Fear Itself (83 page)

119
Conquest,
The Great Terror,
pp. 91–92.

120
Cited in Overy,
The Dictators,
p. 292. See also Z. I. Zile, ed.,
Ideas and Forces in Soviet Legal History: A Reader on the Soviet State and the Law
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Piers Beirne, ed.,
Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet Legal Theory, 1917–1938
(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990).

121
Cited in Stéphane Courtois, “Why?,” in Stéphane Courtois et al.,
The Black Book of Communism,
p. 750. For his role in the 1930s, see Arkady Vaksberg,
The Prosecutor and the Prey: Vyshinsky and the 1930s Moscow Show Trials
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990).

122
The fifteen victims of the second trial included Grigori Piatakov and Karl Radek; at the third, the convicted included Nikolai Bukharin and Genrikh G. Yagoda, the former director of the Secret Police, who had been instrumental in organizing the first two trials. These proceedings brought to a close the often credulous perspectives on Soviet justice that had been offered by Western friends of the regime. Writing in April 1933, for example, on the eve of a Soviet trial in Moscow of English engineers accused of espionage, the barrister D. N. Pritt wrote, “The method of investigation and trial of criminal charges in Soviet Russia, in sober truth, bears an unexpectedly close resemblance in its main features to that prevailing in many non-Communist countries; indeed, the distinctions between the methods of Russia and those of, say, Denmark are perhaps smaller than the distinctions between those of England and Denmark.” See D. N. Pritt, “Procedures in a Soviet Court,” in
The Moscow Trial (April, 1933)
, comp. W. P. Coates (London: Anglo-Russian Parliamentary Committee, 1933), p. 11.

123
Piers Brendon,
The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), p. 472.

124
Cited in Simon Sebag Montifiore,
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar
(New York: Phoenix, 2004), p. 192.

125
Report of Court Proceedings,
The Case of the
Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Centre,
p. 171.

126
Ibid., pp. 165–73.

127
Ibid., p. 119.

128
Alan Bullock,
Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 480.

129
Alexander Orlov,
The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes
(New York: Random House, 1953), pp. 168–69.

130
Cited in Rayfield,
Stalin and His Hangmen,
p. 317. Bukharin’s confession at his trial in March 1938 inspired Arthur Koestler to break with Communism and write
Darkness at Noon
(New York: Macmillan, 1940).

131
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course
(New York: International Publishers, 1939), pp. 346–48.

132
Vaksberg,
The Prosecutor and the Prey,
p. 101.

133
Tusa and Tusa,
The Nuremberg Trial,
p. 232.

134
Vyshinsky chaired a secret “Government Commission on the Nuremberg Trial” set up by Stalin, on which Nikitchenko served. See Parrish,
The Lesser Terror,
pp. 62–63. The Soviet prosecution had alleged German responsibility for Katyn. Against Nikitchenko’s objections, the Germans were allowed to call witnesses in July to refute these charges. See Conot,
Justice at Nuremberg,
pp. 452–55. More broadly, he enforced Stalin’s wishes at the trial.

135
After a two-day hearing, the tribunal decided not to pursue the matter. See Tusa and Tusa,
The Nuremberg Trial,
p. 412.

136
Persico,
Nuremberg,
p. 451; Tusa and Tusa,
The Nuremberg Trial,
p. 476; Owen,
Nuremberg,
p. 327. In 2005, Anthony Marreco, the only surviving member of the British prosecution team at Nuremberg, recalled, “I felt sorry for Nikitchenko, the main Russian judge. He was a tremendous chap and widely respected, but after the sentencing, he was cast into the wilderness because he’d failed to secure the 100 per cent death sentences Stalin expected. Nikitchenko was last seen pushing his wife in a wheelchair along some drab, forsaken Black Sea resort.” See
Evening Standard
(London), November 23, 2005.

137
New York Times,
April 23, 1967.

138
U.S. Congress,
Memorial Services Held,
p. 19.

139
Chester M. Morgan, “Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, the New Deal, and Mississippi Politics (1934–1940),”
Journal of Mississippi History
47 (1985): 149, 151, 152, 161.

140
See William D. McCain, “Theodore Gilmore Bilbo and the Mississippi Delta,”
Journal of Mississippi History
31 (1969): 1–27.

141
William F. Holmes,
The White Chief: James Kimble Vardaman
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), pp. 77–87.

142
Vincent Giroux Jr., “The Rise of Theodore G. Bilbo (1908–1932),”
Journal of Mississippi History
43 (1981): 198–99; Daniel M. Robison, “From Tillman to Long: Some Striking Leaders of the Rural South,”
Journal of Southern History
3 (1937): 208. For overviews that help set Bilbo in context, see Cortez A. M. Ewing, “Southern Governors,”
Journal of Politics
10 (1948): 385–409; Robert L. Fleegler, “Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism,”
Journal of Mississippi History
68 (2006): 1–27.

143
Harrison wanted Bilbo, a potential political rival, kept away from Mississippi’s electoral politics. See R. G. Tugwell, “The Compromising Roosevelt,”
Western Political Quarterly
6 (1953): 338–39.

144
New York Times,
September 20, 1934.

145
U.S. Congress,
Memorial Services Held,
pp. 71, 74, 76. These House speeches were delivered exactly a year before the memorial service, on November 17, 1947, and were included in the service volume.

146
Joseph D. Kennan to Bilbo, August 28, 1940; cited in Morgan, “Senator Theodore G. Bilbo,” p. 162.

147
Campaign press release, October 29, 1940, in Bilbo papers; cited in Chester M. Morgan,
Redneck Liberal: Theodore G. Bilbo and the New Deal
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), p. 230. With this record, two critical students of “Dixie demagogues” concluded in 1939 that he was “the least destructive representative of Dixie in either House of Congress.” See Allan A. Michie and Frank Ryhlick,
Dixie Demagogues
(New York: Vanguard Press, 1939), p. 107. In his fine synthetic history, David Kennedy, writing about President Roosevelt’s decision to intervene actively in a series of 1938 primary elections, mistakenly notes that the campaign was aimed at producing “fewer reactionaries like . . . Bilbo.” See David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 346. By contrast, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. rightly underscored Bilbo’s progressive inclinations, especially in agriculture, in his discussion of the Bankhead Act. See Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Roosevelt
, vol. 2,
The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 380–81.

148
Dewey W. Grantham,
The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), p. 113.

149
William G. Carleton, “The Southern Politician—1900 and 1950,”
Journal of Politics
13 (1951): 221.

150
A biographer aptly described him as the “archangel of white supremacy,” who represented a constituency where “white supremacy was an unquestioned fact.” See A. Wigfall Green,
The Man Bilbo
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963), pp. 104, 98, 99.

151
U.S. Congress,
Memorial Services Held,
pp. 59, 72.

152
Chicago Defender,
July 12, 1919.

153
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 3d sess., February 1, 1940, p. 894.

154
Ibid., p. 1554.

155
Newsweek,
August 6, 1945; cited in Green,
The Man Bilbo,
p. 105.

156
Victor Riesel, “New Bilbo Blast Revives Old Ku Klux Klan Techniques,”
New York Post,
July 30, 1945. During the Fair Employment debate, Bilbo “told the Senate Agriculture Committee that if fair employment is to be guaranteed to every individual regardless of race, color, or creed as provided by the President’s Executive Order 8802, ‘then you had better not disband your army when the war is over—you’ll need it.’” See
Chicago Defender,
February 24, 1945.

157
Cited in Benjamin E. Mays, “Veterans: It Need Not Happen Again,”
Phylon
6 (1945): 208.

158
Congressional Record,
79th Cong., 1st sess. 1945, 91, pt. 3, p. 6898.

159
Chicago Defender,
November 10, 1945.

160
Raymond Gram Swing, “Bilbo the Rabble Rouser,”
Nation,
January 30, 1935, p. 124.

161
Chicago Defender,
February 12, 1944.

162
Ibid.

163
Morgan,
Redneck Liberal
, pp. 251–52;
Chicago Defender,
July 7, 1945; Flora Bryant Brown, “NAACP Sponsored Sit-Ins by Howard University Students in Washington, D.C.,”
Journal of Negro History
85 (2000): 274–86. A multiracial group in the city, whose meeting was addressed by Charles Houston, the noted Howard University civil rights lawyer and law school dean, formed to try to remove Bilbo from his D.C. chairmanship, and sent him a telegram demanding that he step down in light of his racial views, all to no avail.

164
Chicago Defender,
February 19, 1944.

165
Cited in Hodding Carter, “‘The Man’ from Mississippi—Bilbo: Portrait of a Senator on the Home Grounds Making His Plea for Another Term in Office,”
New York Times Magazine,
June 30, 1946, p. 7.

166
Garry Boulard, “‘The Man’ versus ‘The Quisling’: Theodore Bilbo, Hodding Carter, and the 1946 Democratic Party,”
Journal of Mississippi History
51 (1989): 201–17; Richard D. Ethridge, “The Fall of the Man: The United States Senate’s Probe of Theodore G. Bilbo in December 1946 and Its Aftermath,”
Journal of Mississippi History
38 (August 1976): 241–62.

167
Senate Special Committee to Investigate Senatorial Campaign Expenditures,
Hearings, Mississippi
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), p. 13.

168
New York Times,
June 23, 1946;
Chicago Defender
, June 29, 1946; Boulard, “‘The Man,’” p. 211; Senate Special Committee,
Hearings, Mississippi,
pp. 7–11. In an editorial, the
New York Times
noted that “it is now assured that Senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi will not take his seat in the next Senate without a full-dress investigation of his qualifications to serve. . . . The real issue is what has come to be known as ‘Bilboism,’ a combination of racial hatred, Ku Klux Klannery, intimidation at the polls and a narrow parochialism to which all national interests are subordinate.” See
New York Times,
November 18, 1946. See also F. Ross Peterson, “Glen H. Taylor and the Bilbo Case,”
Phylon
31 (1970): 344–50.

169
Theodore G. Bilbo,
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization
(Poplarville, MS: Dream House Publishing Company, 1947), pp. 8, 5, 6, 7.

170
Senate Special Committee,
Hearings, Mississippi,
p. 23.

171
Ellender emphasized that he intended the word
nigger.
Cited in Ethridge, “The Fall of the Man,” p. 255.

172
Floyd M. Riddick, “American Government and Politics: The First Session of the Eightieth Congress,”
American Political Science Review
42 (1948): 679; L. W. Jr., “The Right of Congress to Exclude Its Members,”
Virginia Law Review
33 (1947): 323.

173
Time,
September 1, 1947, p. 14.

174
See James Q. Whitman, “Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal,”
American Journal of Constitutional Law
39 (1991): 747–78.

175
John P. Diggins, “Flirtation with Fascism: American Pragmatic Liberals and Mussolini’s Italy,”
American Historical Review
71 (1966): 498. See also, John P. Diggins, “American Catholics and Italian Fascism,”
Journal of Contemporary History
2 (1967): 51–68; David F. Schmitz,
The United States and Fascist Italy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Ido Oren, “Uncritical Portrayals of Fascist Italy and of Iberic-Latin Dictatorships in American Political Science,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
42 (2000): 87–118. Maurizio Vaudagna, “The New Deal and Corporativism in Italy,”
Radical History Review
4 (1977): 3–35. Support for Mussolini in the liberal democracies was not limited to the United States. “Winston Churchill, who applauded the fascist struggle against the ‘bestial appetite and passions of Leninism,’ was quick to recognize the Duce’s accomplishments. Just weeks before the Italian attack on Abyssinia, he was still praising Mussolini, ‘so great a man, so wise a ruler,’ who was presiding over ‘a revivified Italian nation.’” Steiner,
The Lights That Failed,
pp. 331–32.

176
John Garraty, “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression,”
American Historical Review
78 (1973): p. 914. See also James Q. Whitman, “Of Corporatism, Fascism, and the First New Deal,”
The American Journal of Comparative Law
39 (1991): 747–78; available at http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/600. Devoting a full 1934 issue, mostly approvingly, to Italian corporatism,
Fortune
described how “the Corporate State is to Mussolini what the New Deal is to Roosevelt” (cited on p. 748).