The Nazi politicians of Germany hated many of the same things being demonized in the United States. Crooning, jitterbugging, and jazz music were among the first things banned by the Nazis. German Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen called the genres a “corroding poison [that] threatens to destroy the moral code” and categorized them as “Cultural Bolshevism.”
A comedian named Werner Finck was performing in a Berlin nightclub in 1935 when it was raided by police. Reuters reported, “Werner Finck, one of the best-known vaudeville stars in Germany, has been put in a concentration camp for ‘pulling the leg’ of Nazi leaders … He has been detained since in a secret police prison in Berlin. His 70-year-old mother has been unable to obtain any information regarding his whereabouts.”
Actress Käthe Dorsch learned Finck was incarcerated at the Esterwegen concentration camp. She met directly with Nazi minister Hermann Göring to secure his release, and the comedian was freed in 1936.
“You know, it’s funny,” said Finck. “I walked around the camp and saw the walls, guards with their guns, and the heavy gates. Everybody told me how hard it was to get in—but all I did was speak one sentence.”
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Berlin comedians “society rabble and intellectual snobs.” Goebbels said, “There is plenty of humor in Germany, more than enough. But we do not permit ourselves to be ridiculed … Such jokes make us wretch.”
Five more comedians were banned “for publicly ridiculing Nazi party and state functionaries [and making] Nazi leaders the butts of their jokes.”
“Comedians have no right to be jocular about such things as the Nazi four-year economic plan or Adolf Hitler’s demand for colonies because they are too important and require too much careful thinking on the part of big minds,” said Goebbels. The Nazis banned nearly all comedy—with the exception of anti-Semitic jokes and racist humor.
Warner Bros. pulled their films from Germany after Philip Kaufman, their point man in Berlin, was brutally beaten by Nazis. The other film studios, however, were keen to retain the German market. Joe Kennedy, the former Hollywood studio head and father of John F. Kennedy, said, “Americans should accept Adolf Hitler as a fact of life.”
Films starring Jewish comedians were banned wherever fascism reigned. The Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup was banned in fascist Italy and fascist Spain. It was also banned in Portugal for fear that the surname Marx would trigger sympathy for communism.
American radio preachers spread anti-Semitism during their weekly radio sermons. Reverend Edwin Moll of Wisconsin called comedian Eddie Cantor a “cheap Hebrew wit” because he advocated on behalf of Jewish refugees. Moll received letters of praise from domestic Nazis: “I congratulate you that you have taken up the challenge—too long unanswered—of these cheap, immoral radio comedians among which the Jew Eddie Cantor is the most shining as well as the most harmful example.”
Father Charles Coughlin of Michigan was the most famous of the radio preachers. Initially a supporter of President [Franklin D.] Roosevelt’s social safety net, he turned against him when the president refused to hire him as an advisor. Coughlin began quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory pushed by the Nazis.
Father Coughlin’s rise to prominence was underwritten by millionaire George Richards, the anti-Semitic owner of the Detroit Lions. Richards owned major radio stations including WGAR in Cleveland, KMPC in Los Angeles, and WJR in Detroit. He referred to President Roosevelt as “a Jew-lover who was out to communize the nation” and directed his news bureaus to report negative stories about “that Communist bastard.” He told his station managers, “We have got to get these kike actors out of Hollywood.” Without the support of Richards, there’s no way Father Coughlin could have stayed on the air.
Father Coughlin’s program aired on station WMCA in the New York area, but his anti-Semitic commentary became too much, and his program was pulled. Two thousand Coughlin supporters marched in front of WMCA, claiming the station had declared war on the First Amendment. Many held anti-Semitic signs.
An editorial in the Reading Times noted, “Freedom such as we Americans enjoy is a broad thing with no sharply-defined limits. Perhaps the simplest way to define it is to say that it gives every man the right to speak or act absolutely as he pleases, provided that in doing he does not infringe on the rights of others. That means that freedom is not quite unlimited. Freedom of the press, for instance, does not give an editor the right to commit libel … Political freedom does not give any citizen the right to get down on the floor of Congress and disrupt business by yelling his head off … And so it is with freedom of speech. You may have the right to say what you please; but if you elect to stir up race hatred … you have no business trying to hide behind the freedom of speech clause.”
Comedian Eddie Cantor called Father Coughlin a phony opportunist. “Father Coughlin is a great orator but I doubt he has a sincere atom in his entire system,” said Cantor. “We Jews have nothing to fear from good Christians. We are their brothers and sisters. But I am afraid of people who pretend to be good Christians.”
The Eddie Cantor Show was sponsored by Texaco Oil from 1935 through 1938. The comedian used his platform to speak out against the Nazi threat. At the end of one episode, he pleaded with listeners to support Jewish refugees fleeing Germany. “If you believe in the things that I do, believe in America, love your country,” said Cantor, “then join in the fight for civilization and humanity.” For his statement, Texaco threatened to cancel his program while American Nazis threatened his life.
Cantor’s wife picked up the phone and heard an anonymous voice on the other end: “Tell Cantor to get out of Los Angeles before he is carried out in a pine box.” He hired bodyguards to protect his family. “My home, my wife and my children have been threatened,” said Cantor. “I don’t care if they do get me now. This, the help of fellow Jews, is my life work. If I am gotten, someone else will carry on.”
Broadcasting from Columbia Square, an art deco megaplex at 6121 Sunset Boulevard, Cantor was heckled by fascists. The Los Angeles Times reported, “Jokes about Adolf Hitler told by Eddie Cantor, Jewish radio and film comedian, in an after-program talk in the Columbia Broadcast Studio … led to a fight between members of the audience and two men.”
“We were sitting near the rear of the theater,” said audience member Charles Gollob. “And as this final address started I suggested to my wife that we leave, because we didn’t want to hear any propaganda. As we neared the door, a woman asked us if we didn’t like the program. We explained that we liked it but didn’t want to hear any propaganda against Hitler.” When comedian Bert Gordon overheard the comment, he sucker punched the man, and a shoving match spilled into the street.
Texaco Oil considered Eddie Cantor a problem. After the comic emceed several rallies for the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, Texaco pulled their sponsorship, and the program was canceled. Six months later, Texaco chairman Torkild Rieber resigned after he was exposed for secretly supplying oil to Hitler and providing classified information about American shipping routes to the Nazis.
Not everyone agreed about the extent of the Nazi threat—or cared. Many in the corporate sector considered fascism the lesser of two evils. After all, if Hitler hated communists as American capitalists did—and criminalized their philosophy, as some American capitalists desired—how bad could he be?
NBC and CBS presented a joint broadcast of a Nuremburg rally on September 12, 1938, and Variety gave it a glowing review: “One of the most momentous speeches in modern history was given America first-hand via shortwave from Nuremburg Monday when both the NBC and CBS nets [networks] broadcast Adolf Hitler’s closing address to the annual Nazi congress … A dynamic, spellbinding speaker, the broadcast was most impressive when he worked up the thousands of Nazis in attendance to frenzied cheers, ‘Heil Hitlers’ and ‘Sieg Heils.’”
NBC and CBS had no problem broadcasting a Nuremberg rally, but references to Hitler were forbidden in “song parodies, comedy skits [or] dramatic productions.” The novelty song “Even Hitler Had a Mother” was banned in England because British censors had a firm rule: “No head of state should be ridiculed.”
Criticism of Hitler was cut from March of Time newsreels in Ohio so as not to anger local Germans. Charlie Chaplin’s anti-fascist satire The Great Dictator was banned by Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy, and the police in Chicago. Chicago’s Police Censor Board approved the pro-Hitler film Campaign in Poland, but banned newsreels that mentioned Nazi atrocities. They called the anti-Hitler films Goose Step, Professor Mamlock, and Pastor Hall “purely Jewish and Communist propaganda against Germany.”
Texas congressman Martin Dies, a precursor to Joseph McCarthy, chaired the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938. He condemned the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and declared, “Racial equality forms a vital part of communistic teachings and practices.”
Dies was one of the first politicians to demonize Hollywood for political gain. He was detested by the major stars of the day. “I do not believe in the so-called revelations made by the Dies Investigating Committee,” said Oscar-winning actress Luise Rainer. “I believe their purpose is purely destructive, aimed at discrediting worthwhile peace and anti-fascist organizations, which are so much needed in these worried times.”
“May I express my whole-hearted desire to cooperate to the utmost of my ability with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League,” said conservative filmmaker John Ford. “If this be Communism, count me in.”
Congressman Dies belonged to a political dynasty. His father was elected to Congress in 1909, railing against “the dangers of foreign immigration” and opposing the woman’s right to vote on the grounds it would “thrust the ballot into the hands of millions of ignorant negro women of the South.”
As his anti-Hollywood campaign accelerated, Dies received a congratulatory telegram: “Every true American, and that includes every Klansman, is behind you and your committee in its effort to turn the country back to the honest, freedom-loving, God-fearing American to whom it belongs.”
His committee inspired several pamphleteers to join the fight. A leaflet titled Behind the Scenes in Hollywood railed, “Hollywood has a Russian background. Hollywood has Communistic leanings. This alien influence which the movies have enthroned over America has perverted the character of our people; it has dried up the sources of spiritual strength; it has plagued us with the pagan spirit of materialism and sexuality.”
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The United States entered the war in December 1941 and anti-fascism was suddenly a noble cause rather than a Commie plot. And as fascism ran over Europe, racist humor was objected to in the United States.
Irving Caesar, a songwriter who wrote hit songs for Al Jolson, said, “I am unalterably opposed [to] dialect humor at this particular time. Today, with all too many bigoted, moronic, intolerant, and well-organized forces loose in the world, the similarity of all Americans should be emphasized, not their ethnological differences.”
Many of the best comedians were deployed overseas, either as servicemen or as entertainers. It left a domestic vacuum that was filled by mediocre, lackluster talents. Broadway producer Billy Rose noted an ironic trend of racist comedians filling the vacant spots. “Before the war, most of them didn’t work two weeks in fifty,” said Rose. “During the war, these brassy, not-so-classy comics got their chance.”
Alan Carney of the movie comedy team Brown and Carney was one of them. “I saw comedian Alan Carney’s performance on the Paramount stage last Thursday,” complained an anti-fascist. “Although it was done in jest, it contained some of the same arguments used seriously by the enemies of democracy. It poked fun at some of our basic freedoms … He caricatured the various national minorities in this country … Carney’s anti-Jewish caricature got the biggest laugh. There was even a note of hysteria in the laughter. It could easily have been turned into a Christian Front meeting at that point.”
Fibber McGee and Molly was a popular radio comedy that used Greek, Irish, Black, and Asian stereotypes. When the program was pressured to eliminate them, head writer Don Quinn was angered. He called the campaign “snoopery, meddling, finger pointing and thin-skinned crybabyism.” Quinn felt Americans had gone soft: “We’ve got an epidemic of war-born touchiness; a mass yearning to regulate and restrict … Everybody wants to be a censor [or] maybe it’s just that a few people are getting louder.”
Armed Forces Radio broadcasted several pleas for racial tolerance and they featured Black performers speaking in their own voice, without adopting dialect. On the AFR program A New World A-Comin’, white journalist Lillian Smith criticized racist comedy:
“We are now in the midst of a total World War and changes are already taking place, changes for the better, changes which concern all of us deeply … The next time you hear someone start to tell what he considers to be a great joke, using certain distasteful words concerning colored people … you might urge the individual to stop using those words and, even better, to stop telling that kind of joke. These days, jokes like that are not very funny except to the Germans. It’s a little thing, yes, but the little things do as much as the big things to wear out the nerves of decent, self-respecting Negroes in our community.”
March of Time released an anti-racist newsreel in 1944 called Americans All. “Deep seated in the American citizen,” opened the narration, “is born of the concept that all men are free and equal. But at a time when unity is desperately needed, American is being set against American, systematically and purposefully, by singling out one minority or another as a target for old and reasonless hatred.” Warner Bros. ordered several copies of the film for its chain of theaters, but the message was undercut by the Warner Bros. cartoon that played with it, Angel Puss, based on the slowpoke stereotypes of actor Stepin Fetchit. Angel Puss was heckled in the Black neighborhoods where it played.
Members of the Screen Cartoonists Guild objected when they were asked to animate racist drawings, but they were overruled by superiors. The SCG insisted they held “distinct dissatisfaction with the type of racial caricature material used in the making of animated film cartoons.”
The American Guild of Variety Artists, a union that represented nightclub performers, drafted a resolution in July 1944 that forbade “all clichés and racial caricatures for comedy purposes.”
“Feeling has long been manifest in some quarters that racial disunity is being engendered by frequent cracks in niteries at the expense of minority groups,” reported Variety. “More often than not contempt … is implied via makeup and costume, to the embarrassment of many in the audience.” Variety addressed the issue in a July 1945 editorial: “Comedians persist in being among the worst offenders against racial minorities. This is not because comedians are biased, but because so many are thoughtless of consequences. Anything for a giggle. Moreover, a comedian’s habit of thinking exclusively in terms of gags … often makes him unwilling to admit—when challenged—that much of what used to be innocent fun is now vicious political propaganda … They do not acknowledge the offense, protest good intention, or indicate a disposition to watch more carefully in the future. Instead they counter-attack.”
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Attacks on African Americans increased after the war as bigots targeted Black veterans. Vigilante beatings, police brutality, and lynch murders sought to “make an example” of Black men in uniform. The situation was inflamed by Mississippi governor Theodore Bilbo, who said Black soldiers “had shown a lack of intelligence and initiative and had been a disgrace to the uniform.”
Historian Philip Dray explains, “Even before the soldiers had walked down the gangplanks of the returning troopships, Southern demagogues were warning of the dangers of having allowed 750,000 blacks to engage in a great war for democracy. Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi claimed, ludicrously, that black soldiers in the Occupation Forces in Germany were routinely raping white women.” And when the vocal white supremacist Eugene Talmadge was re-elected governor of Georgia in 1946, the “Grass-Roots Fuhrer” was blamed for the new “outbreak of racist violence” sweeping across the state.
Black celebrities were not immune to racist attack. Bandleader Lionel Hampton invited jazz legend Cab Calloway to be his guest at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Kansas City. But when Calloway tried to walk through the stage door, a white police officer intervened and struck him “several times over the head with a .45 automatic pistol.” Calloway was charged with “interfering with a police officer” and sent to a hospital, where he received eight stitches. Hampton was informed of the fracas during intermission and refused to return to the bandstand. The Pla-Mor issued fifteen hundred refunds.
Journalist Eugene Gordon concluded, “It is obviously not only a frameup but, more seriously, according to accumulating masses of evidence, it is a part of the same general pattern, a studied effort by fascist-minded Americans to shove black fellow Americans back to their prewar status.”
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“We’re Hitler’s boys! We’re going to get Robeson! Lynch Robeson!”
White supremacists chanted in the fairgrounds above Peekskill, New York, while a cross burned on the hill.
Paul Robeson was a well-known African American actor, baritone, Communist sympathizer, and Soviet apologist. He played Othello on the stage in London, starred in Show Boat on Broadway, and sang in a Royal Command Performance at Buckingham Palace.
Hired by a labor union to sing in Peekskill in August 1949, a consortium of American Legionnaires, Nazi sympathizers, and Klan associates conspired with police to run Robeson out of town. Concertgoers who arrived to enjoy a night of music were swarmed by “thousands of local vigilantes” who pelted them with rocks and beat them as they fled.
The Pittsburgh Courier reported, “For five hate-filled hours Sunday, wild-eyed ‘defenders of law and order,’ with teeth bared and wearing the uniforms of New York State Troopers and special deputies, joined the vicious mob of hoodlums disguised as ‘World War II veterans’ in putting on one of the … most shameful spectacles in American history.”
Twelve hundred police officers were sent to restore order but, according to the Courier, “their flying nightsticks wrought as much mayhem in the rioting they helped carry out as did the stones, clubs and bottles hurled by the ‘veterans’ who tried—unsuccessfully—to keep Robeson from singing. The officers openly and brazenly broke the very laws they had sworn to uphold … Everybody who seemed to be a Negro was automatically taken … and received the full weight of the joint attack of the police.”
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While bigoted politicians encouraged vigilantes, the Vatican influenced lay Catholics to endorse Spanish fascism, which was considered preferable to the communist alternative. Stand-up comedian Frank Fay, a devout Catholic, followed the pope’s lead.
Fay belonged to Actors’ Equity, a union representing Broadway performers. When the union criticized the Spanish Catholic Church for endorsing the execution of anti-fascists, Fay considered it a slur on his religion. Fay broke with his union and criticized their stance in the press. As a result, he was censured by Actors’ Equity, and his cause was taken up by fascist sympathizers.
Five months after World War Two, thousands of fascist sympathizers gathered in Madison Square Garden to deliver speeches in support of Franco. A banner hanging from the podium said: “The Friends of Frank Fay.” Showbiz columnist Maurice Zolotow wrote, “Several personalities connected with the Fascist lunatic fringe were the organizers and speakers. Naturally, a terrific controversy was aroused by Fay’s association with these persons.” Speakers included the Klan ally Joseph Scott; an anti-Semitic author named John Geis; and Joseph P. Kamp, a man who used the Klan’s mailing list to distribute anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about FDR.
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Debates about ethnic characterizations intensified in the late 1940s. Mister Kitzel, a hot dog vendor with a Yiddish accent played by Artie Auerbach on The Jack Benny Program, and the malaprop-prone Mrs. Nussbaum played by Minerva Pious on The Fred Allen Show, had been popular for years. But now, in the postwar atmosphere, their purpose was questioned.
“I’m not suggesting Fred Allen get rid of Mrs. Nussbaum or Jack Benny dispense with Rochester and Kitzel,” said Broadway producer Billy Rose. “I am suggesting these two highly talented gentlemen make sure those yocks aren’t knocks. The race crack is the crutch of the stumble bum who is too scared, too stupid or too stingy to lay it on the line for good material.”
The Jack Benny Program had another Jewish character named Schlepperman, played by comic actor Sam Hearn. Most listeners considered it harmless fun—until it was embraced by anti-Semites.
“I was vacationing in the country with my family when we came across a clambake held in the woods by a group from town known to be anti-Semites,” recalled Jewish humorist Sam Levenson. “We were in a rowboat at the time. I pulled up close to shore just to take a peek and found the group laughing like crazy, listening to a loud-speaker that was playing ‘Schlepperman’ records.” Levenson felt it was time for showbiz to evolve.
“The classic vaudeville dialecticians did not tell the truth about my father’s generation,” said Levenson. “If they had presented the whole picture, then perhaps there would have been room for some dialectical kidding, but when every Jew is presented as a pawnbroker or his next of kin, I say good riddance … It is dated at best.”
Billy Rose agreed. “Let me start with the flat statement that, without exception, the fellows peddling race ridicule are inferior comedians and midget talents,” he said. “These jokes not only make me mad—they make me sleepy. I laughed at them 20 years ago. I yawned at them 10 years ago. I winced at them five years ago. Today they nauseate me.”
The Jack Benny Program also featured Eddie Anderson, the country’s highest-paid African American comedian. He was beloved for the role of Rochester, a sarcastic manservant who ridiculed the vanity of his white boss. In real life Anderson owned racehorses, designed his own sports car, and purchased a Los Angeles city block, which he renamed Rochester Circle. Enjoying his fame and wealth, he denied the existence of discrimination.
“I believe those who have shown that they had something to offer have been given an equal opportunity,” said Anderson. “I haven’t seen anything objectionable. I don’t see why certain characters are called stereotypes.”
Lillian Randolph was a radio contemporary of Anderson’s. She was well-known for playing maids on radio sitcoms like The Great Gildersleeve, and she was the only Black woman in attendance at the American Federation of Radio Artists convention in 1947. At the convention, her union proposed a resolution condemning stereotypical roles. Although it was offered in the spirit of civil rights, Randolph objected, feeling that the resolution specifically targeted her livelihood.
The resolution read:
“Whereas, radio is one of the most potent mediums of education, information and entertainment, and should not portray minorities, in general terms, at their worst, but should rather treat all people as individuals, each with his own failings and shortcomings; and should not show members of minorities as stereotypes … Whereas, it is common for AFRA members to be compelled by economic pressures, to perform such stereotyped characters, against their own better judgement, and thus give what amounts to tacit, approval of a bad practice … copies of this resolution [will] be forwarded to Radio Writers’ Guild, Radio Directors’ Guild, and all agencies, stations, networks and producers.”
The membership applauded, but Randolph stood up in protest. She defended herself among the sea of white do-gooders. “I am very proud that I can portray a stereotyped role,” she said. “When you take that away from me, you take away my birthright. We are not doing anything to disgrace anybody. Such things as that should be left alone. There are certain traditions we can’t get rid of. [I will] fight the above resolution to eliminate the stereotyping of Negroes on the radio.”
Randolph was criticized in the Black press. The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “Negro delegates spoke of portraying … stereotype as their birthright—I am embarrassed as a human being and as a Negro. They might well look to other of their birthrights for which such men as Frederick Douglass fought rather than those for which Uncle Tom sang and danced.”