Fear Itself (9 page)

The dictatorships introduced advanced models of internal security reflecting strictly defined strong criteria for membership, based on ideology, nation, and race. Their programs of control were not compromised by attention to the liberties of citizens. The Soviet Union, which described itself as a union of peoples, imposed class criteria for full citizenship, downplaying nationalism, while in Germany a racially defined conception of nation—the nation as
Volk
—set limits for how Nazism sanctioned citizenship (German Jews could not qualify as ethnic Germans), presenting a model that was copied, if more moderately, by the Italian government in 1938. Each of these countries induced order from the willing and imposed it on those who were not. Each used police powers with hardly any constraints. Each justified its repressive apparatus with Manichean language, sharply distinguishing foes from friends, the certainty of these divisions intrinsically appealing in such dark times. Germany and the USSR established immensely complex and far-flung camp systems (with the Soviet, before World War II, being considerably larger, housing nearly 1.7 million people in 1939, compared with 60,000 in Germany) that isolated, punished, restricted, and reformed dissenters in immense numbers, well before Germany first built death camps in 1941. Tolerance was equated with weakness, and enemies were defined as those whose support was suspect. The cost of dissent was more than physical insecurity, but the loss of individual identity and the capacity to communicate.

The dictatorships professed to solve these various problems better than the democracies. They also claimed to be better democracies. As antiliberal democracies, they offered mass mobilization and participation through approved political parties, buttressed by strong images of popular support and national unity.
⁹⁵
Their governments, they insisted, were modern, secular, and largely popular, sustained by consent alongside repression. By advancing a social agenda, producing economic results, and mobilizing the population, they “caught the parliamentary powers off guard” by advancing policy answers without going through the route of democratic lawmaking.
⁹⁶
“The Fascist State,” Giovanni Gentile wrote, “is a people’s state, and, as such, the democratic State
par excellence.
” Through the party, it uses and reflects “the thought and will of the masses.” For this reason, the regime undertakes what he described as “the enormous task” of “trying to bring the whole mass of the people . . . inside the fold of the Party.”
⁹⁷
Similarly, Stalin declared in 1936, “We understand democracy as the raising of the activeness and consciousness of the party mass, as the systematic involving of the party mass not only in the discussion of questions but also in the leadership to work.”
⁹⁸
According to these readings, the key to democracy was just the reverse of its liberal understanding, which insisted on the separation of state and society. Here, by contrast, the ethical and political unity of the people and their state was a central principle, thus bypassing entirely the need for representative legislative institutions.

The countries on both sides of the divide were aware of what the others were doing. They knew and studied one another’s policy prescriptions, observed their political and technical counterparts, and borrowed where they thought appropriate. “The Soviet-watching Nazis suppressed existing trade unions, and sought to organize their own new ones; the Japanese, watching the Nazis, would do the same.”
⁹⁹
And the United States watched as well, absorbing and learning where possible, as the Roosevelt administration did when it sent Louis Brownlow, Charles Merriam, and Luther Gulick—each a leading student of public administration who, together, composed the president’s Committee on Administrative Management, which Brownlow chaired—to Rome to study how Benito Mussolini’s government had organized Fascism’s administration, and then used what they found to make extensive recommendations for the reorganization of America’s national government. It called for the abolition of regulatory agencies in order to strengthen the executive branch, advocating placing them under the authority of the president’s cabinet departments, a suggestion Congress refused to enact.
¹⁰⁰

Facing many common challenges, each regime measured the accomplishments of its arts of ruling by where it stood in this competitive game.
¹⁰¹
“Notwithstanding the distinctiveness of their ideology and many of their practices,” the historian of the Soviet Union Stephen Kotkin has observed, these regimes “were part of an international conjuncture, and compared themselves to others.”
¹⁰²
They sometimes produced similar policy prescriptions, such as the use of public labor camps to put redundant labor to work.
¹⁰³

In the 1930s and early 1940s, the competition pit the constitutional democracies in Europe and North America against a wide array of authoritarian alternatives. Most, including Japanese militarism, Italian Fascism, and German Nazism, were defeated during World War II. But the rivalry between dictatorship and democracy did not come to an end after the war; rather, it took a new form, with Soviet Communism facing off against late–New Deal America, and with each crusading, literally armed to the teeth.

Although American majorities were never drawn to the models crafted by the dictatorships, their seeming success did attract tens of thousands, including visible and articulate intellectuals and organizational leaders. In the United States, other forms of economy and politics beckoned. Some looked to the Soviet Union, envious of its capacity to deploy multiyear plans to rapidly modernize and surmount the speculative boom and crisis patterns of capitalism, and for its propertyless class structure. Over the course of the 1930s, Communist Party rallies often filled the twenty thousand seats in New York’s Madison Square Garden. By 1938, some 75,000 Americans had joined the Communist Party, and many others participated in post–1935 popular-front organizations, many of which were sponsored by the Party.
¹⁰⁴

Excitement about the Soviet experiment formed a component of left-of-center ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. Famously, Walter Duranty, a
New York Times
journalist with a strong pro-Soviet tilt, explained why he had decided not to file deliberately “lost stories” that described the human cost of the first Five-Year Plan, stating that “what matters to me is the facts, that is to say whether the Soviet drive to Socialism is or is not successful irrespective of the cost. . . . In the course of the last seven years, this country has made an unprecedented capital investment in socialized industry and has simultaneously converted agriculture from narrow and obsolete individualism to modern Socialist methods. What is more both of these operations have been carried out with success. Their cost in blood and other terms of human suffering has been prodigious, but I am not prepared to say that it is unjustified,” he stated, concluding that “any plan, however rigid, is better than no plan at all and that any altruistic end, however remote, may justify any means, however cruel.”
¹⁰⁵

In June 1936, in assessing Stalin’s new constitution as a welcome “loosening of the bonds of dictatorship,” the editors of
The New Republic
drew on the adulatory report of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and an account by the journalist Louis Fischer (who had declared, despite March 1933 reports about the massive famine, especially in Ukraine, that “there is no starvation in Russia,” a statement he later recanted in
The God That Failed
¹⁰⁶
) that “the Soviet system has always contained more genuine democracy than outsiders have realized. . . . The essential power in the Soviet Union has never rested entirely with the government,” citing the Webbs, who had concluded that the Soviet Union “has been the very opposite of dictatorship.”
¹⁰⁷

The appeal of the Soviet Union extended into unexpected places, including the American Civil Liberties Union. “If American workers, with no real liberties but to change masters, or, rarely, to escape from the working class, could understand their class interests,” its director, Roger Baldwin, wrote in 1934, “Soviet ‘workers democracy’ would be their goal.” Baldwin had been a champion of freedom at home. He had led the ACLU’s challenge of the ban on
Ulysses,
and had involved his organization in the Scopes trial and the murder trial of Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Yet he endorsed the abandonment of liberal democracy in the Soviet Union. Freedom in the USSR, he wrote, is “fixed on the only ground on which liberty really matters—economic. No class to exploit the workers and peasants; wide sharing of control in the economic organizations; and the wealth produced is common property,” and he declared that “the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world.”
¹⁰⁸
Baldwin was hardly alone; he was joined in his sentiments by, for example, Edmund Wilson, who extolled the Soviet Union in
Travels in Two Democracies.
¹⁰⁹

Others flirted with Fascism, and still more, including leaders of the country’s most important universities, refused to take principled stands against such regimes.
¹¹⁰
Some were attracted to strong-leader right-wing models. Richard Washburn Child, reflecting on his experiences in Rome as ambassador when the fascists had seized power, celebrated the young regime in 1924 in
The Saturday Evening Post,
the country’s largest weekly magazine, with a circulation of nearly four million: “When a spirited people cannot stand it any longer, they act.” The institutions of liberal democracy, he mused, “are luxuries enjoyed by these people who do not face intolerable situations. . . . When a people face an intolerable situation the real ravenous hunger is not for a program, but for a man.”
¹¹¹
Four years later, he gushed in a foreword to the Duce’s
Autobiography
that “it may be forecast that no man will exhibit dimensions of permanent greatness equal to that of Mussolini,” a “man who had made a state. . . . He takes responsibility for everything—for discipline, for censorship, for measures which, were less rigor required, would appear repressive and cruel. . . . Time has shown he is wise and humane.”
¹¹²
Even in the mid-1930s, not on the fringe but in the
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
the most moderate and respectable of learned journals, a pro-Fascist opponent of the New Deal (tried for sedition in 1944) explained why he did not agree with those, such as former president Herbert Hoover and Socialist Norman Thomas, who attacked the New Deal as similar to Fascism. They were assuming, Lawrence Dennis wrote, that “fascism is per se something to be feared or fought.” Rather, he argued, “it appears to me that prevailing social forces the world over make a fascist trend the inevitable alternative to chaos or communism.”
¹¹³

Many Americans drawn to Fascism were attracted by its trope of ethnic solidarity. The Italian-American linguist Mario Pei celebrated in 1935 how “the Italian people today are enjoying a new and different type of liberty. They are enjoying themselves as members, part and parcel, of a powerful, organic state, which rules for the welfare of everybody and not in the interests of a chosen few, a state which has social justice within and international prestige without its borders.”
¹¹⁴
Led by the self-styled American Führer, Fritz Kuhn, the pro-Nazi Amerikadeutscher Bund (German American Bund) attracted approximately 100,000 members. Some twenty thousand, many dressed in Nazi garb and chanting “Heil Hitler,” descended on Madison Square Garden, which was decorated with swastikas and American flags for this “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism” on February 20, 1939, where they listened as speakers asserted the rights of Gentiles, denounced the New Deal as a “Jew Deal,” and referred to President Roosevelt as “Frank D. Rosenfeld.” By this time, the Bund was closely cooperating with Father Charles Coughlin, whose appeals had grown stridently anti-Semitic.

VII.

W
ITH THE
boundaries and capacities of liberal democracy in question, and with incremental fine tuning to the status quo absent as a real option, fear defined the context within which political action in the United States proceeded. It also served as a motivation to act. Such circumstances required making decisions that were more fundamental than picking alternatives or choosing possibilities. Fateful and transformative, New Deal decisions were more fundamental, more likely to be irrevocable. What was unclear was whether America’s political institutions could tame fear and produce tolerable risk at least as well as the dictatorships.
¹¹⁵

This was what Franklin Roosevelt pledged to do on that blustery March day in 1933 when he had identified how “fear itself . . . paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” As he, his successor, and their colleagues sought to counter the dictatorships in an increasingly desperate world, they risked informal cooperation and formal alliances with partners of necessity. As anxiety, disillusion, and doubt afflicted the American polity, neither the dilemma of dirty hands nor questions about democracy’s abilities could be evaded.

2
Pilot, Judge, Senator

D
RESSED IN HIS
pilot’s garb and seated in an open cockpit, Gen. Italo Balbo, Benito Mussolini’s dashing minister of aviation,
¹
commanded the cover of
Time
on June 26, 1933. Celebrating ten years of Fascist rule, his squadron of seaplane pilots were preparing for the “Cruise of the Decade” at the navigation school of the Italian Air Force at Orbetello, north of Rome, on the Tuscan coast. Led by Balbo, the crew of this Crociera del Decennale would soon travel 6,100 miles in forty-eight hours, journeying from Rome—via Amsterdam, Londonderry, Reykjavik, the Labrador coast, New Brunswick, and Montreal—to the “Century of Progress” world’s fair in Chicago.
²

The International Military Tribunal met briefly in Berlin in October 1945, then in Nuremberg for eleven months, to try the surviving senior leadership of the defeated Nazi regime. The Soviet judge, Iola Nikitchenko, had been born in 1895 in Dom Voisko Province, the center of Cossack culture. He had gone to work in the Donbass coal mines at thirteen, before joining the Red Army, then fought in the Russian Civil War. After studying law at Moscow University, he ascended to be vice president and divisional military jurist on the panel of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR and a lecturer in criminal law at Moscow’s Academy of Military Jurisprudence.
³

On May 17, 1948, memorial services were conducted in a joint meeting of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to commemorate the lives and achievements of seven members who had died during the prior session. Their number included Democrat Theodore Bilbo, who, following terms in the state senate, as lieutenant governor, and twice as governor, had served as a senator from Mississippi from January 1935 until his death in August 1947.
⁴
The main tribute, delivered by his successor, John Stennis, identified Bilbo with “progressive forces” and “service to the common people,” and as “a faithful friend” to FDR who had delighted in the “inspiration and hope” provided by the New Deal.
⁵

As individuals, the energetic, dapper Balbo, the pale, thin-faced Nikitchenko, and the paunchy, florid Bilbo could not have been more different. But in one crucial respect, they were very much alike. The role played by these servants of an authoritarian regime illuminates how the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were obliged to pursue their often dangerous efforts to secure liberal democratic alternatives under deeply uncertain conditions. By attending to these largely forgotten major figures in public life, we can begin to observe the character and consequences of the New Deal’s partnerships with discomfiting confederates.

I.

T
IME
’
S ACCOUNT
of Italo Balbo’s impending flight was lighthearted and sympathetic, a tone that was not surprising given the sympathies of its publisher, Henry Luce.
⁶
Intent on making these Fascist pilots more palatable to an American readership, the article eschewed the nativist cant that had been widely used only six years before in describing the two “swarthy” Italians, the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, before their execution. “With discipline relaxed,” so the article proclaimed, these valiant pilots “amused themselves like college footballers on the eve of a Big Game.” For months, “the men had been confined in monastic seclusion lest any of them get off mental or emotional balance.” In high spirits “having been joined on the eve of their departure by females young & old, beauteous & unlovely . . . permitted to roam the air station arm-in-arm with the flyers,” they “awaited the signal to start the biggest show ever staged by Italian aviation.”
⁷

The article drew no link between Italy’s fearless Fascist fliers and the Nazis who had just ransacked a Jewish-owned department store in Vienna, and it did not comment on how the same issue’s foreign news section was highlighting how, five months after Hitler’s dramatic rise to power, pre-Anschluss Austria was erupting in Nazi-inspired violence, which included attempts to assassinate senior officials and bomb the city’s main Jewish quarter.
⁸

That week’s lead centered instead on developments at home, focusing on early New Deal achievements. It recorded how “the 20 hours between the adjournment of Congress and his departure for a New England vacation last week” had been “some of the busiest President Roosevelt had put in since taking office.” Celebrating effective collaboration between the executive and legislative branches, the story took note of “the finest fruit of that cooperation . . . the vast Industrial Recovery Act,” which sought to reorganize a deeply distressed economy, a bill “the president signed with a vim.” The piece also reported on a new Banking Act, named for Senator Carter Glass of Virginia and Congressman Henry Bascom Steagall of Alabama, a historic piece of legislation that provided for the separation of banking and brokerage companies, which would not be repealed until 1999.
⁹
The article closed with an account of how a “happy” Franklin Roosevelt “turned out the light and went to sleep conscious that he had been blessed as few presidents are: he had 1) got Congress to pass most of the laws he wanted, and 2) got rid of Congress . . . before Congress got completely out of control.”
¹⁰

Time
also noted the death, at seventy-five, of Clara Zetkin, the “grandmother of German Communism,” who, “in the face of Nazi fury,” valiantly insisted only months before her passing on “her rights as oldest deputy to open the Reichstag,” despite having to be “carried in on a stretcher” into Germany’s legislative chamber. The magazine also announced the premature death of the fifty-one-year-old Ukrainian-born immigrant Josef (Yossele) Rosenblatt, “world famed synagog cantor and concert singer; of a heart attack after completing a film for the American-Palestine Fox Film Co. in Jerusalem. An orthodox Jew whose voice drew comparisons to Caruso, had refused to remove his vast beard even when offered $3,000 a night to sing
La Juive
for the Chicago Opera Company.”
¹¹
And commenting on an event halfway around the world, the magazine also took note of a “revolutionary marriage” between Mahatma Gandhi’s son Devadas, a Vaishya (the caste of shopkeepers) to a Congress Party leader’s Brahmin daughter.

The issue’s fullest and splashiest report, however, was devoted to Balbo’s undertaking. It extravagantly described the rigorous training, flight plans, advanced technology, and aesthetics of how “the Italians fly in a cavalcade of seven compact triads and one quartet” led by “Balbo’s plane, identified by a large black star on the fuselage.” It richly portrayed the send-off ceremony at Orbetello, as the fliers and visitors gathered to face “the 25 big seaplanes bobbing at moorings,” each painted either in Fascist black or the white and green colors of the Italian flag, each carrying the Fascist emblem that had been inscribed on air force planes on Balbo’s orders since 1928:

The stage was set. Upon it stepped the imposing figure of General Italo Balbo, Minister of Aviation, supreme commander of the Atlantic flight. . . . “I greet you all as a commander and a companion. We are ready with tranquil spirit. I am not unmindful of the dangers. . . . But these are not inferior to our destiny.” Right arms extended, commander & crew recited in unison the Fascist oath: “We will make ourselves worthy soldiers of the King and worthy soldiers of the Italy created by our leader [
nostro Duce
].” A priest came forward, prayed over the men, sprinkled holy water toward the seaplanes, and invoked the blessing of the Virgin of Loreto.
¹²

This mission was hardly the first. From the start of his terms as undersecretary in 1926 and minister in 1929, Balbo had undertaken to promote thoroughly choreographed mass flights. In an age fascinated by such modernist spectacles, entranced by the daring of audacious pilots like Wiley Post, Roscoe Turner, James Mollison, and Charles Lindbergh, Balbo wished to demonstrate the technological capacities, military prowess, discipline, and personal heroism of Italy, and, more specifically, Italian Fascism.
¹³
Immediately on assuming power eleven years earlier, in 1922, Mussolini had moved to establish an independent air force, less as an instrument of war than a means to build a Fascist “civilization” based on the values of dynamism and innovation. His
Autobiography,
eagerly published in English by the venerable firm of Scribner’s, which also published the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, recalls how he had turned “immediately” to build a “new type of armed force,” boasting in 1928 how “I dedicated myself to a reorganization of aviation, which had been abandoned to utter decay by the former administrations.” Even at this early stage, he noted how “the flights in squadrons . . . have demonstrated that Italian aviation has recently acquired great expertness and prestige, not only in Italy, but wherever there is air to fly in.”
¹⁴

The historical link between aviation and Fascism had been already established a decade earlier. The connection had been reinforced by images and words, and by spectacular feats.
¹⁵
Introducing his book
Mussolini aviatore
in 1935, the journalist Guido Mattioli explained that “every aviator is a born fascist.” Mussolini himself had trained to fly in 1920, at age thirty-seven, to pursue what Mattioli called the “necessary and intimate spiritual connection” linking Fascism to aviation.
¹⁶

Like millions of others around the world, Balbo had been mesmerized when Lindbergh had piloted the
Spirit of St. Louis
from Long Island to Paris in 1927, and he would visit the United States for a month the following year, where he reported pleasure at seeing the first Mickey Mouse cartoon,
Plane Crazy,
in which Mickey takes Minnie for a near-disastrous ride in an airplane converted from a car. The Lindbergh frenzy crossed geographic and ideological lines. Even the left-wing playwright Bertolt Brecht got in on the action, writing
Der Lindberghflug,
a radio play celebrating the achievement for the 1928 Baden-Baden music festival, with music by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. Yet Italian reverence for Lindbergh was particularly intense. Millions of Italians sang “The Eagle of the USA” and learned to dance the Lindy.
¹⁷
From May 26 to June 2, 1928, Balbo, dressed in the uniform of a Fascist militia general, led his first mass flight, a voyage of sixty-one seaplanes, including light bombers, that took off from Orbetello and traveled to six Spanish and French ports in the western Mediterranean. A longer mission followed, in 1929, when Balbo directed a fleet of thirty-six bombers to the eastern Mediterranean, stopping in Athens, Istanbul, Varna, and finally Odessa, in part to explore whether Italy and the Soviet Union had common ground in their lack of sympathy for constitutional democracies, which Balbo announced to be “rotten to the bone, lying and false.”
¹⁸
On his first Atlantic crossing, in 1931, Balbo led twelve seaplanes from Rome to Rio de Janeiro, making stops in West Africa and northern Brazil.
¹⁹
Each flier, his memoir reports, was “given Fascist Party membership cards before leaving Orbetello and the crews don black shirts for the Atlantic crossing, as a symbol of their ‘Fascist will’ to conquer the ocean.”
²⁰

Known for his megalomania, for his radicalism within the Fascist Party, and for his violent and fanatical tendencies as “an intransigent squadrista, founder of the blackshirts and first head of the Fascist militia,”
²¹
Balbo had made his mark as a brutal
ras
(chief) of the Blackshirt militia of Ferrara and Emilia after service in the Alpine Corps in World War I, earning a bronze medal and two silver medals for bravery.
²²
Notably, he had been one of the four paramilitary leaders of the October 1922 March on Rome, which swept away the liberal state he disparaged as “a nest of owls.”
²³
“When I returned from the War,” his diary recorded in 1922, “I hated politics and politicians,” and decided to “deny everything” about liberal Italy, especially its parliamentary politics.
²⁴