4

THE INTERNATIONAL JEWISH CONSPIRACY AND THE SECRET GOVERNMENT

Your literature does not have to state the word: Jew. All you have to do to place the blame where people can understand it is to accuse the international bankers.

George Deatherage, American Nationalist Confederation1

The idea of a “secret government” is the core of the most widespread and durable conspiracy theory of the twentieth century: the Jewish conspiracy for world domination. The basic idea grew out of a Jewish banking conspiracy already established by the time of the Populists’ conspiracism of the 1890s—but strengthened and broadened by the Protocols and fleshed out with Aryan-racist and occult concepts. The catalyzing event that turned many people’s attention to the “Jewish peril” was the Russian Revolution. For the most prominent conspiracist of that time, the Englishwoman Nesta Webster, Bolshevism amounted to a rebirth of the Jacobinism of the French Revolution. Accordingly, her work revived the ideas of Robison and Barruel and rescued the Illuminati from decades of obscurity. By giving the Jews a prominent role, Webster shaped the thinking of a generation of conspiracists. The heyday of the so-called secret government occurred during the 1920s and 1930s, but it continues today as, among other variants, the Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory.

The International Jew

In several books, beginning in 1919 with The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, Nesta Webster developed her belief in a long-standing “co-ordinated and continuous conspiracy of Jews to destroy Christianity and dominate the world.” Her early emphasis on the Illuminati and continental Freemasonry as agents of revolution slowly gave way to the idea of “the Jewish peril,” which she envisioned as a Cabala-based conspiracy whose “forces” had been “gathering strength for an onslaught not only on Christianity, but on all moral and social order” since “the first century of the Christian era.”2 Webster’s Cabalists used a succession of secret societies to obscure their role. By her own day, Webster claimed, the influence of Jews in what she deemed “the five great powers at work in the world,” Freemasonry, Theosophy, Pan-Germanism, international finance, and revolution, could no longer be considered “a matter of surmise but of fact.”3 Although others concerned about “the Jewish peril” usually ignored the first three of these “great powers,” the last two began to coalesce into a widely accepted vision of conspiracy.

Many respectable British commentators had already accepted the Jewish peril in light of the Russian Revolution. Winston Churchill, a member of the Lloyd-George government, questioned the loyalties of “international” Jews. The British government issued a booklet titled The Jewish Peril in 1920. At the same time, Howell Arthur Gwynne, editor of the Morning Post, collected into a book his writings on the Jewish peril. As judiciously as he could so as to skirt the obvious charge of antisemitism, Gwynne laid out his premise “that there has been for centuries a hidden conspiracy, chiefly Jewish, whose objects have been and are to produce revolution, communism and anarchy, by means of which they hope to arrive at the hegemony of the world by establishing some sort of despotic rule. . . . The Jewish Bolsheviks are to-day carrying out almost to the letter the programme outlined in the Protocols.”4

The threat allegedly posed by Jewish Bolsheviks was not long in reaching the United States. Most famously, Henry Ford serialized and commented on the Protocols in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and collected the series into a book, The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.5 At the same time however, the authenticity of the Protocols had come under serious attack in at least three countries. One writer noted somewhat mockingly that “the names of the ‘Elders of Zion’ are not given. The dates of their ‘Protocols’ are not given. The names of the assistants or followers to whom the ‘Protocols’ were addressed are not given. The names of the Jews who are to execute, or who have already executed, the plottings detailed in the ‘Protocols’ are not (with the exception of Karl Marx) anywhere given. But the plot to wreck and conquer the world is given in full.”6 A common reaction to the exposure of the Protocols as fraudulent was to concede the possibility and move on, as Gwynne had done. The Christian Science Monitor editorialized that, “for the present, it is sufficient to draw attention to the fact that these ideals keep reappearing with a curious and significant regularity, at moments of great political commotion, and exercising an extraordinary and appalling effect upon world politics.” Without actually using the word “conspiracy,” the Monitor did link the Protocols to “the naked theory of Adam Weishaupt.” A Catholic weekly similarly offered its view that the Protocols “may or may not be authentic” before claiming that Jews had dominated the Bolshevik revolution (as they did all revolutions) as well as the Communist government of Russia.7

Fear of the Jewish peril in the United States increased during the first “Red Scare.” In 1919, the Overman Committee of the House of Representatives, the first of many congressional committees to investigate the threat of Communism in America, heard testimony about the Bolsheviks in Saint Petersburg. Not only were 372 of the 386 Bolsheviks in Saint Petersburg Jews, but over two-thirds of these were from the lower east side of Manhattan. Numbers such as these provided “evidence” for antisemitic conspiracists for decades. Howell Gwynne had estimated 95 percent of the revolutionary leadership in Russia was Jewish. Victor Marsden (translator of the Protocols) came up with 545 Bolshevik officials, of whom 447 were Jews. After Stalin rose to leadership, lists such as these were expanded to include those who, like Stalin, were “married to Jewesses.”8

Fear of Communism in the 1920s was focused sharply on aliens since “Bolshevism is not indigenous to American soil. It is a disease that . . . comes from overseas, and with which no native-born American would be likely to be afflicted unless there were something about him congenitally abnormal.”9 Various “patriotic” organizations and individuals reported on threats across the board. Ralph Easley, who promoted the idea of “fantastic conspiracies” from abroad, exposed Bolshevism in churches, the press, unions, and schools and colleges, and led the effort to scrutinize textbooks for suspicious content. The Daughters of the American Revolution, declaring that “Communism, Bolshevism, Socialism, Liberalism, and Ultra-Pacifism tend to the same ends,” came up with a blacklist of “the Common Enemy”—over two hundred people barred from speaking under their aegis. Bolshevism was also becoming embedded in “cultural conflicts that had previously been viewed as homegrown battles between traditional religion and secularization” such as evolution. By 1924, William Jennings Bryan was blaming the “scientific soviet” as the force behind Darwinism being taught in schools.10

Throughout this period, and even earlier, Jews were portrayed as alien to the United States in much of the academic and quasi-academic literature about race; in 1908 Alfred Schultz had singled out Jews as one of the “alien stocks” that threatened “Aryan purity.”11 Immigration opponent Prescott F. Hall, railing in 1921 against the westward movement of the “brown and yellow races of Asia, described the threat of Bolshevism as “essentially . . . a movement of oriental Tartar tribes led by Asiatic Semites against Nordic bourgeoisie.” By 1921, the idea that East European Jews were actually descended from the Khazars was making its way into the mainstream via H. G. Wells’s popular The Outline of History. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Burton Hendrick brought this seemingly exotic idea home in his book The Jews in America:

The blood of this Turkish or Mongol people flows extensively in the veins of the Eastern Jew of to-day. A further large Slavic mixture makes the Eastern Jew racially alien to Jews from other parts of Europe. Thus the masses that comprise one fourth the present population of New York City trace their beginnings, in considerable degree, to certain tribes that roamed the steppes of Russia in the Middle Ages and happened to accept the religion of Judah as their own. . . . As candidates for assimilation, these Jews, as they land at Ellis Island, are about as promising as a similarly inflowing stream of Hindus or Syrian Druses.12

The idea of Jews as truly alien—not even “true Jews, but only Judaized Mongols,” as Klan leader Hiram Wesley Evans referred to them—fit nicely into a conspiratorial framework. Alien Jews were even joined with the Catholics in a conspiracy of “Romanism, alienism, Bolshevism, internationalism, political debauchery and lawlessness.” An expatriate Russian known as Major-General, Count Cherep-Spiridovich, routinely referred to the “Judeo-Mongol World Government” which he said sought “nothing more or less than the deliberate murder of the intelligent Aryan classes in order to substitute the Asiatics.”13

Taken all together, these components—the purely racist antisemitism, the conspiracism of the Protocols, and the alien threat—brought the Jewish conspiracy into being. So recognizable were they, in fact, that all three were combined in Marcus Eli Ravage’s 1928 satire, “A Real Case against the Jews” (subtitled, “One of Them Points Out the Full Depth of Their Guilt”). Tossing aside war and revolution, Ravage confesses the Jews’ deepest conspiracy: imposing Christianity on the Aryans, a previously “innocent, care-free pagan race”:

Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy Bible. . . . A Jewish maiden is your ideal of motherhood and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central figure in your religious worship. . . . In Dayton, Tennessee, a Bible-bred community forbids the teaching of your science because it conflicts with our ancient Jewish account of the origin of life. . . .

Is it any wonder you resent us? . . . We have imposed upon you an alien book and an alien faith which you cannot swallow or digest, which is at cross-purposes with your native spirit.14

By the end of the 1920s, conspiracists saw an international Jewish conspiracy clearly in place, although its proponents were less numerous than they had been during the height of the Red Scare. The onset of the depression reversed this decline, however, and by 1933 antisemites had a new common enemy: Franklin D. Roosevelt.

International Jewish Finance

By the time Roosevelt was elected president, “Bolshevism” was fourteen years old and thus less threatening than it had been during the Red Scare. Moreover, the Protocols had been shown, to most people’s satisfaction, to be fraudulent, and the notion that most Jews were actually Khazars was fading away with the Ku Klux Klan. With the onset of the Great Depression, negative attention to Jews became increasingly focused on their financial activity rather than their Bolshevik plotting. The old populist conception of British bankers as the enemy was making a comeback, as were the Rothschilds, but with a stronger focus on that family’s American agents. Jacob Schiff was the favorite candidate of many conspiracists. Gerald Winrod saw Schiff as the agent of not only the Rothschilds but revolutionary Jewry as well: “Schiff . . . was born in one of the Rothschild houses in Frankfort, Germany and after arriving in America married the daughter of Loeb, thus becoming part of the banking family Kuhn, Loeb and Company, the concern which is credited with having financed Lenin and Trotsky in overthrowing the Russian Empire.”15 Other presumed agents included Paul Warburg and August Belmont. But ultimately it did not matter. As Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent put it, “Rothschild power . . . has been so broadened by the entry of other banking families into governmental finance, that it now must be known not by the name of one family of Jews, but by the name of the race. Thus it is spoken of as International Jewish Finance.”16

Some of the rhetoric describing the Jewish financial conspiracy was taken wholesale from the populists’ fixation on gold, as filtered through the Protocols. Winrod quoted the third Protocol as particularly “prophetic”: “We shall create by all the secret subterranean methods open to us and with the aid of gold, which is all in our hands, a universal crisis.” Father Charles Coughlin, in one of his early radio addresses, castigated any government that let International Jewish Finance “dictate that gold alone shall be its basic money.” The Jews’ “shuttling of gold and credits,” Coughlin followed up, would make “scepters fall; crowns roll in the dust.” A pamphlet by the avowedly fascist American Guards claimed, “It is known that the Jews control the finances of the world through their gold fetish.” How financial control through gold actually worked was handled with generic rhetoric such as Robert Edward Edmondson’s: “The power of gold enables Jews to crowd Gentiles out of and monopolize the avenues of opportunity.” Count Cherep-Spiridovich noted how easy it was for the Rothschilds to subvert politicians, professors, and preachers “contemplating the mountains of gold on which the Rothschilds are seated.”17

One specific claim was widely made: Jewish financiers had conspired to overthrow the Russian government and install Bolshevism. A supposedly suppressed yet frequently cited British white paper had made this accusation in 1919:

Section 1—In February, 1916, it was first discovered that a revolution was being fomented in Russia. It was found out that the following persons as well as the banking-house mentioned were engaged in this work of destruction: Jacob Schiff (Jew); Guggenheim (Jew); Max Breitung (Jew); Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (Jewish Banking-house), of which the following are directors: Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Otto Kahn, Mortimer Schiff, S. H. Hanauer (all Jews).

There can be no doubt that the Russian revolution, which broke out a year after the information above had been received, was launched and fomented by distinctly Jewish influences.18

Schiff and Kuhn, Loeb & Company became the linchpins of this conspiracy. They backed “the syphilitic Jew Lenin” and the rest of “Trotsky and Co.” For years, claimed Gerald Winrod in 1935, “the connection between Bolshevism and international Jewish financiers was kept out of sight,” but now no informed person “doubts that Bolshevism is controlled and directed by a mysterious hierarchy of Jewish financial wizards.”19 Schiff and his associates became such touchstones of antisemitic conspiracism that Antony Sutton, whose more recent exposés of Wall Street financial influence have been widely cited by conspiracists, felt compelled to set the record straight:

Investment banker Jacob Schiff . . . was in fact against support of the Bolshevik regime. . . . The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes. . . . New York bankers who were also Jewish had relatively minor roles in supporting the Bolsheviks, while the New York bankers who were also Gentiles (Morgan, Rockefeller, Thompson) had major roles.20

Conspiracists also maintained that the Jews had conspired to destroy the American financial system, a process culminating in the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. The leading voice against the Fed was Representative Louis McFadden’s. The Pennsylvania Republican ultimately destroyed his political career with a series of increasingly antisemitic tirades against the Fed, beginning with a 1932 attack on “the evil practices of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve banks and the interests which control them.” These “interests” came into sharper focus the next year, as McFadden expanded on his theory: “In the United States today, the Gentiles have slips of paper while the Jews have the gold and lawful money.” Quoting Protocol twelve on “modern power-gold,” McFadden laid the groundwork for an argument that still has adherents today—that Jewish financiers created a system to foist worthless paper money backed by nothing on Americans, leading the nation to fall into their debt. McFadden challenged the House Democrats to fight the alien forces trying to destroy the economy: “Do not force Americans to pay tribute to foreign ruler and potentates. Take back this country or perish in the attempt. Let this be our country again. Let us rebuild it for our own. . . . Remember, Mr. Chairman, that the ship of state has women and children aboard. Do not, therefore, guide it into uncharted waters. Do not allow the great Democratic Party to steer it onto the rocks . . . so that the international salvage crews may set to work on the wreck of it.”21 Variations on McFadden’s charges have appeared routinely over the years. Pedro del Valle interrupted a diatribe against Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights agenda to hail McFadden and berate the “moral cowards” in the House of Representatives who failed to support him. A 1970 tribute to McFadden came remarkably close to portraying the Great Depression as a sort of “false flag” operation by the Fed, which somehow managed to hide the nation’s wealth to make it appear that the economy had collapsed. Today, McFadden is something of an icon on anti-Fed conspiracy websites, where the antisemitism is cleansed away and he is portrayed as a populist martyr—silenced for speaking out against powerful financial forces.22

McFadden’s was not the only voice. New Zealander A. N. Field had independently stressed the “strange story of the Federal Reserve board” and the Protocols in his 1932 explanation of “the Slump.” Gerald Winrod stressed the sixth Protocol in order to indict the Jews for the “wild business orgy of insane spending . . . deliberately planned by the Elders.” William Pelley alluded to the same thing as following from the “Satanic plans of the Red Jews.” George E. Sullivan painted the Jewish forces “bent on world conquest” not merely as “financially powerful” but as “occult” as well. In “The Subjugation of America,” part 2 of Texas judge George Armstrong’s book on the Rothschilds, the Protocols actually take second place to a nineteen-point plan for world takeover masquerading as an 1869 funeral oration by a Rabbi Reichorn. Less convincing even than the Protocols, the oration’s point number nine was most germane: “Let us try to replace the circulation of gold with paper money; our chests will absorb the gold, and we shall regulate the value of the paper which will make us masters of all the positions.” Investment adviser and economist Robert Edward Edmondson issued numerous leaflets warning of a Jewish takeover of the economy as part of “The Edmondson Jew-Exposure Publicity Campaign.” In his typically florid style, Edmondson described how the “tribe” of “foreign-born Jews” would “‘settle upon the glands’ of our American System . . .—parasitically eating out the substance we have created with the vampirish voracity of a plague of locusts.”23

The Secret Government behind the New Deal

The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 generated a frenzy of activity on the Right, among which was a “small proportion” of antisemites. An Anti-Defamation League study concluded that from 1933 to 1939 “some hundred organizations, large and small, drew together the Jew haters into a potentially dangerous force.” The people involved in these groups were, the study found, “markedly diverse”; a remarkable description of them was provided in retrospect by Carey McWilliams: “A most heterogeneous lot: monetary reform addicts; Pope-baiters; mystics of the Pelley variety; pension plan schemers; professional God-killers; Bible-Belt fundamentalists; West Coast sun worshippers and vegetarians; warped zealots of the John Rankin breed; Negro-haters and what-not. . . . To the extent that they have been able to work together at all, it has been by reason of their hatred of progressive political action, their strong antipathy to the trade union movement, and their uniform and consistent anti-Semitism.”24 During the 1920s, antisemites had been able to focus their rhetoric on “International Jewish Finance,” but in the political realm no such focus existed. But as Roosevelt’s “Red Record” began to reveal itself, the term “the Jew Deal” came into being.25

For the conspiracy-minded antisemite, the problem with the New Deal did not lie in its actions or accomplishments. These were little touched on and, even then, often symbolically—the Blue Eagle logo of the National Recovery Administration struck Gerald Winrod for its resemblance to the Beast of Revelation, whereas it struck Pelley’s Silver Shirts as having a “Red Communist derivation.” Rather, the conspiratorial focus on the Jews in the New Deal encompassed both specific individuals as well as their overall numbers. Three individuals vied for the top spot. Bernard Baruch, a Wall Street banker and onetime adviser to Woodrow Wilson, was often referred to as “the unofficial president.” Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, whose famous dissenting opinions constituted FDR’s “underlying philosophy,” was dubbed “the father of the New Deal.” The third contender, Felix Frankfurter, was until 1939 only an adviser to FDR. However, as a law professor at Harvard, Frankfurter contributed any number of “protégés” to the ranks of the New Deal. One conspiracist effort combined anti-Communism and anti-intellectualism to come up with the menace of the “Scarlet Fever Boys, a swarm of Felix Frankfurter disciples, all under the domination of young, free-thinking collegians of no practical experience, whose theories have only been partially tried in Russia.” Frankfurter was still being singled out as late as 1970 by the Ku Klux Klan because his ideas supported school desegregation.26 That Frankfurter was born in Austria was a fact frequently highlighted by anti-Semites—though Baruch’s South Carolina origins and Brandeis’s birth in Louisville, Kentucky, were never mentioned.27

Beyond these three, lists of Jews making up the secret government varied. William Pelley included Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. (another very popular choice), then moved on to thirty-one lesser threats, ranging from Judge Rosenman (“Roosevelt’s Right Arm”) to Henrietta S. Klotz, a Morgenthau assistant. He also sold a booklet of “nearly 300 Jews who have gained to [sic] the most vital positions in our Federal Government.”28 Carl Mote added legal advisers Ben Cohen and Jerome Frank, along with Tennessee Valley Authority administrator David Lilienthal and an array of “economists,” using quotation marks perhaps as a nod to the Protocols: “We shall surround our government with a whole world of Economists.”29 With the dearth of actual Jews in important positions, non-Jews were frequently included in such lists. Pelley’s followers included Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, who Pelley claimed was not in fact a Bostonian but a “Polish-born Jewess.” A West Coast Silver Shirt reportedly offered $1,000 to “the person who will bring me her American birth certificate.” Eugene Sanctuary’s list of five Jews gives way to people who, “if not Jews, were closely connected with Jews.” These connections could be fairly tenuous. One could be “connected with” the League for Industrial Democracy, which “runs parallel to the Ethical Culture Society, founded by the Jew Felix Adler.” The shortage of Jews was also behind Edmondson’s designation of New Dealers General Hugh Johnson and Tommy “The Cork” Corcoran as “protégés” of Jews.30

The Jews in the New Deal were only the visible part of their otherwise “invisible empire,” as Gerald Winrod called it. Winrod’s assessment of the threat followed naturally from his apocalyptic worldview, but he found it difficult to describe: “It is possible that this invisible empire has existed as a self-propagating body ever since the Jewish leaders contacted the Chaldeans while in Babylonia. . . . The entire cabal is so large and far-reaching, its motives so hellish, its plan of attack so contrary to Christian thinking, that it simply staggers the mind. . . . This anti-Christ force has apparently manifested itself from its underground sources in different ways at different periods of history, but never with the boldness and permanency that it has since it came to the surface eighteen years ago.”31 The idea that Jews were inherently alien made a strong comeback in this atmosphere. Carl Mote expressed his concern but no surprise over “alien and Jewish Communists” in the New Deal, since, “instinctively, the Jews are very much at home in the New Deal and fit snugly into its pattern for the simple reason that the warp and woof of the pattern are change, confusion, disturbance, even revolution, to which the Jew is accustomed.” Eugene Sanctuary painted New Deal Jews as agents of “the secret councils of the central Jewish Kahal.” Americans had a difficult time grasping Jewish motives, according to William Pelley, since “the Jew is not a white man, but an oriental.” Even more bluntly, Kansas publisher E. J. Garner used his newspaper Publicity to rail against “the Mongolian Jew Controlled Roosevelt Dictatorship.”32

Roosevelt’s role in all this was a matter of dispute among conspiracists. One view was that FDR was merely, in Gerald L. K. Smith’s words, a “grinning manikin [sic] that was some day to serve as the ruling figurehead over a once free people.” As “the pampered son of a rich family in New York, who had never done a day’s work in his life,” William Pelley’s FDR was the perfect stooge for “the world-wide coalition of great banking Jews who really constituted a Hidden Empire.” Why would Roosevelt agree to such a role? Elizabeth Dilling answered: “Roosevelt is merely an ambitious rich man’s son, eager for honors and dictatorial power and flattered with the idea that his ‘reign’ is a beneficent one, and that he has been promised enjoyment of the Presidential plum and still more power if he continues to ‘behave.’ If he but takes the time to smile for publicity cameras, and to deliver some prepared radio speeches in a warm fireside manner, the Red ruling clique running him and the government with his full approval and cooperation are well satisfied.”33 Smith, despite his portrayal of Roosevelt as a figurehead, was one of many conspiracists holding the view that FDR was actually a Jew himself. Winrod agreed, while Pelley held that FDR was three-fourths Jewish.34 According to the World-Service, the press agency of Nazi Germany (created “to enlighten ill-informed Gentiles”), Robert Edward Edmondson created the Roosevelt “family tree” on which Smith and Winrod relied. Roosevelt himself told reporters: “My forefathers came to America from Holland about 300 years ago. Whether these ancestors of mine were Jews, Catholics, or Protestants—this question does not disturb me.” The World-Service found this answer “evasive.”35

The idea that Roosevelt was Jewish was more than an ad hominem attack; it proved, “from the viewpoint of eugenics, his natural bent toward radicalism.” It made him an integral part of the conspiracy:

Roosevelt inevitably draws upon his Semitic ancestry. It is, therefore, as natural for him to be a radical, as it is for others to be true Americans. This is why he can boast of flaunting conventionalities, and publicly gloat over destroying those traditions which are fundamental to our national character. HE IS NOT ONE OF US! This may also explain why he attaches so little importance to his word of honor, and has no hesitation in breaking his promises. It is to be doubted if he, himself, understands the inner forces that surge through his being, driving him further and further toward the Left. It’s in his blood.36

For those who took this view, blood was not a metaphor. William Pelley, claiming everyone knew “the bloods of the three great racial divisions of the world; white, yellow, and black, all test differently under chemical analysis,” added that “it is not generally known that the Jew’s blood tests yellow.” Eugene Sanctuary, however, went with cultural determinism over biological determinism, taking the view that “Rabbinical Judaism with its unyielding laws and fettering customs ‘cuts off the Jews from the great family of mankind.’” And Edward Edmondson singled out centuries of “nomadic desert life” for making Jewish tribes “Communistic in structure” and thus “non-assimilable.” Either way—by blood or custom—Jews were inexorably alien; FDR and his New Deal were inexorably alien; and there was only one possible cure. Pelley instructed his followers to “be prepared to strike directly at the heart of the whole racial conspiracy.” Sanctuary looked to the new fascist regimes in Germany and Hungary, where the people “had the courage of their convictions and dared to meet this slimy thing, although in human form, and thrust it from their midst.”37

Antisemitic conspiracists expended considerable effort moving the Jewish conspiracy from the financial realm into government. They created a government run by Jews, perhaps even headed by a Jew, an alien presence controlling America. Gentiles were summarily “ruined,” “turned into the streets,” “foreclosed upon,” their prospects “gutted.”38 Such rhetoric was commonplace; more precise outcomes, however, were in short supply. Even Representative McFadden’s diatribes against the Federal Reserve dealt more with its existence than its actions.

Gerald Winrod was among a handful of fundamentalists who occasionally focused on actions, linking the repeal of prohibition, for example, to a larger anti-Christian conspiracy. James B. True found Roosevelt’s foreign policy to be “identical with the policy of International Jewry.” And a fair number of conspiracists brought up the Recognition of the Soviet Union. Elizabeth Dilling was one of very few detail-oriented conspiracists. Just as her Red Network had named every leftist and liberal she could think of, her follow-up book, The Roosevelt Red Record, listed every administration action she found objectionable. On just one page, Dilling castigates the Emergency Leasing Corporation, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (“The thoroughness and audacity of dictatorial provisions along these lines make one gasp.”), and the Works Progress Administration.39

Still, most antisemitic conspiracists stuck to the big picture. In his 1939 testimony before the Dies Committee—officially excluded from the committee report as embarrassing—George Van Horn Moseley challenged the committee to expand its horizons to include “organized Jewry”: “It is not generally realized how complete is the Jewish State as it is organized and operating within the United States—a nation complete within a nation. Your inquiry should include an investigation of the controlling organizations of that state. . . . I have had the temerity to challenge that great octopus and expose it in an effort to protect our Republic. I wish to see control revert to an honest government and to millions of truly loyal Christian American people.”40

The Secret Government at War

As war in Europe threatened and finally broke out, the international Jewish conspiracy was adapted to include it. Early on, isolationist sentiment was common, but little of it could be considered antisemitic or conspiratorial. By the end of the 1930s, this opposition had been organized into a great many groups, the most famous and largest of which was the America First Committee. The career of the committee illustrates how rapidly opposition to the war was steamrolled by conspiracists and the German-American Bund. An investigation by the American Legion in California found America First chapters overtaken by antisemites and Nazi followers from the American Guards, the National Copperheads, and members of William Pelley’s Silver Shirts, among others. Bundists also worked their way into “Nativist hate-groups” such as the Ku Klux Klan.41

Efforts to resist the antisemitic onslaught were not successful. At a Carnegie Hall meeting of Women United, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. told the crowd that “growing anti-Semitism in this country is the kind of thing that will destroy our republic, and should not be allowed to go on. Tolerance is as important to our national defense as armament. It is the cornerstone of the nation.” The reaction to this admonition was reported by Charles Hudson, the publisher of America in Danger!: “Evidence of Americans’ feelings and understanding of war and warmakers, seen in hearty applause to speeches made by Senators Robt. Reynolds and Bennett Champ Clark at Carnegie Hall 4-14-41, when the 2,300 peace-lovers there became cold when the honorary chmn, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., plead [sic] for ‘tolerance.’ . . . She left in the middle of the meeting. . . . Looks like Mrs. ‘Teddy, Jr.’ had been planted—possibly to test the reaction among Christian Americans in New York City to that ‘tolerance’ plea.” More dispassionate reporting noted that her statement was received with “undisguised hostility” by the crowd, members of which called it “tolerance drivel” and “downright un-American.”42 Around this time, the National Legion of Mothers of America, a prominent mothers’ movement voice of isolationism, was fractured by radio priest Charles Coughlin’s encroachment. The leader of the National Legion of Mothers of America, novelist Kathleen Norris, fought his endorsement, along with the subsequent ones of William Pelley and Gerald L. K. Smith. Nevertheless, extremists began to take over local chapters. A Philadelphia extremist “said Hitler was no danger to America, but she wished he would come over and clean up the ‘damn Jews.’” In the wake of this hostile takeover, chapters seceded and a markedly more violent group splintered off, the Molly Pitcher Rifle Legion, whose flyers urged women to “Buy Christian, Vote Christian, Employ Christian.”43

Despite the high visibility of respectable individuals, such as American icon and tragic hero Charles Lindbergh Jr., the most active members of groups fighting American involvement in the war were well-established conspiracists such as Pelley, Sanctuary, Dilling, and Coughlin. They were joined by less familiar but equally antisemitic conspiracists. Francis Moran, of the Christian Front, attacked “war-mongering, chiseling Jews.” George Deatherage, promoter of the umbrella organization the American Nationalist Confederation, found the coalescence of American fascist groups “gratifying.” Catherine Baldwin founded the Defenders of the Constitution, in part because “the big public outfits are all run by Jewish stooges,” who “operated their outfits as traps to get good people in, who will all be prosecuted at a later date.”44

Blaming the Jews for working against the “good people” was common in these circles; a West Coast Christian patriot publication headlined one story: “Jewry Declares War—Christian Patriots Are Ready.” Elizabeth Dilling was one of many who blamed B’nai B’rith for “breeding, instead of lessening, anti-Semitism.” George Deatherage tried to defend the swastika from Jewish propagandists in America (“where they control the press”) who were doing their best “to cast odium on the emblem.” In his Dies Committee testimony, George Van Horn Moseley took umbrage at having been called a Fascist for his remarks about Jews, claiming that, “as far as I know, I have never seen a Fascist. I belong to no organization. The Jews have forced me to discuss the problem of the Jew in self-defense. They are doing everything in their power to intimidate me and to force me into the camp of their enemies.” Also blaming the victim, Edwin Westphal simply disclaimed credit for starting his own organization. “We Christians didn’t start the Christian Mobilizers,” Westphal told supporters. “The Jews started it for us. If it weren’t for their intolerance, there wouldn’t be any of these organizations.”45

Pamphlets and speakers representing these organizations made two layers of claims: the general contention that Jews caused wars on purpose for their own benefit and the specific claim that they were behind the war against Germany. Back in 1921, Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent had gone with the general claim, writing that the Rothschild fortune was “founded in war. The first twenty million dollars the Rothschilds ever had to speculate with was money paid for Hessian troops to fight against the American colonies.” George Armstrong supported his view of Jewish warmongering by pointing to the Protocols. C. Leon de Aryan suggested a continuum back to Old Testament days with his remarkable observation that Winston Churchill’s V for “victory” salute was a secret Jewish sign for “violence, vengeance, and sabotage” “dating back to ‘the Feast of Belshazzar.’”46

More commonly, Jewish conspirators were blamed for bringing about the current war. Eugene Sanctuary issued a series of pamphlets explaining the Jews’ role in “This War, the Second Major Crime in History, the First Being the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.” The conspirators’ exact reasons varied but were always nefarious. In George Deatherage’s view, the war was actually a struggle between the Rothschild and Warburg financial interests.47 To Howland Spencer, the “zealots who seek world domination” needed first to force the United States into the League of Nations by way of a neutrality bill. Spencer placed long-time presidential adviser Bernard Baruch at the apex of this conspiracy:

To win world domination by 1941—the year of triumph announced by the Communist, Einstein—the next few months are vital to the conspirators. This was admitted by one of them—the man Tugwell—in his Los Angeles speech. Another world war must be brought about and the United States involved in such a war through the lunacy of a dictatorship or the dictatorship of a lunatic. Such plot and such madness is the original neutrality bill, involving sanctions. . . .

We have Baruch’s own boast of his part when in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel he met Captain Jefferson Davis Cohen, then a recent guest of the President at Hyde Park. ‘What have you been doing?’ asked Cohen. ‘I have been writing the Neutrality bill,’ replied Baruch.48

In a warning addressed to “Gentile Freemasons,” Ernst Goerner portrayed the crisis in Czechoslovakia as “just another conspiracy to start the conflagration.” He continued: “The people of Europe do not want to fight each other. They have no grievances. But it is the Jew-controlled governments of the so-called Democracies who try to make their people fight just to satisfy Jewish hatred.” On the same basis, the Anti-Communist Federation of America mockingly advocated funding a “Jewish Expeditionary Force” composed of Jewish New Dealers (along with celebrities such as Edward G. Robinson and the Marx Brothers). “Fellow Americans!” the federation said in conclusion. “Give the Jews a chance . . . If THEY want WAR against Germany, let THEM fight it, while we attend to our people our problems and our nation.” At what has to be the extreme position, one Rosa Farber of the Detroit-based Mothers of the U.S.A., maintained that the Jews—through a world Jewish council, or Sanhedrin—had installed Hitler in Germany to make their plans for Communism seem more appealing. American entry into the war did not eliminate such rhetoric; according to Agnes Waters, the attack on Pearl Harbor was “an inside as well as an outside job . . . part of an international plot to get us into the holocaust of world revolution.”49

The loudest voice urging the United States to join the war came from Britain, and so the British were increasingly linked to “International Jewry” as a “powerful and rich sugar daddy to foot the bills and do their fighting.”50 Catherine Curtis, head of the National Legion of Mothers of America, railed against “the British and the Jews” as part of “a worldwide conspiracy that included communists and international bankers.” The purpose of Goerner’s warning to Gentile Freemasons was to erase the distinction (in place since the days of John Robison’s Proofs and maintained by Nesta Webster) between continental and British (Scottish Rite) Freemasonry and to argue that the latter was also subservient to the Jews. The Molly Pitchers told women in America to “Boycott all Sponsors on the English Jew Controlled Radio.” George Moseley argued that England, not Germany, was “the real threat to America” and that we should ally with Japan. The president of Defenders of the Constitution of U.S.A., Catherine Baldwin, put out numerous pamphlets and charts to show the “alleged effects of British domination in the United States.” And Representative Jacob Thorkelson of Montana interrupted his nine-part attack on Great Britain to insert an attack on the Jews published by London’s Imperial Fascist League. A several page list titled “Hereditary Titleholders of Jewish Blood” pertaining to nobles in Great Britain followed, since “it has long been one of the Jewish methods in the attainment of world domination to penetrate into privileged circles where political power is greatest.” At a “patriotic” forum, one such penetration was credited to British foreign minister Anthony Eden’s wife. “She is JEWISH,” was the charge. “Her name is Litvinov, alias Finkelstein!”51

As America seemed increasingly likely to join the war effort, the tone of the antisemitic attacks became even sharper. Judge George Armstrong explained how the Jewish “undeclared war against Germany” was just part of their plan for world conquest as revealed in the Protocols (“authentic”) and funded by the Rothschild “Dynasty.” Representative Thorkelson, newly defeated in Montana’s Republican primary, gave a radio address blaming shifting public opinion on the international bankers’ control of gold, which in turn “controls the press, radio, news services, and cinema; the four mediums which these men use to soften public opposition to war.” William Kullgren, an occultist antisemite from Atascadero, California, predicted in January 1942 that FDR would cancel the elections that year. Roosevelt would get away with this move because Americans had become “a race of synthetic Jews” living under “the law of the Talmud.”52

The secret government had always been rather strictly defined by the concept of international Jewish finance. By controlling banking systems, Jews were presumably able to foist worthless “fiat money” onto Gentiles while amassing “real” wealth for themselves. They financed wars and revolutions and infiltrated government to institute policies—such as the Federal Reserve System and the abandonment of the gold standard—to manipulate debt and finance to their advantage. This conspiracy was carried into the New Deal but, by the mid-1930s, was giving way to a broader Jewish conspiracy that could be traced back to biblical times and sought to destroy gentile civilization itself. This broader conspiracy was often called “the hidden hand.”

The narrower finance-based secret government conspiracy theory did not altogether disappear. Long after World War II, Don Bell, a new world order conspiracist, used it—and included a list of important Jews in government—to answer his rhetorical question, “Who are our rulers?” A pamphlet distributed by right-wing publisher Conde McGinley used the secret government to describe how the Jews secretly ruled the Soviet Union. A Jewish network of “secret boards,” often headquartered in local synagogues, controlled the population through a campaign of fear.53 The secret government remained a fixture in the rhetoric of the extreme Right fringe (including neo-Nazis) of the American political landscape. Secret Government conspiracism became the favored position of violently right-wing anti-Christian conspiracists—beginning with the iconic “theoretician” Francis Parker Yockey and including William Pierce, whose 1978 novel The Turner Diaries is nearly a sacred text. It was even applied to explain the trial of O. J. Simpson as part of the Jewish conspiracy to create race wars (their earlier effort—the prosecution of Charles Manson—having failed in this regard).54 Other notable late twentieth-century secret government conspiracists include University of Illinois classics professor Dr. Revilo P. Oliver and Eustace Mullins. Today, in its purest form, the secret government conspiracy survives most clearly in the wealth of books and websites devoted to what G. Edward Griffin terms “the creature from Jekyll Island,” the Federal Reserve System.55