Congress investigates prowar movies,
Lindbergh is accused of anti-Semitism, the neutrality
laws are amended, the Japanese mount a
surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
WHILE ROOSEVELT AND CHURCHILL were at sea, the isolationists opened a new front, launching a congressional investigation into “the groups agitating for war in this country.” Flynn claimed to have discovered “amazing results” in research he had commissioned into the motives of Hollywood studio heads and employees that revealed “a strong undercover movement for war.”1
On August 1, at an America First rally in St. Louis, Nye, who had headed the congressional investigation into the “merchants of death” who profited from the arms trade in World War One, railed against Hollywood for luring America into war. “Who has brought us to the verge of war?” he asked. “At least twenty pictures have been produced in the last years, all designed to drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them,” he said.2
Nye described the Hollywood studios as “the most gigantic engines of propaganda in existence to rouse war fever in America and plunge the Nation to her destruction.” When he started to list the fifteen studio heads, thirteen of whom were Jewish, the America First crowd booed, “Jews!”3 “In each of these companies,” Nye continued, “there are a number of production directors, many of whom have come from Russia, Hungary, Germany and the Balkan countries. . . . The place swarms with refugees. It also swarms with British actors.”4
That day, Champ Clark and Nye cosponsored a Senate motion calling for a “complete investigation of any propaganda disseminated by motion pictures and radio or any other activity of the motion picture industry to influence public sentiment in the direction of participation of the United States in the present European war.” In response, Wheeler, chairman of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, set up a five-man subcommittee under D. Worth Clark, who called for three weeks of hearings starting September 9. The battle of Hollywood had begun. America First wrote to its members:
Write to the members of the committee. Inform them of every instance of “war propaganda” observed in the motion pictures. Give the name of the picture, the producer, the theater at which it was shown, and a brief outline of the propaganda incident. . . . Urge your members also to send copies of their letters to the theater managers. When it becomes evident that it is unprofitable to book war-propaganda pictures the practice will quickly be discontinued.5
The movie industry’s self-imposed censor, Will Hays, tried to contact the president to tell him that Hollywood was merely making “entertainment” and that there was no truth in the suggestion the studios were peddling pro-democracy propaganda. Presidential aide Lowell Mellett,6 who was charged with trying to draw Hollywood into preparing for war, was relieved when a number of prominent movie figures said they welcomed the chance to declare their anti-Nazi beliefs before Congress and Roosevelt realized that good publicity for interventionism was likely to result.
First on the stand was Nye, who prefaced his remarks, literally, with “some of my best friends are Jews”7 before deploring “the injection of anti-Semitism” into the war debate. He said:
I will not consent to [the committee’s investigation] being used to cover the tracks of those who have been pushing our country on the way to war with their propaganda intended to inflame the American mind with hatred for one foreign cause and magnified respect and glorification for another foreign cause, until we shall come to feel that wars elsewhere in the world are really after all our wars.
He thought it telling that “those primarily responsible for the propaganda pictures are born abroad. They came to our land and took citizenship here entertaining violent animosities toward certain causes abroad.”8 He suggested, as had Kennedy and Lindbergh, that Jews in Hollywood were inviting trouble on themselves by making anti-Nazi films and harbored a “persecution complex.” “I wish those who would be its victims would sense the possibilities and afford a conduct that would not lend itself to fanning later on,” he said, before blaming “those of the Jewish faith” for raising “the anti-Semitic issue.”9
He attributed the “growing spirit” of anti-Semitism in America “to the quite natural Jewish sympathy for and support of” intervening in the European war. There was more than a hint of menace when he came to talk of a time when Americans would go in search of scapegoats to “blame for every misery that grows out of this present world madness.” “Who that goat will most likely be we have good reason to recognize from what we are hearing and seeing every day,” he said.
Nye went on to accuse writers sympathetic to Britain of slipping into movies a prowar message that “is not easily eliminated” in the minds of impressionable moviegoers. He listed eight movies he considered anti-Nazi, including Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (United Artists, 1940), the British movie Convoy (Ealing, 1941), I Married a Nazi (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1940) with Joan Bennett, and Walter Pidgeon stalking Hitler with a sniper rifle in Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1941). This and a further thirteen movies cited by the committee became known as “the isolationist blacklist.”10
Citing a 1915 Supreme Court decision, Nye contended that because movies were “a business pure and simple” they could be censored as they did not qualify as “part of the press of this country, and are not protected by the first amendment to our Constitution.”11 Senator Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri told the committee, “Not one word on the side of the argument against war is heard”12 because “the moving picture industry is a monopoly controlled by a half dozen men dominated by hatred, who are determined in order to wreak vengeance on Adolf Hitler, a ferocious beast, to plunge this nation into war.” He condemned Henry Luce’s March of Time newsreel series explaining the war because it “poisons the minds of the American people to go to war.”13
Nye described British movie people in Hollywood as “the British occupation.” One producer in his sights was Alexander Korda,14 who made one of the blacklisted movies, That Hamilton Woman, released in America in April 1941. As if to confirm the isolationists’ suspicions, the story of Nelson and his mistress was screened for Churchill en route to his Atlantic rendezvous with Roosevelt and became the prime minister’s favorite wartime movie. It contained a line written by Walter Reisch,15 spoken by Laurence Olivier, that presented an inescapable contemporary allusion: “Napoleon can never be master of the world until he has smashed us up—and believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world. You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them. Wipe them out!”
Willkie, whom Wheeler had started describing as “the leader of the war party,” was hired for a fee of $100,000 to represent the studios at the hearings. Korda wrote a brief for Willkie on That Hamilton Woman, explaining that everything in the screenplay was based on fact, though the word “despot” had been exchanged for “dictator” to make it more contemporary. “We would not use ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ in a picture,” he explained.16 Korda suggested to Willkie that “the fact that the film shows a great similarity between the Napoleonic era and the present day is only natural”17 and that an American silent picture had already been made about Hamilton, Divine Lady (1929), and there was even a German silent, Lady Hamilton (1921), with Conrad Veidt,18 a refugee from Nazism now living in Hollywood, as Nelson.
Willkie was forthright about Hollywood’s anti-Nazi bias. “The motion picture industry and its executives are opposed to the Hitler regime,” which in turn represented the views of the “great overwhelming majority of the people of our country,” he wrote in a submission to the committee.19 He denied there was a conspiracy between the studios and foreign powers to denigrate Nazism. He ridiculed the committee’s failure to come up with any proposals, let alone legislation, to oblige Hollywood to be evenhanded. He asked the committee to allow him to call German witnesses of Nazi oppression to show that Hollywood’s portrayal of life under Hitler was accurate. The committee declined.
Willkie called upon Harry M. Warner, president of Warner Brothers, whom Nye had accused of producing more prowar propaganda movies than any other studio boss. Warner’s prided itself on using contemporary themes as backgrounds for its gritty dramas and eagerly pursued the burgeoning audience for anti-Nazi movies. Warner told the committee:
I am opposed to Nazi-ism. I abhor and detest every principle and practice of the Nazi movement. To me, Nazi-ism typifies the very opposite of the kind of life every decent man, woman, and child wants to live. I believe Nazi-ism is a world revolution whose ultimate objective is to destroy our democracy, wipe out all religion, and enslave our people—just as Germany has destroyed and enslaved Poland, Belgium, Holland and France. I am ready to give myself and all my personal resources to aid in the defeat of the Nazi menace to the American people.
“If Warner Bros. had produced no pictures concerning the Nazi movement, our public would have had good reason to criticize,” he said. “Our accusers desire that we change our policy of picturing accurately world affairs and the national defense program. This Warner Bros. will never do.” He said he had backed the president’s foreign policy since war was declared in 1939 and that “the freedom which this country fought England to obtain, we may have to fight with England to retain. . . . The President knows the world situation and our country’s problems better than any other man. I would follow his recommendation concerning a declaration of war.”
Next on the stand was Darryl F. Zanuck,20 in charge of production at Twentieth Century–Fox.
In the time of acute national peril, I feel that it is the duty of every American to give his complete cooperation and support to our President and our Congress to do everything to defeat Hitler and preserve America. If this course of necessity leads to war, I want to follow my President along that course.
Zanuck reminded the committee that Hollywood had promoted the American way of life around the world. “They sold it so strongly that when dictators took over Italy and Germany, what did Hitler and his flunky, Mussolini, do? The first thing they did was to ban our pictures.” His words were met with applause.
When it was Flynn’s turn to testify, he offered a paradox: “Sometimes the worst kind of propaganda is propaganda which is particularly true.” He accused the movie business of establishing a monopoly in production, distribution, and exhibition that should be broken up. Flynn, who was never the most charismatic or eloquent of speakers despite his chosen profession, believed the odds were stacked against isolationists like him. “When I am talking in a hall to two or three thousand people, there is some fellow who practically has just arrived here from Europe a few months ago who is talking to 5,000,000 over the radio.” Anyone who cornered the market in movies and radio shows “has got the other side licked almost before they start.” He threatened a change in the law. “There is censorship for you gentlemen to worry about,” he said.21
From the committee bench, D. Worth Clark extended the monopoly argument beyond movies to the “small oligarchy” that owned the media. He complained, “The man who owns the radio machine can cut off from discussion those who disagree with him by the simple expedient of saying ‘No.’ And who is this man? . . . He is just a businessman who by virtue of his acquisitive talents has gotten possession of this little microphone.”
The small group of men who owned and ran the movie business—Paramount, Loew’s, RKO, Warner’s, Twentieth Century–Fox, Universal, and United Artists—“have opened those 17,000 theaters to the idea of war, to the glorification of war, to the glorification of England’s imperialism, to the hatred of the people of Germany and now of France, to the hatred of those in America who disagree with them.” Going to the movie theater was little more than attending “daily and nightly mass meetings for war,” he said, while “not one word on the side of the argument against war is heard.”22
As time went on, the hearings turned to comedy. Nye admitted that he had not seen all the films he listed as prowar and couldn’t remember much about those he had. Asked by Senator Ernest McFarland whether he had seen Convoy, Nye replied, “I think I did.” Pressed on why he objected to the movie, Nye said, “I am at a loss to call to mind any particular feature about it that led me to draw the conclusion which I have drawn.” He had seen Confessions of a Nazi Spy and I Married a Nazi, but “for the life of me I could not tell you which was which.” He admitted that “the representations of others have played a large part in the conclusions that I have drawn.”23
Nye had seen Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and thought it a “portrayal by a great artist, not a citizen of our country,” but felt it “could not do other than build within the heart and mind of those who watched it something of a hatred, detestation of conditions and of leadership that existed abroad.” Willkie asked Nye whether, if Hollywood was expected to portray both sides evenhandedly, he meant that “since Chaplin made a laughable caricature of Hitler, the industry should be forced to employ Charles Laughton to do the same on Winston Churchill?”24
By the time Champ Clark admitted he was “so disgusted” with Hollywood that he “very seldom attend[ed] a motion picture show” and therefore had seen none of the eight films named, the subcommittee had become a laughingstock. After three weeks of hearings, the isolationists on the committee had merely allowed a string of high-profile show people to draw attention to the merits of the anti-Nazi cause.
The interventionist group Fight for Freedom called the hearings “the most barefaced attempt at censorship and racial persecution which has ever been tried in this country.”25 The New York Herald Tribune was alarmed by “the note of hysteria which every day becomes more apparent.”26 The Nation condemned the committee’s work, saying, “The American people are expected to believe, after all that has happened in the past decade, that the Nazi menace is a figment of the Jewish imagination.”27
Everyone agreed that Willkie, with his goading and prodding of inept, ill-prepared witnesses like Nye, had earned his generous fee. The hearings were adjourned on September 26, never to be resumed.28 The committee never issued a report.
Then came a speech by Lindbergh on September 11 in the Coliseum, Des Moines, Iowa. The circumstances were awkward from the start. A week earlier, the US Navy destroyer the Greer had been sunk by a German U-boat and Roosevelt’s mother, Sara, died three days later, obliging the president to put off a scheduled fireside chat about the naval incident until September 11, the date of Lindbergh’s address. Such was the general appetite on both sides to hear the president that the Des Moines chapter of America First decided to relay the broadcast to the hall before calling Lindbergh and the other speakers.
The president railed against Hitler’s “piracy legally and morally.” “It is the Nazi design to abolish the freedom of the seas, and to acquire absolute control and domination of these seas for themselves,” he said. Alluding to Lindbergh and the America Firsters, the president condemned “Hitler’s advance guards—not only his avowed agents but also his dupes among us.” He said it was time Americans stopped being “deluded by the romantic notion that the Americas can go on living happily and peacefully in a Nazi-dominated world.” There should be “no tender whisperings of appeasers that Hitler is not interested in the Western Hemisphere, no soporific lullabies that a wide ocean protects us from him.” It was not an act of war to defend oneself, he declared, before announcing that “if German or Italian vessels of war enter the waters, the protection of which is necessary for American defense, they do so at their own peril.”29 Belatedly, Americans were being told that US Navy captains had in effect been put under standing orders to shoot on sight.
Lindbergh felt that having to follow the president’s address “gave us about as bad a setting as we could have had for our meeting.” He took to the stage amid boos and jeering, “the most unfriendly crowd of any meeting to date, by far.” His troubles were magnified when the sound system worked intermittently for the first few minutes. But it was the content of his message that caused the most consternation.
“I can understand why the Jewish people wish to overthrow the Nazis,” he said. “The persecution they have suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race.” But, “though I sympathize with the Jew,” he said, “let me add a word of warning. No person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us—and for them.”
It was a veiled threat that if American Jews persisted in encouraging the nation toward war, they would come to pay a heavy price. Lindbergh continued:
Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. . . . A few far-sighted Jewish people realize [that wartime spells an end to tolerance] and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government. . . . We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours.30
Lindbergh was aware of the controversy he was courting. In an early draft of the speech he had written, “I realize that in speaking this frankly I am entering in where angels fear to tread. I realize that tomorrow morning’s headlines will say ‘Lindbergh attacks Jews.’ The ugly cry of anti-Semitism will be eagerly joyfully pounded upon and waved about my name.”31 Although he chose to omit those words from the speech he delivered, it would not have made any difference. “It seems that almost anything can be discussed today in America except the Jewish problem,” he complained to his diary.32
As predicted, Lindbergh was bombarded with accusations of anti-Semitism. As the historian Wayne Cole put it, “They came from Jews, but also from Protestants and Catholics. They came from interventionists, but also from noninterventionists. They came from Democrats, but also from Republicans and Communists. They came from high government leaders, but also from grassroots America.”33
The New York Herald Tribune condemned Lindbergh for raising a subject that “all good Americans pray might be confined to the pages of the [Nazi Party daily paper] Völkischer Beobachter and the addresses of Adolf Hitler.”34 Lindbergh protested his innocence of all charges, though he confessed to his diary, “The power of our opposition is great. . . . Their ranks include the American government, the British government, the Jews, and the major portion of the press, radio, and motion picture facilities.” Anne Lindbergh, who had tried to rewrite her husband’s speech to soften its racial message, was “very disturbed” and was enduring a “profound feeling of grief”35 that he had become “the symbol of anti-Semitism in this country & looked to as the leader of it.”36
Lindbergh’s remarks went too far for a number of leading isolationists. While Webster told him that the “majority” of America First members “were in accord” with what he said, Flynn said “it was inadvisable to mention the Jewish problem,”37 though he did not question the truth of what Lindbergh had said. Hoover told Lindbergh that the address was “a mistake.”38 Wood, under pressure from the Sears, Roebuck board for spending too much time campaigning, called a meeting in Chicago and proposed “adjourning” the America First committee until the following year’s congressional elections, on the grounds that “since the President had already involved us seriously in war, the committee saw nothing gained by continuing its activities.”39 Lindbergh offered to issue a statement that the views expressed in Des Moines were his own and not those of the committee.
Lindbergh was becoming increasingly paranoid and his accusations more wild. The next month, he delivered a broadcast address from Fort Wayne, Indiana, saying he feared that that might be his last broadcast as he fully expected to be stopped from speaking in future. “Pressure,” “smear campaigns,” and “censorship” were being used to silence non-interventionists, he claimed, and “Congress, like the Reichstag, is not consulted.”
The president was “drawing more and more dictatorial powers into his own hands,” he said, and only elections could put a stop to his power grab. “But what if there are no elections next year?” he asked. “Such a condition may not be many steps ahead on the road our President is taking us.”40 He was taken to task by the New York Times for suggesting that “the President is planning a coup d’état.” Such accusations “can only serve one purpose—to bring aid and comfort to the enemies of democracy.”41
Lindbergh was becoming too hot for radio networks to handle. Later in October, when he spoke again at Madison Square Garden to a crowd of 20,000 inside and 30,000 out, alongside Wheeler, Flynn, John Cudahy, and others, all three major networks agreed to broadcast only part of Wheeler’s speech and none of Lindbergh’s. “We know of no reason why Lindbergh should have a nationwide network every time he speaks,” said a CBS spokesman. “We do not intend to provide one just because tactics of hullabaloo and threats are used against us.”
A former magistrate, Joseph Goldstein, threatened to arrest any speaker who made slurring remarks against Jews if the police did not do so. And if the police did not do so, he would also prefer charges against the mayor and the police commissioner. Outside in the street, Fight for Freedom volunteers shouted, “Read the facts about America’s Number One Nazi!” and handed out envelopes containing a pamphlet linking Lindbergh to Hitler.
Lindbergh renewed his assault upon the administration. “They preach about preserving democracy and freedom abroad, while they practice dictatorship and subterfuge at home,” he said. “In spite of the opposition of the American people, we have been led step by step to war, until today we are actually engaged in undeclared naval warfare.” Wheeler said that if the Neutrality Act made it clear that America wanted to avoid becoming entangled in war, the repeal of the act “makes it equally clear that we seek foreign entanglements, that we will become involved in war.”42
The New York Times commented, “We cannot find a word or a line in Mr. Lindbergh’s speech last night that will not be cheered to the echo by the gangsters in Berlin,” and pondered why “an American citizen, richly honored by his countrymen, loving his country and its institutions, could make a carefully prepared speech on this subject and include in it not even a whisper of reproach for Nazi perfidy, Nazi blasphemy, Nazi insolence and Nazi cruelty.”43
The rush to war overwhelmed the isolationists in Congress and, on November 7, a revision of the Neutrality Act was passed by fifty votes to thirty-seven in the Senate, and the next week agreed by 212 to 194 in the House. The following day, America First discussed proposing a “peace plan” to bring an end to the European war and prevent a war with Japan, though Lindbergh was against such an idea as “we would find ourselves in the position of guaranteeing a peace that could not last.”44 Lindbergh proposed that America First should stand as an independent “non-partisan” group in the congressional elections of 1942, and the group considered campaigning for candidates who opposed American entry into the war.
At the start of November, rumors began circulating that Japan was about to launch a major invasion of another nation, prompting Churchill to ask Roosevelt to “prevent a melancholy extension of the war” by threatening that any further Japanese aggression would lead to America declaring war. The president replied that he was limited by the Constitution and could not deliver such an ultimatum. He told Halifax that “his perpetual problem was to steer a course between the two factors represented by: (1) The wish of 70 per cent of Americans to keep out of war; (2) The wish of 70 per cent of Americans to do everything to break Hitler, even if it means war,”45 and urged Churchill to threaten war if Japan invaded Siam (Thailand), a threat which would be “whole-heartedly supported by the United States,” though he failed to mention the exact nature of that support. On December 2, Churchill told the cabinet that British policy “is not to take forward action in advance of the United States.”
On December 7, Roosevelt agreed with Churchill that any attempt by Japan to invade Siam or British and Dutch possessions would be considered “a hostile act”46 against America. Churchill told his military chief in the Middle East, Claude Auchinleck,47 that the president’s commitment was “a great relief as I had long dreaded being at war with Japan without or before the United States.” The same day, Churchill sent a message to the Siamese premier. “There is a possibility of imminent Japanese invasion of your country,” he wrote. “If you are attacked, defend yourself. The preservation of the full independence and sovereignty of Siam is a British interest and we shall regard an attack on you as an attack on ourselves.”48
The same evening, Churchill was dining at Chequers with Averell Harriman and Kennedy’s successor as ambassador in London, John G. Winant.49 Listening to the BBC news, Churchill heard an early report that spoke of “an attack by Japanese on American shipping at Hawaii.” As the facts became clearer, it emerged that Japanese warplanes had mounted a surprise attack lasting about ninety minutes on American warships at anchor in Pearl Harbor. Four battleships were sunk and 2,000 servicemen killed. Churchill called Roosevelt. “Mr. President,” he asked, “what’s this about Japan?” “It’s quite true,” replied the president. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”50
Still Roosevelt offered conflicting signals about his true wishes. Lunching with Hopkins that day, as the news dribbled in about the attack, Roosevelt “discussed at length his efforts to keep the country out of the war and his earnest desire to complete his administration without war, but that if this action of Japan’s were true it would take the matter entirely out of his hands, because the Japanese had made the decision for him.”51 It was a sure sign that the isolationists were left with nowhere to turn. War had arrived.
The sudden attack on American soil overshadowed the rest of the news. At the same time as Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded Siam and the Dutch East Indies and tried to land forces in British Malaya. On the evening of December 8, Congress voted to declare war against Japan. The Senate approved the declaration of war all but unanimously, with a single holdout: Jeannette Rankin, Republican from Montana.
As soon as the vote was in, Roosevelt cabled Churchill: “Today all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire, and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk.”52