Not Just Japanese Americans: The Untold Story of U.S. Repression During ‘The Good War,’ by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel
I. Pre-Pearl Harbor
The sad saga of civil liberties in the United States during the Second World War begins well before Pearl Harbor. The popular impression is that the Japanese surprise attack in December 1941 caught the U.S. government totally unaware. In an effort to counter this impression, countless revisionist historians have raked over the diplomatic events that proceeded the attack. /1 Yet, prior domestic developments within the U.S. probably belie the impression of U.S. unpreparedness much more forcefully. For the U.S. government was, without a doubt, better prepared to fight World War II than any previous war in its history.
This unprecedented military preparedness resulted from a massive prewar mobilization that involved, first, the U.S.’s first large peacetime foreign aid program: lend-lease; second, an emergency peacetime military buildup; third, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history to support that buildup; fourth, an array of new and heavy emergency taxes to pay for the buildup; fifth, the creation of a new and broad regulatory bureaucracy, supplementing New Deal agencies, to direct the economy toward war production; sixth, the use of troops to enforce labor settlements within critical defense industries; and finally seventh, the adoption of a peacetime sedition law to suppress disloyalty. /2
This last is what concerns us. The pre-Pearl Harbor sedition law, the Smith Act, is more generally known for its postwar enforcement, in a period of tense U.S. relations with the Soviet Union. In fact, it was just the most glaring manifestation of the growing precariousness of civil liberties as the nation went on a war footing prior to its intervention in World War II. The deteriorating international situation brought a rash of related legislation, Congressional inquiries, executive harassment, and state government repression, all aimed at so-called subversive activities. /3
Because of disillusionment with the First World War, Americans initially wished to stay out of the Second. An early generation of revisionist historians had successfully debunked the official justifications for U.S. participation in World War I, and had overturned the judgment of exclusive German war guilt. In 1934 and 1935, a Senate committee, under the chairmanship of Gerald P. Nye, a progressive Republican, investigated the munitions industry. It concluded that American financiers and arms merchants had maneuvered the U.S. into the previous European conflict for their own profit. All of these trends coalesced into a powerful isolationist movement, opposed to any future U.S. involvement in European quarrels.
The debate between the isolationists and interventionists became intense and bitter with the onset of war in Europe. By 1940, a broad-based coalition of noninterventionists had joined together in the America First Committee. Among the committee’s luminaries, supporters, and sympathizers were Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, the aviator hero of the twenties; General Robert E. Wood, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck; Colonel Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the conservative Chicago Tribune; ex-President Herbert Hoover, labor leader John L. Lewis, who had co-founded the militant Congress of Industrial Organizations as a rival to the American Federation of Labor, Norman Thomas, Socialist Party candidate for President; and progressive Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler from Montana. /4
Although the isolationists were influential enough to prevent President Franklin D. Roosevelt from dragging the nation overtly into the war before Pearl Harbor, they were unable to prevent the prewar mobilization. Eventually their loyalty came under question, and the government subjected them to increasing harassment. But before that transpired, the State had already honed its repressive instruments upon much less prominent targets on the extreme Right and extreme Left.
Numerous American fascist groups, nearly an minuscule, had sprouted in the Great Depression’s fertile soil. The two most vocal were the German-American Bund and the Legion of Silver Shirts. Both groups were violently anti-Jewish, with paramilitary trappings, and both received public attention grotesquely out of proportion to their numbers. The German-American Bund, virulently but not officially a U.S. branch of Germany’s National Socialist Party, drew its fewer than 25,000 and probably closer to 8,500 members from among recent German immigrants. At its peak, the Bund packed Madison Square Garden in New York with 22,000 sympathizers for a George Washington’s birthday rally in 1939. The Silver Shirts was an independent organization, headed by mystic William Dudley Pelley. Its membership may have reached 15,000 in 1934, but thereafter it declined to less than 5,000. None of the native fascist organizations, separately or in combination, ever approached the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the twenties. /5
The U.S. Communist Party had likewise experienced a surge during the depression decade, growing from 7,500 in 1930 to 30,000 in 1935. By the mid-thirties, the party had adopted the strategy of joining thousands of non-communists in popular front organizations, such as the American League for Peace and Democracy. Many party members found employment in the burgeoning bureaus of the New Deal. With the signing of the German-Soviet nonaggression pact in August 1939, the Communist Party also indirectly arrived at an isolationist foreign policy stance. /6
Very early in the depression the House’s Fish Committee had briefly looked into Communist propaganda. With this one lone exception, the precedent established during the post-World War I Red Scare of Congressional investigation into subversive activity had lain dormant until the German Reichstag granted absolute power to Adolf Hitler in March 1933, the same month as F.D.R.’s inauguration. Immediately, the internal threat to this country from the right received equal billing with the internal threat from the left, in what one historian has recently dubbed the “Brown Scare.” The House established a new special committee to investigate these twin “foreign” dangers, with John W. McCormack as chairman and Samuel Dickstein as vice-chairman. The committee released a report in 1935 that branded the Communist Party, the Silver Shirts, and several other organizations as subversive.
The ultimate results of the committee’s efforts was enactment in 1938, while events were reaching the boiling point in Europe, of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. This first of the pre-World War II repressive laws provided a maximum penalty of two years and $1000 (later increased to five years and $10,000) for anyone whom the U.S. government deemed a “foreign agent” but who failed to register as such with the Secretary of State.
At the time that the Foreign Agents Registration Act passed, the most significant loyalty legislation already on the books was the World War I Espionage Act. The Espionage Act had combined three features: first, a true espionage law, which punished spying and wartime sabotage, second, a neutrality law, which restricted the non-neutral acts of private citizens in foreign conflicts, and third, a sedition law, providing up to twenty years in jail and a $10,000 fine for aiding the enemy with “false reports or false statements,” for obstructing recruiting, or for causing insubordination, disloyalty, or mutiny in the U.S. armed forces. The act also empowered the Postmaster General to exclude from the mail issues of newspapers and periodicals that he felt were subversive.
The sedition portions of the Espionage Act, however, were inoperative in peacetime. During the infamous Red Scare, the Wilson Administration had sought a peacetime sedition act, but had failed. The Foreign Agents Registration Act represented a minor step toward closing that loophole.
Congress also implemented a second of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee’s recommendations: an extension of the Congressional subpoena power beyond the District of Columbia A new Special House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities, created in 1938 with Martin Dies of Texas as chairman, put this added power to effective use. Like its predecessor, the Dies Committee went after both domestic fascists and Communists. It paid greater attention to the latter, however, as Dies, an arch-foe of the New Deal, attempted to taint the Roosevelt Administration with Communist associations. Each succeeding House faithfully renewed the committee, and several states copied it, with their own “little Dies” committees. /7
While the Dies Committee’s spectacular hearings and voluminous reports gathered headlines, Congress approved an array of additional security laws: the Hatch Act of 1939, which generally restricted the political freedom of government employees and specifically prohibited Communists from working for the national government; an amendment of March 1940 to the Espionage Act, increasing the act’s penalties for spying, neutrality violations, and other infractions that applied during peacetime; and finally the Smith Act of June 1940.
The Smith Act bore the somewhat misleading official title of Alien Registration Act. To be sure, provisions of the act affected the 3.5 million immigrants in this country who had not attained citizenship. It required their registration and fingerprinting, and it made deportation for revolutionary activities and beliefs easier. Several states had already foreshadowed these moves. With the outbreak of war in Europe, Georgia and Pennsylvania had both required aliens to register, and Pennsylvania had also forbidden them to hunt, fish, or own dogs.
The Smith Act’s most far-reaching provisions, however, established a penalty of up to ten years in jail and a $10,000 fine for encouraging insubordination in the military, for advocating, in speech or writing, the forceful overthrow of the U.S. government, or for joining any organization that so advocated. Thus, the Smith Act was, in fact, a true peacetime sedition law of the same sort that had previously failed to pass at the height of the Red Scare. It took the approach of World War II to secure enactment.
Following the Smith Act, Congress added still more “security” legislation. The Selective Service Act of September 1940, which gave the U.S. its first peacetime draft, also carried penalties for urging resistance to the draft. The Nationality Act of October 1940 facilitated divesting naturalized immigrants of their citizenship for radical political beliefs. The Voorhis Act, passed later the same month, required registration with the Attorney General of all organizations subject to “foreign control,” if involved in civilian-military activities or if advocating the overthrow of the government. (the previous Foreign Agents Registration Act applied to individuals.) The fact that the Voorhis Act could require members of the radical organizations to incriminate themselves under the Smith Act did not faze Congress. Just before the Pearl Harbor attack, another amendment to the Espionage Act made sabotage a national crime during peacetime as well as wartime. In short, the pre-Pearl Harbor period witnessed the most sustained outburst of repressive legislation in the nation’s history. /8
Executive-branch harassment of government opponents kept pace with Congress’s steady prewar infringement of people’s political liberty. At the van of this harassment was the national government’s police force: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). To fully appreciate the FBI’s prewar politicization, we must take a brief retrospective look at that agency’s evolution during the interwar years. /9
In the midst of the Red Scare, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had established within what was then called the Bureau of Investigation (it got its current name in 1935) a special section to investigate radicals: the General Intelligence Division, with the young J. Edgar Hoover at its head. The Bureau’s subsequent raids and deportations had left it, however, with a severely tarnished reputation. As a result of further revelations that the Bureau had even spied upon Congressmen in order to suppress the Teapot Dome scandal, the supposedly reactionary Coolidge Administration ordered an abrupt halt to all the Bureau’s political activities and abolished the General Intelligence Division.
Unfortunately, to clean up the Bureau, the Coolidge Administration made none other than J. Edgar Hoover its new director. Defenders of Hoover cite this as proof that his role in the Red Scare had been merely perfunctory. Detractors on the other hand speculated that Hoover got the promotion because, in the words of intelligence expert William Corson, “there was enough in his files to effectively sink the Republican Party in the upcoming Presidential election.” Whichever the case may be, recent documents secured by historians under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Hoover secretly defied the Coolidge Directive against political surveillance and sporadically monitored such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), even to the point of illegal break-ins.
Nonetheless, the Bureau’s low political profile coupled with its emphasis on catching criminals transformed its public image during the next decade. An extremely significant but oft-neglected feature of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a “war with the organized forces of crime,” involving a new deal for the Bureau. Congress passed nine major anti-crime bills in 1934. These gave Bureau agents full arrest power and the authority to carry any kind of firearm, and they put a variety of crimes under its jurisdiction: robbing any bank insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, fleeing across state lines to avoid prosecution or subpoena, extorting money by phone or mail, or transporting stolen property valued at $5000 or more across state lines. Among these new laws was the National Rearms Act of 1934, the first federal gun control law.
In his war on crime, as in most other respects, F.D.R. was fully anticipated by President Herbert Hoover. Hoover had appointed the national Wickersham Commission to study the problems of law enforcement. In his zest for increased bureaucratic efficiency in national crime control, he had created a separate Bureau of Prisons and a separate Bureau of Narcotics. He also had signed the bill that established the Bureau of Investigation’s fingerprinting division in 1930 and the Lindbergh Bill, which made kidnapping a national crime, in 1932.
II. Post-Pearl Harbor
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