A Renegade History of the United States Page 33

  The monumentalist, neoclassical style was also favored by architects hired by the Roosevelt administration to design the buildings that came to define modern Washington, including the Federal Triangle, the National Gallery of Art, the National Archives, the Supreme Court Building, the Pentagon, the Department of Justice Building, and the Jefferson Memorial. The architectural historian Thomas S. Hines has noticed that this was a transatlantic phenomenon: Roosevelt’s “architectural tastes were grandly conservative, not far removed from those of his contemporaries, the dictators of Italy and Germany.” Particularly striking were the similarities between the designs of Albert Speer and Roosevelt’s favorite architect, James Russell Pope. Hines suggests that historians begin to make “overt comparisons, formally and culturally, of the architecture of Pope and the frequently similar work of the German architect Albert Speer.” Another architectural historian, John W. Reps, has noted the “supreme irony” that an architectural style “originally conceived to magnify the glories of despotic kings and emperors came to be applied as a national symbol of a country whose philosophical basis was so firmly rooted in democratic equality.”

  Certainly, there was one obvious difference between the New Deal and Nazism, which is that in the United States there was never a mass murder of Jews—or of gypsies, the disabled, communists, or homosexuals—in the name of “racial purity.” There was, however, a different form of racial purification attempted in the U.S., one that was carried out by Jews against themselves.

  Before the New Deal, Jewish heroes filled the eyes of moviegoers. Jewish and Gentile filmmakers told stories set in eastern European shtetls and the Lower East Side. American audiences saw rabbis, cantors, street peddlers, and Yiddish-speaking heroes. Unambiguously Jewish movie stars, such as Vera Gordon, Molly Picon, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, and Al Jolson played unambiguously Jewish characters named Cohen, Goldberg, Rubens, Feinbaum, and Rabinowitz. Even the famous WASP (and racist) director D. W. Griffith made a sentimental film about a young seamstress in the Lower East Side who struggles with the death of her mother. Remarkably, the heyday of Jews in films took place during the 1920s, which was also the heyday of American anti-Semitism, when more than four million people joined the Ku Klux Klan, books and newspapers warning of “the international Jew” sold by the millions, and immigration was cut off from eastern Europe. One group of Jewish filmmakers in Philadelphia responded by deliberately producing even more films on “the every-day life of the Jew.” More remarkably, in the midst of a viciously anti-Semitic culture, when Jews were widely blamed for the Depression, some of the most successful Hollywood films celebrated Jewish–Gentile intermarriage. Following the premise of the enormously successful Abie’s Irish Rose (1928), The Cohens and Kellys series—a string of seven comedies made by Universal Pictures during the early Depression—told the story of a marriage between a Jewish woman and an Irish-Catholic man.

  By the time of the New Deal, Jews had taken over much of the American film industry. Seven of the eight major Hollywood studios during the 1930s were owned wholly by immigrant Jews. A 1936 study found that 62 percent of studio employees engaged in production were Jewish. But these Jews had a different mission than their predecessors. They played golf and polo. They married Gentile women. Louis Mayer, the head of MGM, claimed that he had lost his birth records while immigrating from Russia and took July 4 as his birthday. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures delighted in telling “Jew jokes,” and when asked to contribute to a Jewish relief fund, yelled, “Relief for the Jews! How about relief from the Jews?” All the Hollywood moguls threw lavish Christmas parties, rarely if ever attended synagogue, and made a point of working on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. They mocked Kosher dietary rules.

  Film historian Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, has described the anti-Semitism of Hollywood Jews in the 1930s in terms of a cultural holocaust: “Above all things, they wanted to be regarded as Americans, not Jews; they wanted to reinvent themselves here as new men.” Assimilation among immigrants was nothing new, “but something drove the young Hollywood Jews to a ferocious, even pathological, embrace of America. Something drove them to deny whatever they had been before settling here.” The men who controlled Hollywood “embarked on an assimilation so ruthless and complete that they cut their lives to the pattern of American respectability as they interpreted it.” They “launched a war against their own pasts.”

  Hollywood films of the New Deal era were an exercise in what historian Gary Gerstle calls “ethnic erasure.” Jews were removed from American culture. “The dominant tendency of the thirties is the repression of ethnic and cultural differences and the representation of the average American—the final result of the great ‘melting pot,’” writes film historian Patricia Erens, author of The Jew in American Cinema. “By ‘average’ Hollywood meant White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Thus for most of the thirties, the Jew as a recognizable character practically disappears from the screen.” The Hays Office disallowed the use of the words Jew or Jewish and any reference to religious practices. In films set in Europe, Jews were designated as “non-Aryan,” a Nazi term. Studio executives insisted that Jewish actors “Americanize” their names, so Emanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson, Betty Perske became Lauren Bacall, David Kaminsky became Danny Kaye, Bernard Schwartz became Tony Curtis, and Issur Danielovitch Demsky became the square-jawed, all-American Kirk Douglas. Stories taken from the Yiddish theater were translated into films with Gentile characters and settings far from the ghetto. Even movies about famous episodes of antiSemitism, like They Won’t Forget (1937), about the Leo Frank case, and The Life of Emile Zola (1937), about the Dreyfus affair, made the victims into Gentiles.

  Racial purity was a prominent theme in New Deal culture. “Eugenics,” a doctrine organized around the belief that the human race can and should be perfected by encouraging breeding among superior people and preventing breeding among the inferior, is commonly associated with the Nazi regime. However, Nazis learned much of what they knew about eugenics from Americans. And while the Roosevelt administration never officially promoted eugenics as the Nazis did, its forerunners introduced the doctrine, and the New Deal was born during the heyday of American eugenics. By the mid-1930s, forty-one states prohibited marriage among the “feebleminded” and insane, and thirty allowed eugenic sterilization. In Alabama, those considered by the state to be “feebleminded” were involuntarily sterilized. In California, the law also allowed for “habitual criminals,” “idiots,” and “mental defectives” to be forced to have the surgery. Connecticut committed “those with inherited tendency to crime” to be sterilized. Laws in fourteen states applied to epileptics. “Moral degenerates” and “sexual perverts” were sterilized in North Dakota, Oregon, and Washington; “morally degenerate persons” in Idaho and Iowa. In Wisconsin, the law applied to “criminal persons.”

  According to the historian Steven Selden, author of Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America, “Eugenic ideology was deeply embedded in American popular culture during the 1920s and 1930s.” Films such as The Black Stork promoted the sterilization of “unfit” women. Many ministers taught their congregations that genetically superior people should be careful to avoid marrying someone from an inferior gene pool. State fairs across the country featured “Fitter Families” exhibits that offered free eugenic evaluations. Those who received low scores were warned that they might be among those Americans who were “born to be a burden on the rest.” High scorers were given medals proclaiming, “Yea, I Have a Goodly Heritage.” In the 1930s, most high school science textbooks included lessons on eugenics, including the concept of “fit” and “unfit” races and the need to sterilize the unfit to preserve American culture. Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and Brown were among hundreds of colleges and universities that offered courses on eugenics.

  American eugenics and the New Deal were both progeny of the progressives. A large number of progressives who established many of
the principles and policies that were later developed by the Roosevelt administration—including Margaret Sanger, David Starr Jordan, Robert Latham Owen, William Allen Wilson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Robert Latou Dickinson, Katherine Bement Davis, Virginia Gildersleeve, and Rexford Tugwell’s mentors, Simon Patten and Scott Nearing—were deeply involved with the eugenics movement. They saw in it a means to extend their mission of social planning into the bedroom and the maternity ward, to regulate the population at its genesis. Paul Popenoe, the most influential American eugenicist, was a leader in the progressive movement for “social hygiene.” During World War I, Popenoe served as a captain in the U.S. Army Sanitary Corps, in charge of controlling liquor and vice in army camps—a major progressive cause. After the war, Popenoe’s research and advocacy helped make California the leader in eugenic sterilizations. His book Sterilization for Human Betterment was one of the first American books translated into German by the Nazi government, and it was widely cited by Hitler’s “racial hygiene” theorists to justify the Nazis’ own sterilization programs. In 1934 Popenoe praised Hitler for establishing “his hopes of biological regeneration solidly on the application of biological principles of human society.” Other American eugenicists expressed envy for their more successful German colleagues, as did Dr. Joseph S. DeJarnette, director of Western State Hospital in Virginia, in 1938:

  Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938 in the past 20 years… . The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the US should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum.

  However, DeJarnette could take some solace in the fact that more sterilizations took place during the New Deal than at any other time in American history. The leading historian of the American eugenics movement, Daniel Kevles, found that “through the nineteen-twenties, the national sterilization rate had annually run between two and four per hundred thousand” in the American population. “In the mid-thirties the rate shot up to fifteen and climbed to twenty by the end of the decade… . Moreover, from 1932 to 1941, sterilization was actually practiced—as distinct from merely legislated—in a greater number of states than before.”

  In 1940 the Pioneer Fund, a leading eugenicist organization, embarked on an experiment with the help of Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Harry H. Woodring, to find a way to improve the human race. The group offered $4,000, the equivalent of a middle-class salary, for the education of additional children born to U.S. Air Corps officers who already had at least three offspring—a group they considered to be genetically superior. The air corps (the precursor to the air force) promoted the program among its officers and provided the Pioneer Fund with extensive personnel records, including information on parentage, race, and religion. Twelve children received scholarships from the fund before the war ended the experiment.

  The Second World War appeared to many contemporary observers, and still appears to many historians, as proof of a fundamental antagonism between fascism and the American way of life. Many have seen the war as evidence that, in particular, the New Deal–liberal way of life was hostile to fascism. After all, while many Republicans and other enemies of the New Deal were opposed to fighting fascism abroad, Roosevelt led the nation to war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. More than four hundred thousand Americans died in the fight, and the Roosevelt administration made sure to not just defeat the fascist regimes but to obliterate them. But the evidence of their similarities suggests that the New Deal and fascism went to war not over ideas or values or a way of life. Rather, it seems, the war was a struggle between brothers for control of the world family.

  12

  JUST HOW POPULAR WAS WORLD WAR II?

  It might have been “the Greatest Generation,” as the television journalist and author Tom Brokaw calls the cohort of Americans who lived through the era of World War II, but it was far less willing to go along with the war effort than we are led to believe. Moreover, the resistance to the national mobilization in the midst of what many believe to be the most patriotic era in American history helped give flower to stunningly renegade cultures.

  Unlike in many other wars, when majorities of able-bodied men readily volunteered to fight for a cause, and despite loud and sustained calls by government officials for American men to enlist in the military, most Americans during World War II were less than eager to make the ultimate sacrifice of citizenship when called upon to do so. Some two-thirds of the American soldiers who fought in the war did not volunteer; they were drafted, which alone indicates that the desire of Americans to fight was limited.

  Even before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration, hopefully anticipating U.S. entry into either the war in Europe or a new war to stop the advance of Japan across the Pacific—yet pessimistic about the will of Americans to fight—urged Congress in 1940 to pass the nation’s first peacetime draft legislation. The Selective Training and Service Act, signed into law by Roosevelt in September 1940, required that men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five register with local draft boards. The military draft was hailed by the president as having been since the Revolution the “keystone in the arch of our national defense.” Yet in the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it became clear that not enough men were volunteering to win the war and that many of those who enlisted voluntarily were unfit to fight. So on December 5, 1942, Roosevelt issued an executive order ending voluntary enlistments. From then through the war, the War Manpower Commission oversaw the involuntary induction of an average of two hundred thousand men per month. Some ten million American men were forced to fight in “the Good War.” According to the historian Forrest C. Pogue, “it was the Selective Service Act of 1940 … that made possible the huge United States Army and Air Force that fought World War II.”

  The government also made it clear that those who refused to fight would be punished. Some six thousand people who either refused to serve in the military after being drafted or who did not register for the draft were punished with prison time or forced labor. And in 1940, Congress passed the Smith Act, which made it illegal to say or write anything that would encourage refusal of duty in the armed forces, even in peacetime.

  Several books have celebrated the African American contributions to the armed services during World War II, but they ignore the fact that African Americans comprised 35 percent of the nation’s delinquent draft registrants and more than 18 percent of those imprisoned for draft evasion. This was despite the strenuous efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, and black newspapers to promote what they called the “Double-Victory” or “Double-V” campaign, meaning that the fight against the Axis was just as important as the fight against racism in America.

  There is ample evidence to show that African Americans did not feel that it was their war—the overwhelming majority of the seven hundred thousand African Americans who served in the military during the war were drafted. There is also substantial anecdotal evidence that during the war, large numbers of black men feigned illness or insanity to evade the draft. In the cities, where drugs were widely available, many black men obtained 4-F status (“physically unfit”) by ingesting amphetamines that “made your heart sound defective” before taking their medical inspections at induction centers. A young Malcolm X convinced his local draft board that he was psychologically and politically unfit for service:

  In those days only three things in the world scared me: jail, a job, and the Army. I had about ten days before I was to show up at the induction center. I went right to work. The Army Intelligence soldiers, those black spies in civilian clothes, hung around in Harlem with their ears open for the white man downtown. I knew exactly where to start dropping the word. I started noising around that I was frantic to join … the Japanese Army. When I sensed that I had the ears of the spies, I would talk and act high and crazy… . The d
ay I went down there, I costumed like an actor. With my wild zoot suit I wore the yellow knob-toe shoes, and I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk. I went in, skipping and tipping, and I thrust my tattered Greetings at that reception desk’s white soldier—“Crazy-o, daddy-o, get me moving. I can’t wait to get in that brown”—very likely that soldier hasn’t recovered from me yet… . The room had fallen vacuum-quiet, with me running my mouth a mile a minute, talking nothing but slang… . Pretty soon, stripped to my shorts, I was making my eager-to-join comments in the medical examination rooms—and everybody in the white coats that I saw had 4-F in his eyes… . One of the white coats accompanied me around a turning hallway: I knew we were on the way to a head-shrinker—the Army psychiatrist… . I must say this for that psychiatrist. He tried to be objective and professional in his manner. He sat there and doodled with his blue pencil on a tablet, listening to me spiel to him for three or four minutes before he got a word in… . Suddenly, I sprang up and peeped under both doors, the one I’d entered and another that probably was a closet. And then I bent and whispered fast in his ear. ‘Daddy-o, now you and me, we’re from up North here, so don’t you tell nobody… . I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!’ That psychiatrist’s blue pencil dropped, and his professional manner fell off in all directions. He stared at me as if I were a snake’s egg hatching, fumbling for his red pencil. I knew I had him. I was going back out past Miss First when he said, “That will be all.” A 4-F card came to me in the mail, and I never heard from the Army anymore, and never bothered to ask why I was rejected.