Manufacturing Hysteria

by Jay Feldman

  Hawaiians lived under martial law for almost three years following Pearl Harbor, as the federal government put into effect the Army’s decades-old plan, first formulated by DeWitt in the early 1920s and updated in 1936. Until October 1944, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and other basic civil liberties were suspended in Hawaii. In 1942 alone, there were more than twenty-two thousand military trials, resulting in a 99 percent conviction rate, with sentences that included prison terms, fines, required donations of blood, and mandatory purchases of war bonds.69

  Japanese aggression in the Aleutian Islands in 1942 prompted the federal government to forcibly evacuate close to nine hundred native Aleutian Unangan people from their homes and destroy the dwellings for fear that Japanese troops would occupy the buildings and use the islands for a base. They were relocated to internment camps in southeastern Alaska, where living conditions were appallingly squalid—no electricity, heat, laundry, or bathing facilities, contaminated water. Illness was rampant, and close to seventy-five individuals died from disease during the three years of internment.

  As in World War I, there were prosecutions for sedition, but instead of leftists and pacifists, the defendants were now anti-Semites and Nazi and Fascist sympathizers. In July 1942, William Dudley Pelley, founder and leader of the Silver Legion of America, a Fascist organization that numbered fifteen thousand members at its height in 1934, was convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act and sentenced to fifteen years, for little more than making inflammatory statements about the president, the government, and the war. The same month, twenty-six American Fascists were indicted under both the 1917 law and the Smith Act, for conspiring to undermine the morale of the armed forces. Despite an outcry from such notables as Zechariah Chafee, Roger Baldwin, and senators Robert A. Taft and Burton Wheeler, the group of twenty-six went on trial in April 1944. After seven months, the presiding judge died, and the charges were dismissed.

  But the most egregious and far-reaching program occurred in Latin America, where, in flagrant violation of international law, the United States conspired with the governments of more than fifteen Latin American countries to identify, arrest, and deport to the United States, with little or no evidence and no legal proceedings, more than sixty-two hundred Latin Americans of German, Japanese, and Italian ancestry, including eighty-one German Jews, some of whom had spent time in Nazi concentration camps.§

  The deportees, who were interned in the same camps as domestic alien enemies, consisted of both immigrant residents and citizens of those Latin American countries from which they were deported. As with domestic alien enemies, they included only a tiny percentage of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, and virtually no dangerous Japanese. The greatest majority by far were utterly innocent.

  The ostensible aim of the Latin American program was hemispheric security, but there were as well other, darker purposes behind the plan. The Japanese Latin Americans faced racial prejudice and economic resentment, particularly in Peru, from which more than 80 percent of the Japanese internees came. The generally more prosperous and longer-established German community had challenged American economic dominance in Latin America, and the deportations were designed to help American businesses reassert their supremacy.

  The most sinister objective of the agenda, however, was the intended use of the deportees for the purpose of prisoner exchange, as expressed in an internal State Department memo of November 1942, which noted, “Nations of Central America and the Caribbean islands have in general been willing to send us subversive aliens without placing any limitation on our disposition of them. In other words, we could repatriate them, we could intern them or we could hold them in escrow for bargaining purposes.”70

  Many of those “repatriated” in the prisoner exchange program had been born in Latin America and had never seen the countries to which they were “returned.” Those who were not “repatriated” either made their way back to Latin America or stayed in the United States and began anew here.

  The exclusion of Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans from the West Coast was lifted in September 1945. Six months later, the last functioning internment camp closed.

  Most, but not all, alien enemy internees were released as “restricted parolees” at the end of the war. In July 1947, Senator William Langer of North Dakota introduced S. 1749, “A Bill for the Relief of All Persons Detained as Enemy Aliens,” proposing the release of the remaining internees. It failed to pass in the Senate.

  A group of German-Americans were still in custody when the Crystal City, Texas, family internment camp closed in late 1947. They were transferred to the Ellis Island detention center; in the course of the next year, some were repatriated to Germany, while others were paroled or released.

  Finally, in August 1948, more than three years after the war with Germany ended, the last internees were freed from Ellis Island. Camp employees and released internees alike signed secrecy oaths, vowing never to reveal their experiences on either side of the Alien Enemy Control Program.

  • • •

  The end of World War II marked another turning point in American life, as our World War II ally the Soviet Union once again became our adversary. America and Russia now locked in Cold War combat, and a new red scare brought about the most prolonged and intense period of political scapegoating this nation has ever known.

  *To get around these restrictions, Japanese immigrants often purchased land in the names of their children or a Caucasian friend.

  †The hearings were part of the lead-up to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which, among other restrictions, banned all immigration from Japan (see Chapter 8, above).

  ‡Of the 127,000 ethnic Japanese in this country, more than 112,000 resided in California, Oregon, and Washington, with almost 94,000 in California alone.

  §The countries that participated in the program included Bolivia, British Honduras (now Belize), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

  CHAPTER 11

  Scare Hell Out of the Country

  The end of the war brought with it certain momentous advances in civil liberties. The GI Bill made it possible for millions of returning veterans to attend college or learn a trade and to buy homes through low-interest, no-down-payment government loans. In 1946, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in organized baseball, playing for the Montreal Royals; the following season, he moved up to the Brooklyn Dodgers, changing forever the complexion of the game and spelling the beginning of the end of racial segregation in the United States.

  At the same time, civil liberties came under heavy attack, as the Soviet Union’s aggression in Eastern Europe caused a wave of fear and intolerance, unleashing more than a decade of persecution of the American political left.

  With the war over, tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R. began to increase. After FDR’s death in April 1945, Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish sought to reassure Americans and Russians alike regarding the future of U.S.-Soviet relations. In a May 26 radio broadcast, MacLeish invoked the late president, saying, “There is no necessary reason … why the United States and the Soviet Union should ever find themselves in conflict with each other … What underlies the current talk of inevitable conflict between the two nations … is nothing real, nothing logical. The basis of the fear is only fear itself.”1

  In general, Americans continued to hold a hopeful outlook regarding the possibility of a peaceful coexistence with the U.S.S.R. In a survey taken in September 1945, a striking 70 percent of those questioned were in favor of continued friendly relations with the Soviets.2 By the end of the decade, however, public opinion had shifted drastically, unleashing an avalanche of mistrust and paranoia that opened the door for McCarthyism and set the pattern for the government’s persecution of the American left for the next quarter century—until well after any threat, real or imagined, from the American Communist Party had long since fa
ded.

  Early in 1946, J. Edgar Hoover sent a memo to President Harry S. Truman, warning him about Communist espionage activities in the United States, particularly within the federal government. The president immediately instructed Hoover to make the investigation of such activities a top priority and approved the use of wiretapping in pursuing this investigation.

  In February, FBI executives met in conference to plan the implementation of Truman’s directive. The Bureau’s assistant director, D. Milton Ladd, proposed reinstituting the old policies of “investigating all known members of the Communist Party” and preparing “security index cards” on them. He further recommended asking the attorney general to study the legal options regarding the potential need for mass detentions, pointing out that “the greatest difficulty” in carrying out a roundup of Communists in the case of an emergency would be “the necessity of finding legal authorization.”3

  Ladd also suggested a second program, this one to be kept secret from the attorney general. The plan involved preparing and distributing “educational material” for the purpose of convincing Americans that Communism was “the most reactionary, intolerant and bigoted force in existence.” Equally important, the program was also designed to drive a wedge between Communists and more moderate liberals, who traditionally had defended the rights of their radical leftist colleagues. “The Party earns its support by championing individual causes which are also sponsored by the Liberal elements,” reasoned Ladd, so this concentrated propaganda campaign would also serve to undermine the party’s backing from “ ‘Liberal’ sources,” “labor unions,” and “persons prominent in religious circles.” As Ladd conceived it, the overarching effect of this “educational” effort would be to counteract an anticipated “flood of propaganda from Leftists and so-called Liberal sources” should it become necessary to carry out “extensive arrests of Communists.”4

  Ladd’s recommendations dovetailed neatly with Hoover’s longstanding obsession with Communism. In 1920, as head of the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division (better known as the Radical Division), Hoover had written a “Brief on the Communist Party” as well as a “Memorandum on ‘The Revolution in Action,’ ” both of which were submitted to the House Rules Committee in defense of the Justice Department’s actions during the Palmer raids. In the latter document, Hoover concluded, with a typical hyperbolic flourish, that in Communism “civilization faces its most terrible menace of danger since the barbarian hordes overran West Europe and opened the Dark Ages.”5 During the first red scare and intermittently throughout the 1930s, the bureau promoted the threat of Communism to influence government policy and create fear in the public, and in 1936, when President Roosevelt summoned the FBI director to talk about “the question of subversive activities in the United States, particularly Fascism and Communism,” Hoover had predictably focused primarily on the latter.6

  With the alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union during World War II, a moratorium was observed, and the FBI—while continuing to secretly investigate and keep files on American Communists—temporarily suspended public harassment of them. Now, however, with Fascism defeated and the Russian bear flexing its muscles, Hoover enthusiastically embraced Ladd’s proposals. He wrote to Attorney General Tom Clark, who as an assistant to Francis Biddle had been a minor player in the decision to evacuate the ethnic Japanese from the West Coast. Hoover told Clark that the FBI had found it necessary to step up its investigation of CP activities and Soviet espionage cases, and to start compiling a list of all Communist Party members and others who might prove dangerous in the event of a crisis between the United States and the Soviet Union. Such a crisis, suggested Hoover, might make it necessary “to detain a large number of American citizens,” and he urged Clark to undertake a study of what legislation was available or needed for “effective action,” when and if an emergency situation should occur.7

  Hoover also put Ladd’s secret propaganda plan into effect, in what would become an unflagging, orchestrated crusade to destroy traditional liberal acceptance and defense of radical dissent, as well as to eradicate any influence American Communists might have in labor unions. In so doing, the FBI, while hiding behind its supposedly nonpartisan investigative function, carried out Hoover’s personal political agenda and helped pave the way for the rise of Wisconsin’s senator Joseph McCarthy and his reign of terror.

  Like the secret prewar investigations and subsequent scapegoating of German, Italian, and Japanese aliens, the genesis of the second great red scare in America can be traced to the FBI. In fact, there is a direct line of descent, starting with the original Custodial Detention Index (the ABC list), which the bureau began compiling in December 1939 to catalog individuals who could be dangerous in time of war or national emergency. In addition to the aliens on the list, the Custodial Detention Index included the names of many Communists.

  In 1943, Attorney General Biddle ordered Hoover to stop using the index, noting that such activity went beyond the bureau’s statutory authorization. In an act of covert insubordination, Hoover defied Biddle’s order, sending out a confidential memo to FBI field agents instructing them to change the name of the list to the “Security Index” and to keep the program top secret. It stayed that way until the end of World War II—by which time the FBI had vastly increased both its size and its influence, going from 898 agents in 1940 to 4,886 in 1945—and with the intensified postwar investigations of Communists, the Security Index assumed a major new import.

  The FBI’s powerful ally in the secret campaign to influence public opinion and undercut liberal tolerance for American Communists was the House Un-American Activities Committee, the first incarnation of which was created in 1938 as a special committee, with the conservative Democrat Martin Dies of Texas as its chairman. Originally intended to investigate the German-American Bund, the committee, with its staff of thirty investigators, soon shifted its attention to the left, depicting the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration as parts of a monstrous Communist conspiracy. “Communists have infiltrated the government,” Dies declared in October 1939. “There are Communists in high positions. This is particularly true of the New Deal agencies.”8

  Soon after HUAC’s creation, Vice President John Nance Garner predicted, “The Dies Committee is going to have more influence on the future of American politics than any other committee of Congress.”9 In its first set of hearings alone, HUAC identified 640 organizations, 483 newspapers, and 280 labor unions as being under Communist control, and about a thousand individuals as being members of the party. The groups named included such “subversive” organizations as the Boy Scouts, the Camp Fire Girls, the ACLU, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Catholic Welfare Conference, and the American Society of International Law. Dies later also provided names and occupations of “2,000 of the 4,700 Communists in the Chicago area”;10 the names of more than 500 federal employees who were supposedly members of the American League for Peace and Democracy (many were not), which Dies labeled “a Communist front”; and a list of 1,121 federal employees he accused of being either “Communists or affiliates of subversive organizations.”11 As Robert Griffith wrote in The Politics of Fear, “Martin Dies named more names in one single year than Joe McCarthy did in a lifetime.”12

  A symbiotic relationship quickly developed between HUAC and the FBI, as FBI agents were allowed unrestricted access to HUAC files, while the bureau secretly provided purportedly confidential reports to HUAC. Despite strained relations between Hoover and Dies—the bureau director considered the committee chairman an amateur investigator—Hoover nevertheless told the Montana representative James F. O’Connor that the bureau was in favor of HUAC’s continuation and that his agency and the committee were “working together.”13 The FBI and HUAC continued to cooperate until the committee’s term ended with the close of the Seventy-eighth Congress in December 1944.

  When the new Congress convened in January 1945, Mississippi representative John Rankin—who in
1942 had advocated arresting, interning, and deporting “every Japanese in America, Alaska, and Hawaii”14—blindsided the Dies Committee’s critics by moving to make HUAC a permanent committee of the House. In a roll-call vote, the resolution passed, 207–186, as forty New Dealers—including Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas—were reluctant to take a stand and voted a neutral “present.”

  The new committee took up where Dies had left off. The committee member Karl Mundt of South Dakota spelled out HUAC’s fundamentally antidemocratic mission when he talked about “dealing with factors, people, and policies of organizations engaging in actions which are un-American even though their activities are legal. Because of the extreme privilege of free press and free speech they can do much harm if the nefarious purposes and people lurking behind their high-sounding organizational names remain unexposed.”15

  For the greatest part of the next three decades, the clandestine alliance between the FBI and HUAC propped up the committee in its witch-hunting efforts, as the bureau provided a constant source of confidential reports and security information, despite officially denying such activities. When one HUAC investigator, who was himself a former FBI agent, told a Washington Star reporter in 1957, “We wouldn’t be able to stay in business overnight if it weren’t for the FBI,” he was merely confirming what the then HUAC chairman, J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, had intimated nearly a decade earlier when he stated that “the closest relationship exists between this committee and the FBI. I think there is a very good understanding between us. It is something, however, that we cannot talk too much about.”16