.

3
“Strong Medicine”

T
HE START OF
1933 witnessed an upsurge in lynching in the American South. In mid-March, the
Chicago Defender,
one of the country’s leading black newspapers, chronicled these gruesome events:

Harry Ross was shot and killed January 3 by three white men, outside of Memphis, Tennessee. They reported they were taking him into the city to lay charges of “having made improper proposals to a white woman” against him, when he “tried to escape” from their moving car.

Fell Jenkins, 20 years old, was beaten to death by three white farmers, at Aycock, Louisiana, January 11. They said he had been trespassing on the property of one of them.

Three members of a family of fishermen were hacked to death on Tavernier Island, one of the Florida Keys, January 19, by an invading gang of white men. Their names were not reported in the press and authorities have not responded to queries for more details.

Robert Richardson was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, February 9, while “attempting to escape” from a gang of 25, headed by a deputy sheriff, which raided his house on a report, given out later, that he “had annoyed a white woman.”

Nelson Nash, 21 years old, was hanged from a tree by a gang of men at Ringgold, Louisiana, February 19.

George Cheater died February 19, at Aiken, South Carolina, from a beating administered by three white men who later said he had “stolen their whiskey.”

Levon Carlock, 19 years old, [was] beaten, tortured and shot to death by six policemen in Memphis, Tennessee.
¹

In early March, Edith Frank posed with her daughters Margot, just seven, and Anne, three months shy of her fourth birthday, at Frankfurt’s Tietz department store and the nearby Café Hauptwache. Geert Mak reports:

Three days later, the SA raised the swastika banner above the balcony of the town hall, and three weeks later a boycott was pronounced against most Jewish shops and businesses. After the Easter holidays, Margot’s non-Aryan teacher seems to have disappeared into thin air. During those same weeks, Otto Frank began making plans to emigrate. Within a year the whole family was living on Merwedeplein in Amsterdam. The rest of the story we know.
²

With barbarism advancing at home and abroad, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the thirty-second president of the United States on March 4, 1933.

I.

T
HE LATE-WINTER
day was cool, gray, and windy, mostly cloudy, with a trace of sun. The freezing rain and sleet that fell four years later on the president’s 1937 inaugural, when he returned to the White House in an open car with a half inch of rain splashing on its floor, might have been more appropriate for the start of an era tinged with fear. Franklin Roosevelt took office just over a year after the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR had confidently initiated its Second Five-Year Plan; ten months after Japan’s prime minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, had been assassinated in his official residence by a group of right-wing naval officers and army cadets, exposing the tenuous circumstances of the country’s democratic politics;
³
five weeks after Adolf Hitler launched the SA, the SS, and the Prussian police, led by Hermann Göring, to rule the streets; just days after President Hindenburg and Chancellor Hitler had invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution to suspend civil liberties at a time of national emergency; and nineteen days before the Reichstag, by a vote of 494–94, overwhelmingly passed the Enabling Act, which legally created the Nazi dictatorship by giving the chancellor and the cabinet the right to draft legislation, enact laws, and rule by executive decree.
⁴
Confronted by seemingly more successful dictatorships on the Right and the Left, the president of the United States was about to lead a democracy that was unsure of its practical abilities and moral authority.

“Fear itself”: evocative and shocking, it is a visceral phrase. It was just this “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance” that Roosevelt pledged to dispel in his first minutes as president. It is, he famously said, “the only thing we have to fear.”
⁵
Nameless and unreasoning, perhaps, but not unjustified, and not the only thing Americans had to fear. When he spoke, capitalism had collapsed, spreading misery everywhere. Liberal parliamentary regimes were toppling. Dictatorships led by iron men and motivated by unforgiving ideological zeal seemed to have seized the future. Rearmament had begun against the backdrop of the experience and lessons of total war. Of course, FDR could not have foreseen the vast expansion of powers by predatory states, the imminent intensification of violence, or the radical evil of mass killing that lay just ahead. But we can see how even at the time, FDR’s summons “to wage a war against the emergency” understated the perils and prospects of evil, all of which soon enhanced reasons for dread, apprehension, and alarm.

As the president spoke, there already was more than enough cause to evoke “fear itself.” This was no speech born of hyperbole. “Several of the forces propelling Hitler into power,” the journalist John Gunther recalled, “were much the same as those that put Mr. Roosevelt into office—mass despair in the midst of unprecedented economic crisis, impassioned hatred of the
status quo,
and a burning desire by a great majority of people to find a savior who might bring luck”
⁶
unless adjustments to the traditional constitutional balance were carried out.

Front and center was the global economic failure. On Inauguration Day, a quarter of the wage force was out of work, and a massive banking crisis was robbing the middle class of its savings. The Great Depression had taken “a more violent form” in the United States, its place of origin, than anywhere else. The nation’s collapsing national income accounted for more than half the world’s decline in industrial production. The New Deal historian William Leuchtenburg has judged that “when economic disaster struck, no major country in the world was so ill-prepared as the United States to cope with it,” for its national state lacked “both instruments of control and a tradition of state responsibility.”
⁷

The profound economic crisis was but one of the shocks that marked the two decades between 1913, when FDR began his seven years of service as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy in the Wilson administration, and his presidential inaugural. Hope that bellicosity and significant investments in arms could be offset by an international order that could guard the peace and control warfare seemed irreparably dashed. In 1897, the English barrister John Shuckburgh Risley, later a legal assistant in the Colonial Office, had published
The Law of War,
a massive compendium for lawyers and the general public. Looking at the bright side of efforts then under way to contain warfare, Risley observed:

The Rules of War are pervaded by one grand animating principle—to obtain justice as speedily as possible at the least possible cost of suffering and loss to the enemy, or to neutrals, as the result of belligerent operations. On this principle, for example, the wanton devastation of territory, the slaughter of unarmed prisoners, or the poisoning of an enemy’s wells are recognized forms of illegal violence. . . . That the policy of nations has not been to increase or diminish the horrors of warfare is sufficiently proved by the Convention of Geneva, 1864, and the Declaration of St. Petersburg, 1868.
⁸

The twelfth volume of
The Cambridge Modern History,
devoted to “the latest age,” was published in 1910.
⁹
Armed peace, it suggested, was a leading achievement of modern times. This assessment recognized the ongoing arms race, noting how the five great Continental powers—France and Russia joined in a Dual Alliance; Austria, Germany, and Italy in the Triple Alliance—had placed more than two million men under arms, and could mobilize some twenty million. It acknowledged that the arms race begun in the late 1880s was accelerating, that the production of armaments was ever more integrated into the larger economy, and that annual military spending, for just these five countries, had jumped to 158 million pounds.
¹⁰
Yet a sense of optimism prevailed. “The existence of this tremendous military equipment,” the opening essay confidently declared, “makes for peace. The consequences of war would be felt in every household; and statesmen, as well as nations, shrink from the thought of a conflict between forces so immense.” National passions, it further observed, had “lost their operative power.”
¹¹

The Great War’s vast support and remarkable bloodletting mocked these outlooks. Little did they anticipate the wave of enthusiasm by mass populations, politicians, generals, and intellectuals for the brutal intensity of mobilization and combat, or for the manner in which warfare could unite a nation across the lines of class, region, and religion. A passion for war infected some of the greatest intellectuals of the day, including the novelist Thomas Mann, who saluted the war for its promise of “purification, liberation, and an immense hope,” and the sociologist Max Weber, who assessed how “
this war is great and wonderful . . . however
it turns out.”
¹²

The carnage that soon followed dashed any expectation that the new war would replicate the relatively moderate level of killing that had characterized the last major European conflict, the brief but brutally decisive Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, and the killing fields that marked the colonial territorial race that had taken place between 1880 and 1910 that had been out of sight for most Europeans. On the western front, in the first two months of the Great War, the number of Germans killed, wounded, ill, or missing by the count of the army medical service reached 373,369 in the first two months alone. Fully five of every eight members of the Belgian army’s force of 200,000 died, and the initial British Expeditionary Force of some 117,000 was almost entirely wiped out. By Christmas, 747,000 German and 854,000 French soldiers had been killed or wounded in just the first six months of war since the archduke had been assassinated in Sarajevo.
¹³

These astonishing early losses were inflicted by immense armies and fierce firepower before defensive positions could be constructed. Once deep trenches were built, the contending armies settled in for four more years of extraordinary bloodshed. At Verdun, for example, between February and December 1916, some 800,000 soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing; at the Somme, between June and November 1916, casualties reached 1.1 million.
¹⁴
Mired in the ice and slush of the Dolomites and the Alps, half of all Italian forces died or were missing by the fall of 1917, having fought to move just twelve miles beyond Austrian lines from the border of 1915.
¹⁵
In all, of the 65 million soldiers mobilized to fight, 8 million were killed, 7 million were enduringly disabled, and 15 million were wounded.
¹⁶

As fear and terror directed at civilians became instruments of warfare, there also was collateral damage, killing five million noncombatants, often in assaults that were incidental to military advantage. “There is good reason to believe,” a postwar observer acutely noted, “that one of the motives, possibly the leading motive, which animated those who were responsible for those attacks was the psychological effect which it was believed that terrorization of the civilian inhabitants would cause and which might lead them to demand peace.”
¹⁷
Further, as the historian Alan Kramer has noted, “the enemy was not merely the enemy army, but the enemy nation and the culture through which it defined itself.”
¹⁸

This transformation to the nature of war was first signified by the destruction of the Belgian university town of Louvain and its great university library, the shelling of the cathedral, and the deliberate murder of hundreds of civilians in Rheims, followed later in 1914 by mass executions conducted by German troops in Dinant and the Ardennes. Violence took especially stark form from the air, the source of disembodied killing. When a leading student of foreign affairs proposed rules to regulate such warfare in 1924, he underscored how “an aviator who flies over a city at great height during the night, when all lights are extinguished, as was the general practice during this World War,” could not possibly “identify the persons and things to be bombarded.”
¹⁹