Fear Itself (51 page)

A newly elected member of the House, Martin Dies, fervently embraced the cause. Elected in 1930 from a predominantly rural and heavily black East Texas district once represented by his father,
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Dies had won his 1930 primary contest when only twenty-nine, defeating a six-term incumbent by pushing racial questions. At a campaign stop in Port Arthur, he referred to the only African-American member of Congress, a Republican from Chicago’s South Side, by declaring, “Had I been a member of congress when Oscar DePriest made a speech assailing the southern white man, I would have taken a swing at that nigger’s jaw.”
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Once in Washington, Dies’s congressional career was fast-tracked by his fellow Texans, Speaker of the House John Nance Garner, a close friend of Martin Dies Sr. and soon to be Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, and by the chair of the Committee on Interstate Commerce, Sam Rayburn, a future Speaker of the House. By 1935, Dies was one of twelve members of the Rules Committee, the chamber’s most important. Like almost all his fellow southern Democrats, Dies was an ardent New Dealer in his early congressional years, when he discerned no contradiction between his racism and progressive populism. With the spectacular growth of the labor movement after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935, and with the first efforts by some nonsouthern Democrats after mid-decade to grapple with the worst excesses of southern racial patterns, Dies began to move away from his earlier declaration “I consider it my duty to support [the president and the New Deal] to the utmost.”
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Though still vice president, Garner emerged as an antilabor, anti–civil rights guardian of southern prerogatives during FDR’s second term. Using Dies as his public face, Garner successfully maneuvered to have the House create a Special Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938, with Dies as chair, by a vote, on May 26, of 194–41.
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Most of the positive votes were cast by southern Democrats and Republicans, with a majority of northern Democrats not voting, caught between resisting what they believed to be an antilabor, anti-Roosevelt push and being accused of failing to investigate subversion.

The new committee succeeded a prior Special Committee on Un-American Activities, which had been led by a future Democratic Party Speaker of the House, John McCormack of Massachusetts, and New York Democrat Samuel Dickstein, who served as vice chair. But its focus was radically different. The McCormick-Dickstein committee investigated Nazi propaganda and exposed the direct financial aid and ideological direction Berlin was giving to the German-American Bund.
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By contrast, the Dies committee paid only perfunctory attention to Nazism. Dies quickly appointed Edward Sullivan as chief investigator. Sullivan had worked for the country’s largest labor espionage organization, was a strong supporter of right-wing Ukrainian nationalist groups with Fascist sympathies, and had been a prominent participant in an August 1936 conference of anti-Semitic organizations that met in Asheville, North Carolina. He also shared an office in the National Press Building in Washington with the journalist James True, a prominent anti-Semite, who later, in 1944, was indicated for pro-Nazi subversion.
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An early version of a southern Democratic–Republican alliance lay at the committee’s core. The most aggressive questioning of witnesses was conducted by Dies and Alabama’s Joe Starnes, who served as vice chair. They were assertively joined by “two Republicans of the distant right-wing,” Noah Mason of Illinois and J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, “who pointed out that the Communist party was a greater threat than Nazi organizations since, according to his research, Communists outnumbered Nazis by more than five to one. Worse than both,” Parnell underscored, “were the Communist-influenced agencies of the federal government.” Together, these four directed committee business away from the Bund and Nazi testimony, limited to a single day, to focus on the role of Communists in unions and New Deal agencies, notably the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Project Administration (WPA).
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What most knit the southern Democrats and Republicans together was not simply their anathema of Communism but also a shared concern about the growing power of organized labor.
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Featuring dramatic testimony by John Frey, a senior AFL union official, the committee spotlighted the role of Communists in the CIO, and made known the active role of the Communist Party in popular-front organizations. It also heard testimony from a former Hollywood Communist, who alleged that leading actors, including Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, were secret Party members, a charge that even Dies found unconvincing. During the 1938 election season in Michigan, the committee called witnesses who “alleged Communist activity within that state, control over labor unions, Communist connections to Governor Frank Murphy, and Murphy’s ‘treasonous’ handling of the wave of Michigan sit-down strikes.” In advance of Murphy’s defeat, President Roosevelt denounced the committee for its “flagrantly unfair and un-American attempt to influence an election.”
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The Dies committee was a harbinger of things to come. As “the first congressional committee to take full advantage of its power to punish with subpoenas and contempt citations, and its ability to harm through insinuations and publicity,”
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it established a pattern of threat, denunciation, and rancor that was adopted by its successor, the permanent standing House committee created in 1945, by the 1951-1952 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, led by Nevada Democrat Pat McCarran, and most famously by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations headed by Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy after 1953. The Dies committee also witnessed the first use of the Fifth Amendment, the constitutional protection against self-incrimination, in testimony by Earl Browder, the secretary of the Communist Party, when he was asked whether he ever had traveled to Moscow on a forged passport.
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The Committee was a forerunner in another sense, as well. Roosevelt, Hoover, and other leaders of the executive branch, including those most willing to compromise civil liberties to fight subversion, were apprehensive about freewheeling congressional investigations they could not control, in part because they were institutional rivals, and in part because committee activities could undermine ongoing official investigations. Hoover regularly rebuffed calls by Dies for cooperation, thinking him to be afflicted by “great delusions of personal grandeur,” and a competitor for attention and resources. With the FBI and the senior figures in the Department of Justice particularly concerned that Dies and his committee were prematurely disclosing evidence, the president pressured Dies at the White House in November 1940 to act in a more measured way.
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Dies self-referentially created the Dies Foundation for Americanism and became a widely sought-after speaker to promote his views about subversion and immigration. Despite apprehension about his committee’s methods, its hearings were broadly popular, among both the mass public and leading commentators. A careful 1939 study demonstrated just how much the committee had altered public opinion.
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A
New York Times
lead editorial in January of that year exemplifies the ambivalent but ultimately supportive position of elite views at the time. The paper cautioned that the committee’s procedures were flawed, its members having “solemnly listened to a great deal of obviously hysterical tosh,” and having been “genuinely guilty of red-baiting in the sense of overzealousness to pin a Communist label on every species of liberal thought.” Yet the editorial also observed that the committee had “performed a useful and important service” by revealing “the disingenuous character of Communist tactics in this country.”
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With widespread approval of its goals, the committee’s mandate was renewed in February 1939 by a wide margin in the House, 344–35, and its annual budget was quadrupled, to $100,000. In February 1941, the committee was endorsed by an even wider margin, 354–6, with the budget set at $150,000. By contrast, once the United States was at war, and the Soviet Union had become an vital ally, congressional enthusiasm diminished. When the committee was extended yet again in February 1943, many nonsouthern Democrats changed sides, leading to a vote of 302–94.

The committee’s work continued to push the boundary between inquiry and inquisition. It was, Walter Lippmann judged in 1940, “a kind of committee on public safety . . . official vigilantes . . . often lawless in spirit and disorderly in their methods.” Yet, like most with an establishment opinion, Lippmann refused to call for a halt. “It is plain,” he concluded, “that the Dies Committee cannot be abolished and must be continued since it offers a center of resistance to evils which could not otherwise be brought to light and checked.”
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Before the country’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union caused it to lose steam, the committee demonstrated that even a president and an executive branch attuned to matters of subversion could not contain or control demagogic initiatives in Congress. It revealed that the lack of clear borders between open and closed politics and between liberal and Communist perspectives could cripple progressive politics. It established how indiscriminate speech and often careless and irresponsible charges based on self-interested testimony could mobilize public opinion. By so doing, it created a permissive climate for new federal legislation that constrained liberty for suspected classes of persons, those who held radical views, and especially those who lacked the status of citizenship.

Embracing the policies advocated by Dies and his committee, Virginia’s Howard Smith ushered the Alien Registration Act (Smith Act) through Congress in June 1940. Passed by a voice vote in the Senate and by a nearly unanimous 382–4 vote in the House, this law mandated that all aliens older than fourteen register with federal authorities and get fingerprinted, required that alien subversives and criminals be deported, and defined as a federal crime speech intended “to reach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.”
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The vote affirmed that this was popular legislation. That month, a
Fortune
poll asked, “What if anything do you think should be done about Communists in the United States?” A third of the respondents did not know, and 10 percent responded, “Do nothing; let them alone.” More predominant was the 43 percent that counseled drastic action, including 26 percent that supported deportation, 13 percent that backed finding “some way of getting rid of them,” and 5 percent that favored jail, concentration camps, or even capital punishment. Another 8 percent supported curbs and controls, including a ban on having a Party.
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At first, some nonsouthern Democrats expressed hesitation and even opposition to Smith’s proposal. Brooklyn’s Emanuel Celler, who later chaired the House Judiciary Committee, initially resisted the bill, but ultimately he voted yes, explaining how “in fear of a worse bill, we must accept” this law. President Roosevelt quickly signed the legislation, announcing that it would “hardly . . . constitute an improper encroachment on civil liberties in the light of present world conditions.”
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Some five million aliens were soon registered in the first-ever inventory of foreigners residing in the United States.
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Citing the new law in a memorandum to field agents, Hoover directed the FBI to develop a custodial detention list of persons who either “should be apprehended and interned immediately” after the start of war or should be “watched carefully” because their activities indicated they might harm the nation’s interest.
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Within days of Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war by Italy and Germany, 890,000 Italians, Germans, and Japanese were designated as enemy aliens; their travel was sharply restricted, and they were forbidden to enter the third of the country designated as military zones. They were not allowed to possess weapons, cameras, signal devices, codes, photographs of military installations, or shortwave radios.
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The first sedition trial under the Smith Act was conducted in Minneapolis from October to December 1941, ending one day after Pearl Harbor. Confiscated papers from the offices of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) provided the evidence for charges against twenty-eight persons who either were members of the Party or of Local 544 of the Teamsters Union, what had been guided in part by the SWP. Eighteen were convicted of having violated the Smith Act. “The American people,” the Communist journalist Milton Howard argued in the
Daily Worker,
the Party newspaper, “can find no objection to the destruction of the Fifth Column in this country. On the contrary, they must insist on it.” Clearly, he did not anticipate how, starting in 1946, this law would be used to prosecute Communist Party leaders.
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In 1944, a more spectacular Smith Act sedition trial of twenty-seven American Fascists relied on the defendants’ pro-German, anti-Semitic, and anti-Communist writings, but the prosecution failed to present persuasive evidence that they had conspired, in concert with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, to promote the Axis cause. Upon the death of the presiding judge in November, a mistrial was declared. In December 1945, after the war had ended, the indictments were dismissed. Though what came to be known as the Great Sedition Trial “left no legal precedent and put no one behind bars,” it did “set an important
political
precedent for the Smith Act prosecutions of Communists during the Cold War, which loomed just around the corner.”
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Arguably an even more ominous practice was established when two German-Americans and six German nationals who lived in the United States were arrested for sabotage on June 6, 1942. Having landed by U-boat days earlier in Amagansett, New York, and south of Jacksonville, Florida, they had planned to attack rail terminals, chemical factories, and a hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls. One of the would-be saboteurs betrayed the plot. All were arrested between the twentieth and the twenty-seventh. Their lawyers petitioned to have their case heard in civil court, and the habeas corpus petitions they filed were denied by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. On July 2, acting as commander in chief, President Roosevelt declared them to be unlawful enemy combatants. He appointed a seven-person military commission to conduct a trial under procedural rules its members alone would set. The trial took place at the Department of Justice from July 8 to August 1. Attorney General Biddle led the prosecution team. Each defendant was convicted and sentenced to die. There was no process of appeal. Six were electrocuted on August 8. One, who had intended to defect, had his sentence commuted by Roosevelt to life in prison. The other, who had defected, had his term set at thirty years. President Truman deported both to occupied Germany in 1948.
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