Fear Itself (43 page)

I.

D
URING THE
run-up to American participation in World War II, the era’s most influential mass pressure group, the America First Committee (AFC), argued that only by keeping out of the European war could the United States secure its democracy. The AFC’s policies curiously drew support from across the political spectrum, notably from Norman Thomas and Sinclair Lewis on the Left, and Herbert Hoover and Charles Lindbergh on the Right.
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Though rooted primarily in the Midwest, the organization sought to mobilize all the country’s regions, including the South, where it chartered chapters and clubs in Birmingham and Norfolk, Atlanta and Houston, Jackson and New Orleans.

Southern organizing proved the AFC’s most conspicuous failure. Its members were almost exclusively drawn from the fringes of southern politics, mainly northern newcomers, some Republicans, and “a sprinkling of anti-Semites [and] German-Americans.” In all, “in no section of the nation did the America First Committee encounter such uninterrupted, vehement, and effective opposition as it met in the South. . . . [T]he Committee had lost the foreign-policy debate in that section long before Pearl Harbor.”
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Commenting on the fact that southern sentiment was not only “overwhelmingly in favor of the fullest and most rapid rearmament program possible,” Virginius Dabney, the editor of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch,
observed late in 1940 that “it also is in favor of committing mayhem upon anyone who desires Uncle Sam to offer appeasement to Hitler and Mussolini.”
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The South’s rejection of isolation must have seemed inexplicable to the leaders of the Third Reich, who were fascinated by America’s South and who highlighted how much the new Germany shared with the Jim Crow system.
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It certainly represented a failure of Nazi diplomatic policy. During the regime’s first seven years, Berlin had actively sought friends and supporters below the Mason-Dixon Line. Offering expressions of racial solidarity to the most racially pure part of white America, and noting the obvious affinities between Germany’s “progressive” racial laws and those in the United States, Nazi officials, newspapers, and journals persistently celebrated southern racism. From time to time, they urged the United States to repeal the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which promised equal protection of the laws and the right to vote for all Americans, and urged Americans to push blacks out of the country.

Hitler denigrated blacks, admired American racism, and regretted the South’s defeat in 1865, especially how “the beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.”
²⁶
He complained when the French stationed African troops in the Rhineland, warned about racial mixing, and denounced “negrified music.” His main direct sources of information about the South were a series of odd and skewed reports that were provided by a German resident of Florida who wrote about putative Jewish plans to mobilize American blacks to destroy the white race. Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler was fascinated in 1937 by
Vom Winde verweht,
the German edition of
Gone with the Wind
.
²⁷
This melodramatic epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction was a best-seller. The film, not surprisingly, proved a big hit.
²⁸
Nervous as he awaited the dawn invasion of the USSR, a move that would start Operation Barbarossa, Joseph Goebbels spent the hours after midnight on June 22, 1941, watching a prerelease German version with a group of invited friends, perhaps not aware that one of the film’s stars, Leslie Howard, was a British Jew.
²⁹

When Americans complained about Nazi anti-Semitism, party officials rejoined by citing southern racial practices, claiming a kinship. The
Völkischer Beobachter,
the oldest Nazi Party newspaper, routinely disparaged Africans and African-Americans. Like much of the German press, it frequently printed antiblack cartoons, reminded its readers that southern public accommodations were segregated, and delighted in reporting how blacks, like German Jews, could not sleep in Pullman cars and could not exercise the right to vote. Lynching was a favorite subject.
Neues Volk
celebrated southern lynching for protecting white women from unrestrained black desire. The
Völkischer Beobachter
published many graphic stories that were intended to support lynching as a tool to shield white sexual purity. “The SS journal
Schwarze Korps
exclaimed that if lynching occurred in Germany as it did in the American South, the whole world would complain loudly.”

German racial practices, of course, were primarily directed at Jews, but they also targeted blacks. When the Nazi Party began mobilizing mass support in the mid-1920s,
Der Weltkampf,
its ideological journal, reprinted speeches by the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan about mongrelization. Alfred Rosenberg, the editor, announced that a new Reich would forbid any admission to Germany by “niggers.” Three years before securing national power, Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi minister of the interior in Thuringia, prohibited jazz performances as part of a larger ban on Negro culture. With national power, the new regime limited the participation of blacks in German life, applied the 1935 Nuremberg Laws to them, and, in 1937, sterilized mixed-race children in the Rhineland who had African soldier fathers.

Late in the winter of 1941, Hans Habe, a prisoner of war, reported on the differential treatment that African troops, both Arab and black, had been experiencing after falling into German hands. Of the two million captured French, black Africans accounted for some 400,000. “The Negroes were mistreated even during their removal—on foot, of course—to their places of internment. . . . The heat was unbearable, and we would have collapsed with fatigue without water. The German guards had apparently received instructions to bar the Negroes from this solace. Though we were allowed to drink in every village we passed, the Negroes were prodded on with bared bayonets.” In the camps, these soldiers were isolated, with their barracks cut off, surrounded, as they were, by barbed wire. These quarters were especially overcrowded, food rations were lower, and medical care was not provided to those who fell ill.
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As his camp’s interpreter, Habe attended a series of training “courses that were organized to acquaint German soldiers and non-commissioned officers with the ‘tasks of Germany as a colonial empire.’ The whole curriculum was based on racial theories; Negroes from our camp were often taken to the lecture hall and exhibited as ‘specimens.’” Organized by the General Staff in German-held territory, these classes taught that a leading factor in France’s defeat had been its mixed-race fighting force. They also identified the core principles that Germany planned to uphold as a colonial power. These included white supremacy (“the colored people are an inferior race whose place must be fixed by the white ‘master race’”), occupational restrictions, spatial segregation, a prohibition of sexual contact and intermarriage across racial lines, the absence of any electoral rights other than for whites, no access for blacks to white “railways, streetcars, restaurants, motion pictures, and all public establishments”; and bans on black membership in the National Socialist Party, any of its associated organizations, or in the army, with the exception of special labor battalions.
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During Hitler’s and Roosevelt’s early periods in office, Germans who were informed about the South expected the region to welcome the Führer’s policies on race.
³²
In correspondence with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, Count Felix von Luckner, who had served in Germany’s navy and had traveled often to the United States, anticipated that the South “would be most receptive to Nazi racial propaganda.” He believed that “Nazi racial views would be most appreciated by the ‘100 percent Americans’ in the South and West where the black and Asian questions had already generated great anxiety among whites.” Southerners, he thought, also would be responsive to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, since “they resented Jewish legal assistance to blacks in cases where white women had fallen prey to the ‘lust of Negroes.’” In 1934, the
Atlanta Constitution
’s European correspondent, Pierre van Paassen, reported that he had been told by German shipmates on an Atlantic crossing that “Hitler’s ideas were ‘very much respected’ in the American South.”
³³

Despite the affinities between the two systems of racial domination, southerners in the main did not reciprocate Nazi admiration. To be sure, a smattering of political figures, most notably Senator Robert “Bob” Reynolds of North Carolina, expressed sympathetic points of view. Combining racism with anti-Semitism, Reynolds founded the American Vindicators in January 1939, a society dedicated to fight immigration, prevent contamination of the country’s white and Protestant stock, and keep the United States out of a European war against Germany. Closed to blacks and Jews, the Vindicators collaborated with leading members of the right-wing fringe, including the anti-Semitic Gerald L. K. Smith, who led the Christian Nationalist Crusade, and the poet George Viereck, America’s leading pro-Nazi publicist, who had ties to the German Foreign Office and who later, in 1942, was jailed for a five-year term as a German agent.
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For sure, Reynolds was not alone. From time to time, a smattering of southern newspapers offered positive assessments of the Nazi regime. Pro-Nazi statements in southern newspapers ranged from the relatively mild, like those expressed by a 1934 editorial in the Starkville, Mississippi,
News,
which offered sympathy “with the viewpoint of the German radio commission which has banned Negro Jazz . . . [for] it belongs in Museums of ethnology” to the rabid, as in the dramatic 1935 offer by the Eupora, Mississippi,
Webster Progress
of a “Heil Hitler” for having “placed that downtrodden nation back into the ranks where it belongs! Heil Hitler, Crusher of Communism and Anarchy!” That year, the Memphis
Commercial Appeal
called for understanding Nazi Germany’s wish to “live on terms that are tolerable” after the humiliations of World War I and the humbling conditions enforced at Versailles. Hitler’s verbal assaults on these arrangements, it observed, were “similar to what the South said after the Civil War.”
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“We Southerners are as hostile to democracy as Hitler is,” the
Charleston News and Courier
plainly declared in February 1938, “because we are unwilling for the negro masses to vote and have a part in governing us.”
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Such positions, though, were uncommon and exceptional. Van Paassen’s report “I did not notice anything in this respect myself a few weeks ago when I visited several southern cities” captured the essential truth. “Despite their similarities,” and despite sporadic interest in the Nazi program by small numbers of southerners, “the American South did not embrace Nazi Germany.”
³⁷
On the whole, editorial opinion in the region shared the anti-Nazi views most of the country’s newspapers expressed. Southern newspapers, in the main, strongly disapproved of Germany’s anti-Jewish policies and remonstrated against Germany’s resurgent militarism and expansionist foreign policy. Some likened Nazism to the Ku Klux Klan. The
Birmingham News
identified the Klan, in 1933, as the “nearest approach that any American organization has to the Nazi party in Germany.” Five years later, the
Clarke County Democrat
in Alabama noted the resemblance between German and Klan racism and cautioned that they “are similar enough to cause self-respecting Americans to hang [their] heads in shame.” Over and again, the region’s press rejected comparisons between violence against Jews in Germany and blacks in the South. Lynching, after all, was illegal, while the “crimes against humanity . . . thousands of miles away,” as the
Raleigh News and Observer
noted, were sponsored and sanctioned by the state.
³⁸
Senator Reynolds was increasingly cut off from the southern political mainstream; so much so that he dared not run for reelection in 1944, and the Vindicators withered.
³⁹

A systematic review of the era’s southern press took note of how the region’s newspapers “wrote editorials attacking racism abroad,” but “defended it at home, either with openly racist arguments or by maintaining that racial pride required it for both whites and blacks.”
⁴⁰
As the South’s press excoriated Nazi racism, it persistently argued that their own region’s views and practices were fundamentally different. Though “hardly a champion of black causes,” the
Washington Post
“condemned the Nazi’s treatment of African-American athletes in the 1936 Olympics,” and the
Atlanta Constitution
advocated a boycott of the games. Southern newspapers repeatedly criticized Nazi anti-Semitism, while ignoring their own parlor version of anti-Jewish sentiment. In July 1933, the
Montgomery Advertiser
took note of the regime’s assaults on Jews, counseling that “Hitler will only gain respect in the U.S. if he stops persecuting the minority.”
⁴¹
This contradiction was noted by the German ambassador to Washington in 1936. He reported bitterly that southerners, indeed most white Americans, rejected the idea that Jim Crow and Nazi anti-Semitism were comparable. Though “outraged by Nazi prejudice,” even southern liberals “continued to support segregation in order to save the white race.”
⁴²

In all, the South saw no contradiction between its racist and its pro-British commitments. “In the absence of any effective attack on southern racial practices,” the circumstance that prevailed during the early years of Nazi rule in Germany, the historian George Tindall noted, “a powerful sentiment developed” in the region “to dampen the rekindled fires of racial feeling and to discourage any further public discussion of race.”
⁴³
Nazi appeals to the South that challenged this modus vivendi induced the great majority of the region’s politicians and opinion leaders to underscore that southerners were patriotic Americans. They also elicited a defense of the southern system that differentiated it from the antidemocratic features of the German regime. As John Hope Franklin, the distinguished African-American historian, put the point, white southern thought and speech revealed “a section that has been continuously both southern and American and a people who rushed upon tragedy by making virtues of their vices.”
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