Rebecca Naomi Jones: The Wreckage is part of the American Jewish Education Program, generously supported by Sid and Ruth Lapidus.
Archival Audio: I just learned a secret, it’s a honey, it’s a pip!
But the enemy is listening, so I’ll never let it slip.
‘Cause when I learn a secret, boy, I zipper up my lip!
Now the military secret that I carry in my brain,
I keep in safe deposit, with a pad-a-lock and chain!
You bet I’ve got a secret.
Oh, and I bet we find it out!
The soldier’s got a secret, but I bet we find it out!
Hello, Ma, I got a secret, I can only drop a tip.
Don’t breathe a word to no one, but I’m goin’ on a trip!
Shh! Don’t breathe a word to no one, but he’s going on a trip!
Hey! Give me some magazines to read for when I’m on the ship.
Don’t breathe a word to no one, but he’s going to go by ship!
It’s a cinch to keep a secret, if a fellow just takes care.
He’s sailing on a troop ship, now we got to find out where!
I’m a sound and silent soldier, just as steady as a rock,
Here’s to my little secret, with its chain and pad-a-lock.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In 1938, as a wave of authoritarianism spread across Europe and Asia, the Dies Committee was formed to investigate, quote “subversive activities” within the United States. The committee, headed by Texas Congressman Martin Dies, was tasked with targeting these subversives – Americans suspected of fascist or communist sympathies. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, efforts to root out those believed to be disloyal to the United States escalated, and ushered in a new era of Home Front fears.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: American Subversives. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. Welcome to the convening of The Committee. Our story begins in the late 1930s, as war clouds loomed across the globe.
Archival Audio: April 7 1939. As we here in America observe Good Friday –
Extra paper, extra! Italy attacks Albania!
(Bomb explodes.)
The picture was becoming clear. The conquering forces of violence were being set loose in the world. Where would they stop? In a last desperate effort to avert a world war, President Roosevelt has anew sent messages to Hitler and Mussolini asking their promise to respect the independence of 33 countries.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Joining us is Dr. Matthew Dallek, political historian, professor at The George Washington University, and author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: There were a lot of factors coming to a head in the mid-to-late 1930s that made many Americans, and especially many liberals inside the Franklin Roosevelt administration, increasingly fearful of fascism. One was the increased military threat. So as Nazi Germany built up its military machine, liberals in the United States saw that they were relying on air power. And they were actually using airplanes to bomb their enemies in Ethiopia, in Spain during the civil war in the mid-1930s. And air power had been in use, of course, in World War One, but by the mid-1930s, it appeared to have made this incredible leap. And Franklin Roosevelt, starting around, really, 1938, ‘39, started to capture these fears that if Nazi Germany was able to capture bases in maybe Greenland, Iceland, Latin America, that the flying times, the speed in which these aircraft could then attack the United States had been dramatically reduced. And his argument to the country—and again, many people—some people, at least, sympathized with this—was that military technology was nothing like it looked in World War One twenty years ago, and that the oceans that Americans had come to rely on to protect them could no longer be counted on, right? That time and distance had shrunk.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In response to the growing concerns over home front security, Texas Congressman Martin Dies assembled an investigative House committee to root out those he believed to be enemies of the state. These so-called “fifth columnists” were defined as any individual or group within a nation at war who were conspiring with, or sympathetic to, its enemies. There was widespread paranoia that there were foreign spies working within the United States.
Archival Audio, Representative Martin Dies Addresses Congress: “Fifth columnists are working in our national defense industries for the purpose of sabotaging our preparedness program through strikes, slowdowns, explosions, and other destructive acts. The only way that we can defeat their aims and purposes is to expose them before they strike and to get them out of these industries.
“We have proven that fearless exposure followed by vigorous prosecution is a democratic answer to the fifth column. Our committee is the only agency of government that has the power of exposure. Therefore, this investigation must go on without fear or favor. And our slogan must be, no quarter to the enemies of our country.”
Dr. Matthew Dallek: He was—like many, most, or almost all southern Democratic members of Congress—he was opposed to civil rights. He was a real—a race-baiter, right? A racist. And he was also deeply opposed—increasingly opposed, by 1938, when this committee was established—to unions, to foreigners, to intellectuals and other alleged subversives.
And remember, this is a moment where the United States will soon enter into this alliance with the Soviet Union. And fears of fascism are running very high in the United States, but there also remains, as there had been for many decades prior to the establishment of this committee in 1938, fears of communist or forms of left-wing subversion. In a way, left-wing subversion was the original animating impulse; that foreign ideas, often imported from Europe, of socialism, Marxism, communism, anarchism were working their way into the body politic in the United States and that they were going to destroy the American way of life.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In response to these fears, the Dies Committee soon shifted many of its resources to rooting out those suspected of Communist ties. Targets for anti-Communist proceedings included activists, union leaders, educators, gay communities, and those in the entertainment industry.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: And so they did look at some fascists and some kind of right-wing alleged subversives, but in a way, their sympathies lay more with what we would consider the right’s hardline anti-communists, right? This hunt for alleged subversives. And it was also a vehicle for really attacking some of the most liberal elements of the New Deal in the 1930s and early ‘40s.
And then often in the hunt for subversive activity during World War Two—and this would include the Dies Committee—it would include an almost mash-up, right? It could be fascist, communist, people who were going to disrupt—maybe labor, radical labor organizers of some kind that were going to disrupt war production. And some agencies and individuals who were investigating this—FBI, for example—they would maybe toggle back and forth between these things. And so it kind of depended on a particular moment or a particular target of the investigation.
But in the 1930s—and even in the late 1930s—some people who wanted to see the government go after Nazis inside the United States more aggressively had trouble getting the government to focus on that because they were almost too concerned with Communists.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On May 20, 1941, the Roosevelt administration formed the Office of Civilian Defense, and appointed New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia as its director.
La Guardia, a native New Yorker and the son of Italian immigrants, became interested in politics at a young age. His father, Achille, enlisted in the Army in 1885, and served in the 11th Infantry Regiment as a warrant officer and chief musician. His mother, Irene, came from an illustrious Sephardic Jewish Italian family, and was a polyglot and art lover. The pair had two children – daughter Gemma in 1881, and son Fiorello in 1882. His parents encouraged his interest in politics, and after working a series of clerk jobs, he attended NYU Law School. Active in the Labor Movement – he was known to give speeches to striking workers in Italian and Yiddish – he entered the political arena and served both in the House of Representatives and as an alderman. New York City elected him as their mayor in 1933.
La Guardia’s appointment to the Office of Civilian Defense was strategic – demands to create an agency of this kind were coming from mayors of major cities.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: Part of the pressure to establish this Office of Civilian Defense was coming from mayors of the cities, because mayors were concerned that they were unprepared to handle an attack, either by a fifth column, these subversives within, or an air raid. And they were looking to the federal government for help. And so the Conference of Mayors, led by Fiorello La Guardia of New York, pressured—over actually many months, if not years—the Roosevelt administration for institutional support to help protect them, protect their people, because they didn’t have very much to do that.
And American leaders looked to Britain for that model. Because if the United States was bombed or if Nazi agents succeeded in carrying out some kind of an attack, they wanted an organization distinct from the Army—the Army was focused on offensive operations—that could provide for the physical organization and protection of Americans but also, importantly, keep their morale intact so that people would not flip out, and because the collapse of morale, the collapse of civilian morale was the great worry in the United States because they had seen what had happened to many of these countries overrun in Europe.
But there was another component, another real appeal of this Office of Civilian Defense, which is that Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, and a number of other New Dealers believed that in wartime the New Deal had to be updated and expanded, and that morale involved things like food security and a kind of social security, a social welfare; that people needed to feel as if democracy, American democracy, was providing for them in order for them to have faith in the fight against fascism. And so there was a kind of ideological appeal or component to this, that democracy is capable of providing for people’s needs, but also a sense that the New Deal must not be abandoned, because the New Deal is what had helped keep democracy and keep the market system alive in the 1930s, and that the war must not be allowed to kind of overwhelm the New Deal.
And so Fiorello La Guardia was appointed the director, and the First Lady, remarkably, was appointed an assistant director to carry out these various really ambitious missions, but without a whole lot of funding or popular support or the other kinds of things that one would need to actually implement these things.
Archival Audio: The city of Honolulu has been attacked and considerable damage done. This battle has been going on for nearly three hours. One of the bombs dropped within 50 feet of KTU Tower. It is no joke, it is the real war. The, uh, public of Honolulu has been advised to keep in their homes and away from house, uh, from the Army and Navy.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On Sunday, December 7, 1941, just before 8am, Japan attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The island of Oahu became clouded in a blanket of smoke as bombs rained down. Civilians and military personnel alike ran for cover, and in less than 90 minutes, Japanese warplanes severely damaged and destroyed hundreds of battleships and aircraft. When the smoke cleared, the wreckage included 2,392 men, 250 women, and 11 children that had been killed. Warships became tombs, as servicemen and women trapped inside were discovered among the perished.
The attack eliminated all debate over whether or not the United States should enter into World War II – the Japanese government had made the decision for Roosevelt. On December 8, 1941, Congress declared war on Japan.
In the wake of the attack, there were fears that the West Coast could be next, and the Office of Civilian Defense had a significant role in shoring up homeland security. Together, La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt traveled to the West Coast.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: And La Guardia on this trip, really, it was like his message of fear on steroids. He was going up and down the West Coast trying to organize people in civil defense. But he was talking about how—ordering Japanese Americans, for example, back in New York City, to stay in their homes until the federal government could visit them. He had been yelling out on a bullhorn for people to stay calm, calm, calm, and doing drills, right? They were preparing for drills and overseeing drills. And it was really bombastic. And in many respects, he was untethered from the Roosevelt administration itself, and people started to look at him as almost a kind of little dictator. Little Flower was his nickname, but they viewed him as sort of dictating to people. And so he was really, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor—so in February of 1942—he was pushed out of the Office of Civilian Defense.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Roosevelt appointed James Landis, Dean of Harvard Law School, as La Guardia’s replacement.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: Landis cut a real intense figure. I mean, he was gaunt. His face—he had, like, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth when he was giving speeches sometimes, and his face looked really haunted and didn’t look like he was sleeping at all. And he took on the burden of the job, and it really showed, I think, physically. And then he was the director of it for, I believe, most of the next two years.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Among the policies implemented with support from the Dies Committee and Landis’s Office of Civilian Defense was the mass incarceration of Japanese American residents of the West Coast. Between February 1942 and the end of the war, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans representing 90% of the ethnic group’s population were incarcerated in 10 camps across the West and Southwest of the United States.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: The internment, which is widely considered one of the greatest abuses, civil liberties abuses in the American history of the twentieth century—there was really, after Pearl Harbor—prior to Pearl Harbor, of course, there had been racism, right? A kind of anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese racism that had long existed in the United States. And after Pearl Harbor, that was overlaid with a hysteria about a fifth column. And because it was Japan that had attacked Pearl Harbor, there was a great fear that even not just Japanese nationals, but Japanese Americans—so citizens of the United States, the vast, vast majority of whom were ultimately—were loyal to the United States, right, and many of them, of course, served in World War Two—but the hysteria that they were part of a fifth column loyal to the Japanese government and that their citizenship status, even, was a mirage. This was the attitude of the time.
And in that moment of hysteria, there was—very quickly after Pearl Harbor, within two months—I think it was early February of 1942—Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order pushing the internment, basically allowing the internment camps to be established. And in many respects, it was a whole of government operation. So the Army was involved in rounding up and setting up these camps. The Department of Interior, I believe, had a role. And the Office of Civilian Defense was supportive. Committees in Congress, of course. The Dies Committee. So there was not much looking back at the internment.
There were a few voices, including someone like Eleanor Roosevelt, who went up to Seattle like a week after Pearl Harbor and talked to Japanese Americans and said that, in this hysteria, we must not lose sight of the fact that—basically, that Japanese Americans are citizens and they’re loyal to the United States. They have rights, they have their civil liberties, and they should not be persecuted. But that was a pretty unusual voice. I mean, there were very few of those voices.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: The OCD never amassed the same critical federal support that other established war agencies did. It never employed more than a few dozen people at any time during World War II, and by 1944, had largely become obsolete.
Time Magazine reported on Landis’s departure with the following bulletin:
Note on the shifting emphasis of World War II: Cadaverous James McCauley Landis, called in to rescue the Office of Civilian Defense from its dancer and bowling coordinator dog days two months after Pearl Harbor, is resigning soon to go to Cairo as a member of the British-American board on Middle East supplies.
Landis went on to serve as American Director of Economic Operations in the Middle East, and after the war, served in a host of government positions. In 1963, he pled guilty to nonpayment of income taxes, and served one month in prison. Less than a year later, he suffered a heart attack while swimming at his home in Harrison, New York, and passed away at the age of 64.
As for La Guardia, he concluded a 12-year run as New York City mayor in 1946, and in March of that year, he was nominated to serve as Director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the organization tasked with resettling refugees displaced during the war. He passed away in September 1947, also at the age of 64, of pancreatic cancer.
In January 1945, the Dies Committee became a permanent House committee, and took on the name, the House Un-American Activities Committee – or HUAC. After the war, the committee considered opening a series of investigations into the Ku Klux Klan, but ultimately declined to pursue it. In response, the ardent white supremacist and committee member, John E. Rankin of Mississippi, remarked “After all, the KKK is an old American institution.”
HUAC instead chose to investigate suspected infiltration of the Works Progress Administration and its programs by members of the American Communist Party.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: And so Dies, in some respects, targets—one of his first major targets is actually really interesting, which is the Federal Theater Project. And they started to—in the Federal Theater Project and other New Deal agencies—look for subversives, left-wing subversives especially, who they charged were bringing kind of communistic ideas into the United States.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: By 1946, the Communist Soviet Union had gone from the United States’ reluctant ally to Cold War enemy. Fears over the spread of Communism and the USSR’s authoritarian leader Joseph Stalin impacted nearly all aspects of American life.
Dr. Matthew Dallek: The culture—much in the way that the culture during World War II was geared toward a total war effort, an effort to support the war by buying bonds or saving scrap—anything you could do, right, service—it very quickly turns into an effort to support the American way in the struggle against—this titanic struggle against the Soviet Union. And so in films and television shows and popular press, in higher education, it really—and labor unions —anti-communism becomes an organizing ideological force. And it becomes really inescapable for, I think, almost all Americans.
These were, in many respects, groups that were long seen as hotbeds of subversion: Hollywood, organized labor, unions—the kinds of groups that Martin Dies himself had detested in the late ‘30s and early 1940s; higher education, intellectuals, the so-called eggheads who were running the campuses; and then some elites and experts within the State Department or within even the national security bureaucracy, even people like, of course, Robert Oppenheimer, right, the famous movie, who—people who were alleged—they were seen by some of the most hardline anti-communists—they were seen as liberals or sympathetic to the left or opposed to the militarization and the kind of effort to stop the Soviet Union. They were seen as soft on communism in some way. And so institutions like government agencies became targets as well in this burgeoning Red Scare.
Archival Audio, Martin Dies Addresses Audience: “It is most difficult to expose fearlessly and without partisanship the termites who have ceaselessly gnawed at the pillars of this republic. Because there are those who would like for us to be partisan when the question is involved. I said in the beginning of this investigation that I was determined it would be conducted without fear and without favor, and that I would not hesitate to expose any man, whether he’s a Democrat or Republican, whether he’s a new dealer or any new dealer, whether he works in the government or whether he’s working in industry.
“Only on that basis can I reconcile my attitude with my conscience.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written by executive director Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Transcription is provided by Adept Word Management. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the US National Archives, the Department of Defense, the Sherman Grinberg Film Library, the NBC News Archive, Time Magazine, and the Gordon Skene Sound Collection.
For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform which helps others discover our series.
