In the fall of 1938 while riding in a New York subway, I picked up a leaflet entitled Why Are Jews Persecuted for Their Religion? It was printed on cheap, gray newsprint and included four pages of bitterly anti-Semitic quotations and distorted passages from American History. The leaflet urged "American patriots" to "rise up as one man and clean house politically and economically." It bore the imprint of the Nationalist Press Association, 147 East 116th Street, New York. Pricked by curiosity I decided to look up these headquarters of "Americanism."

We moved along to Times Square and stopped in front of Nedick's orange drink stand at the corner of 42nd Street to watch five Social Justice salesmen in operation. [Social Justice was Father Coughlin's paper. -S] Pete Stahrenberg was there, waiting for Dan and me. After a while Dan displayed the National American and began to call out his slogans.

"I'll be watching you if anything happens," Pete told Dan.

Then it suddenly happened...

A Jewish youth with thin features and large eyes, goaded by the insults the hawkers were screaming, knocked down the pile of National American from Dan's hand. Dan swung with his free right hand and the blow caught the youth on the shoulder. A crowd gathered instantly and I saw the goon squad coming down on the run -- eyes blazing, fists ready to pummel the Jewish youth into a bloody pulp. I turned away my face.

"C'mon, c'mon, keep moving you. Break it up."

By the Grace of God the cops got there first, surrounded the Jewish youth, protectively backing him up against a taxi-cab fender, and pushed Dan away. More police stepped in and dispersed the crowd. Dan and the Jewish youth were then led away, followed by Pete.

When the salesmen for Social Justice resumed their hawking, the goon squads glared menacingly at Jewish passersby.

"Those Goddam cops beat us to it," they muttered. "We gotta get there first next time."

"Yeah. It ain't no fun if you don't do nuthin'."

I stood there alone, leaning against a building, stunned by the nightmarish scene. Again I had that curious feeling of unreality. I kept saying to myself: "This is New York. This isn't Berlin. This is the City of New York, in the United States. You are not in Turkey. You are in New York."

I looked up. The clock atop the Paramount Building pointed to midnight.

In February, 1941 through "chain" recommendations from one American Fascist to another, I was urged to go as a delegate with the Paul Revere Sentinels leaving for Washington to sabotage passage of the Lend-Lease Bill. When I phoned Sanctuary he urged me to come and pick up a "package of patriotic literature."

He loaded me down with a huge bundle containing a variety of anti-war, anti-Semitic leaflets, with instructions to give it to Charles Hudson. "If he's not there Mrs. Dilling will do," he said. About twenty-five of us from the Paul Revere Sentinels and the Christian Front arrived in Washington on the morning of February 26, 1941. Mrs. Dilling was in charge of the Mothers' Movement and the lobby of the Plaza Hotel was crowded with a wild, milling mob of women and some men.

"This is my thundering herd," Mrs. Dilling told me. "How do you like it?"

She was perfect in the role of a herd leader.

"Come on, mothers," she yelled. "Let's picket the Senate Building."

Sixty or more women rushed to the exits and took their places in line, carrying American flags. Round and round the Senate Building they went singing The Star-Spangled Banner and Battle Hymn of the Republic. Watching from the opposite sidewalk with other men, the demonstration struck me as pointless. Getting no attention from reporters Mrs. Dilling decided to storm the Capitol steps, hoping for publicity by violating Capitol ordinances. The cops promptly stopped the mob, which was just what Mrs. Dilling wanted. It broke into a howl.

"Don't you dare tell us we can't parade with our sacred American flags."

"These are the flags of our Republic, but wouldn't know that, you Jew stooges," one woman yelled.

"I'll bet it was the internationalists who made the laws."

"Is this America? Who runs this country, the Americans or the internationalist Jews?"

The cops laughed good-naturedly and gently pushed them back. I was amazed at their patience in the face of the abuse and clawing. There was a sentimental side to the scene. Some of the mothers began to cry over sons or husbands killed in the World War. I could sympathize with that and my heart went out to these sincere mothers, for I knew the tragedies that war can bring. But prominent among the mothers was a tall gawky woman who reminded me of the professional weepers the Nazis sent into France to weep in public places and lower morale. When this woman began to cry again, I asked who she was.

"Her name is Miss Rooney," I was told in confidence. "She always cries."

And whenever she cried the short, roly-poly Polish woman from South Bend, Indiana invariably followed. Both began to bawl in sight of reporters, several others began to take out handkerchiefs, and the thing gave signs of spreading through the mob when some of the more farsighted ones put a stop to the crying jag.

"Don't start that now," one of the women whispered to Miss Rooney. "Wait till Mrs. Dilling gets back."

Mrs. Dilling who had quietly gone off, came back panting with the announcement that Congressman Clare E. Hoffman had agreed to see them.

"There, now, there is a Christian man for you," came in a chorus.

The pack instantly fell into line to follow Mrs. Dilling. On the way over they knelt on the dirty sidewalk and committed the sacrilege of reciting the Lord's Prayer -- for the benefit of newspaper reporters and photographers. Anything which publicized their shameful conduct was deemed "patriotic." A man of fanatic leaning, Representative Hoffman received the herd, commended their "patriotism" and said:

"Apparently the Red flag of Communists and the flag of every other organization and country is today more welcome here in Washington than is the flag which carries the Stars and Stripes."

Led by Hoffman, the pack milled its way down to Roy O. Woodruff, Hoffman's colleague from Michigan. Here the Congressmen posed for photographers, while Mrs. Dilling held a placard "Kill Bill 1776 -- Not Our Boys" and Hoffman held the flag. So Mrs. Dilling finally got the publicity she craved.

[...]

Publicity became the mania of their leaders in order to create the impression that their stunts represented the majority of American mothers. This was far from true. "News crazy" reporters, however, provided wide publicity to such stunts as the hanging in effigy of Senator Claude "Benedict Arnold" Pepper and the "death watch" in which mothers dressed completely in black and sat in Senate and House galleries. They badgered officials hostile to appeasement, but were received with open arms by those who thought in like terms. And these Coughlinite Mothers' groups, noisy and discordant, later became another gear within the multiple-geared America First Committee of organized appeasement and defeatism.

The Chicago group -- We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America, Inc. -- reached the lowest ebb of unmotherly infamy when over the signature of Mrs. Grace Keefe, it sent a letter to a Louisiana mother mourning the death of her son on the high seas:

Legal experts advise that if any soldier, draftee, or otherwise, loses his life while executing orders which his superiors have no constitutional authority to give, then those official can be sued as private citizens. We owe it to our loved dead, to the country for which they died, to call to account those who violated our Constitution and heartlessly placed our men in the danger zone between two warring nations while we are at peace...

We, the mothers of American boys, beg you to place the blame for the death of your son where it belongs, and not be deceived by propaganda into blaming a foreign power. In the name of justice, we ask you to call to justice the real murderers of your loved one.

"Impeach Roosevelt" became the cry...

I was also eager to interview Congressman John E. Rankin because of a tragic event which took place in the Hose on June 4, 1941. On that day Ranking delivered one of several blistering condemnations of American Jews as "war mongers." Rising to protest against the slander, Representative M. Michael Edelstein pointed out that the meeting of so-called "international bankers" which "took place yesterday on the steps of the Sub-Treasury [Building] was entirely controlled by persons other than Jewish bankers."

As Congressman Edelstein's closing words: "All men are created equal, regardless of race, creed or color" rang to the applause of his colleagues, he strode from the House to go to his chambers. Just outside the entrance he collapsed. He was carried, limp, to a couch in the adjacent House reading room. Congressman Edelstein was dead.

His tragic death was greeted by American Nazis with all the fanfare of a Nazi military victory. Fascist speakers turned down other topics to apostrophize the "patriotism" of the Congressman from Mississippi. Rankin's name became indelibly inscribed on the international fascist roll of honor and was lauded in the January 15, 1940, issue of World Service.

This was the man I arranged to see.

A sharp-eyed, shrewd, callous little man, with volatile and fanatic energy, Rankin asked me to leave my camera behind as we walked into his room. My first thought was that he was a Klansman. Peculiarly enough, during the ensuing conversation he brought up the subject and said that he had been charged with being a Klansman. He had answered: "I don't have to belong to any organization to be pro-American."

He had received my letter, he said, and read the inclosures, but could not find it at the moment. He asked for my name again and when I repeated it, he demanded:

"First tell me why you wanted to see me."

I wold him that we had read about Congressman Edelstein and I was eager to shake the hand of an "American." This obviously pleased Rankin because he burst into a smile. "Yeah, he keeled over," he said. Crossing his little legs, Rankin turned his face, cross-patched with wrinkles and advised:

"When you go back to New York, you tell them this. There is only one way to win this fight and that is to expose the international Jewish bankers as the war mongers. Tell the people that it is the Jews who want war. Do that and you've got half the battle won." Rankin then boasted that Senator Hiram W. Johnson had said of him: "This man has done more in one minute than any other man in the past six months."

A few nights later I went to Carnegie Hall. As George Pagnanelli, the "patriotic" editor, I was invited to grace the platform, but I sat there only long enough to ascertain that the corpulent fellow occupying a platform seat was John Cecil, speaker for the American Nationalist Party and the Christian Front. I saw a lot of ladies dressed in fine clothes, and I saw my rabble pals hobnobbing with Park Avenue. Thomas Malone, salesman for National American was distributing free copies of The American Vindicator, next to a salesman selling Social Justice...

...Was this, too, a "coalition" meeting of America First? Not quite. It was a meeting of Women United, an America First Committee subsidiary, and Senator Reynolds was the guest of honor. Deatherage took it upon himself to instruct Mrs. Geraldine Buchanan Parker, executive secretary, on the "respectable" way of disseminating anti-Semitism:

Your literature does not need to state the word -- Jew. All you have to do in order to place the blame where the people can understand it is to accuse the international bankers. The masses have now been educated to understand what is meant...Senator Holt can give you the information, you can quote from the Congressional Record -- it is there.

True, its leadership at first was as American as Plymouth Rock. But the rank and file following -- at first sincere and respectable -- was later polluted by the Pelleys, Coughlins, McWilliamses; the Vierecks, Kuhns and Deatherages; by Klansmen; by Japanese and Nazi agents. And its weak-kneed leadership, cowed and bullied by stories of Nazi might, swayed by Chamberlain sentimentality and Pollyanna smugness, took craven comfort in the delusion that they were "defending America." The surrender of a mighty nation in appeasement to Hitler might easily have been the outcome if the designs of its two most publicized spokesmen had been carried through.

Its national chairman, General Robert E. Wood, told Kenneth Crawford a reporter for PM, a New York newspaper, that in the event of an invasion of South America by a Nazi armada, he would defend our Latin Allies "only the part as far south as the bulge of Brazil." Without firing a shot in self-defense, the General indicated his willingness to let Hitler seize more than half of South America, plant his legions firmly on the Western Hemisphere and place the Panama Canal at the mercy of his Luftwaffe.

William R. Castle, another founder of the America First Committee, expressed amazing shortsightedness for a former official of the State Department. Apparently dominated by Viereck's syrupy assurances that Hitler was the friend of all and the enemy of none, Castle wrote in the Nazi organ Today's Challenge:

Let's mind our own business -- and keep our powder dry -- avoid all the ideologies which are contrary to our own good system. Let us so live our own lives in a world of neighbors that we shall be a power for good because we have the respect of all.

This sample of infantile trust after years of relentless Nazi aggression during which Democracies crumbled one by one because they, too, believed in Hitler's promises, remained dominant with the "new leadership." Faith in Hitler but an unreasoning lack of faith in the Administration -- these were the cornerstones of the Committee's policy of appeasement and defeatism which corroded our democratic fibre. It delighted Nazi commentators, who crooned from Berlin: "The America First Committee is known as true Americanism and true patriotism, as opposed to the synthetic brand."

"Patriotic" meetings of the Mobilizers and the Bund fell down in attendance, while most of the other fascistic groups were suspended altogether as their members flocked to America First rallies...

Into the America First offices poured a daily stream of my "friends" I knew or personally recognized seeing at subversive meetings. There was no partiality. Anyone who asked for literature got it -- free of charge.

The office [of the America First Committee] at 515 Madison Avenue, where I worked as volunteer was a bedlam. Volunteers stayed till the early morning hours, energized by a hot revivalist fever. Mothers stayed away from their homes and family life was disrupted in a crusade for peace at any sell-out price. Sitting at the volunteers' table, I heard a great deal of intimate talk. This sort of thing:

"I haven't cooked supper in three weeks and my husband is sore."

"Well, we've all got to sacrifice to save our country. After all, it's Roosevelt who wants war, not Hitler."

"Roosevelt and the internationalists."

"You mean the Jews. Don't be afraid to say it, sister."

"They ain't all bad. There's a Rabbi Charles Fleischer who speaks for the Committee, and that fellow doing the publicity for us..."

"Sydney Hertzberg, that's his name."

"Yeah, and Mrs. Paul palmer on the Committee. She's wealthy and she's Jewish, you know."

"These are good Jews, but most of them are bad."

I had been watching a small, kindly-faced grandmother with white hair and a wrinkled face. She worked quietly and rarely spoke. Once or twice we had exchanged smiles and I had taken a fancy to her. I felt she had something on her mind and had noticed her leave the table several times when the discussion was hottest. Suddenly she froze the volunteers by saying in a thin, clear voice:

"I don't think it's fair of you to talk that way about the Jews. We're not fighting this war against the Jews and I can't understand why you are always talking against them. I'm here because I don't want to see my grandchildren go to war, but I'm not going to speak against any race of people. I don't think you ladies are being Christian at all."

I felt like rushing over and hugging grandma, but it would have been my suicide as investigator.

The America First Committee had become the voice of American Fascism and the spearhead aimed at the heart of Democracy, carrying to their doom many who were innocent and would have resigned in disgust had they known what went on behind the scenes. An official of the Committee, Judge Mildred Dugan confirmed my convictions by saying candidly:

"Eighty per cent of the membership is Coughlinite, and there isn't the least doubt in my mind that at the present rate the anti-Semites and the Coughlinites will come out on top eventually."

The Monday after Pearl Harbor I received the December 6 issue of the America First Bulletin and read the headline: "Blame for Rift with Japan Rests on Administration." It was the same old cry of denouncing our own family of Americans and, by implication, exonerating the Axis of all evil. And by an irony of fate, a typical letter from William R. Castle appeared in the New York Sunday Herald Tribune on the morning of Pearl Harbor, and it read:

Why should we go to war with Japan? To that question I have never received a reasonable answer, except the answer always made by those who feel we should interfere anywhere in the world. People like our bellicose Secretery of the Navy announce that trouble is inevitable...

President of the Mothers of the United States of America, [Mrs. Rosa M. Farber], she had known as early as May, 1941, she confessed, that Laura Ingalls was on the Nazi pay roll. "There was a lot more about her than appeared in the newspapers," she said mysteriously. "What was printed was only half the story."

How did she know that?

And why had she continued to associate with her?

It was nearly ten o'clock. So far I had learned little from Mrs. Farber that was worth while. Then, as the hour hand on the living room clock pointed to ten, Mrs. Farber suddenly came out with: "There is no other way out for us than through a revolution."

"You mean a revolution with bloodshed?" I asked, surprised at her sudden remark.

She nodded: "It's the only way."

"I was going to start an underground organization last fall," she explained, "but they [meaning gossipy women] would not have been able to keep it secret and I gave up the idea. It's the only thing left to do now -- start an underground movement." Mrs. Farber wasn't holding meetings of any kind now. "You only make yourself a target," she said. "They'll shut you down. The only way to work now is through conversation."

She called it that. What she actually did was to outline a whispering campaign. She gave me her formula as she practiced it day by day. She recounted how she had spread defeatism at the local school. One of the teachers giving out ration cards had said that rationing was necessary for psychological reasons. But Mrs. Farber had argued back: "If the want us to know that we are in the war then let them publish the casualty lists and also send the bodies back." One of the teachers had commented, "Yes, come to think of it, those lists haven't been published, have they."

Mrs. Farber boasted, "You see? I planted an idea in her head, now she'll think of it again."

Thoroughly warmed up to her subject, she went on: "I just plant seeds like that every day. They are little ideas which I put in my conversations day by day. I do it all the time. That is all I do. That is all you can do now. Here, let me show you something." She got up from her chair and went over to the bureau. From it she pulled out a large pocketbook and drew out a newspaper picture of Attorney General Francis Biddle. "Look at that face," she said. "It's one hundred per cent Jewish." (footnote: Attorney General Biddle is a member of the famous non-Jewish Philadelphia family.)

From another folder in her pocketbook she took out a picture of a child whose grand-uncle was captioned as being General MacArthur. She said that his face, too, was Jewish. And then this statement from Mrs. Farber: "People say that MacArthur's little son looks like a little kike."

"Should we, in these conversations you suggest, use anti-Semitism?" I asked innocently.

"What do you think I'm doing when I show Biddle's picture and tell people he looks like a Jew?" she exploded. "Preach anti-Semitism all you can, the more the better."

After this Mrs. Farber lost all self-composure and all reason. Having controlled herself all through the early evening, she now let go and subjected me to a half hour of fantastic delusions. One of these was the amazing statement that Polish Jews had willingly and wantonly encouraged Hitler's attack on Poland. The Sanhedrin, or a mythical world Jewish Council (existing only in the imagination of Jew-baiters) had decreed this in order that Hitler devastate all of Europe.

"How would the Jews benefit from this?" I asked incredulously.

Mrs. Farber explained that it was to further a plot of world ruin so that Communist elements might be in a position to offer Communism as the only antidote for National-Socialism. "Hitler," Mrs. Farber said, out of all reason, "is being kept alive as a hate object by those who want our civilization destroyed in order to set up an international world order."

I could hardly believe my ears, for here was a woman, hitherto rational, whose blind hatreds and fanaticisms led her to believe and propagate the most fantastic lies. She became just like the crackpots I had met on countless occasions. In her defamation of Jewry, in her attempt to lay the blame of the war at the feet of persecuted Polish Jews, Mrs. Farber may have been attempting to absolve Hitler of all blame. In her lumping together of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Churchill and Roosevelt Mrs. Farber followed another favorite Nazi device used to discredit the national leadership, and sow mistrust toward the national war effort. On leaving, she loaded me down with a huge stack of pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist literature.

I learned from Mrs. Farber that Mrs. Beatrice Knowles, president of American Mothers, was holding underground meeting. Phoning, I told her of my visits to Mrs. Farber, Vietig and Parker Sage. "Come right over," she invited...

...I sensed Chicago was the hotbed of a native fascism which was truly alarming in proportion and intensity. I had never had this feeling before. As I analyze Chicago, I can readily understand why. In addition to the Dillings, Jungs, Van Hynings, Willards, the America First Committee which had first festered there, there was the factor of the "Washington-New York-Chicago newspaper Axis," with the Chicago Tribune as the cornerstone.

Its publisher was a remarkable and profound man. He himself said so -- and who should know better than Colonel Robert R. McCormick, "Bertie" for short...

...Whereas the influence of the Dillings and Jungs extended among thousands only, "Bertie" reached millions (average daily circulation of the Tribune was 1,076,866) with a daily barrage of obstructionism and defeatism of the war effort, carping at the national leadership, berating Democracy and denouncing our military allies under the guise of "patriotism" and "freedom of the press."...

...Other partners of the "newspaper Axis" were the New York Daily News, published by McCormick's cousin, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson; and the Washington Times-Herald, published by Patterson's sister, Eleanor "Cissy" Patterson. Their combined audience was estimated at five million readers daily. The party line was the same for all three.

On December 14, 1938 under the by-line of its Washington correspondent, John O'Donnell, the Daily News honored an American Nazi, Pelley, by publishing in its entirety the contents of one of his booklets purporting to show the number of "Jews in Washington." Pelley's picture was inserted and the cover of his vicious booklet reproduced. The story was featured on page two under a screaming three-column headline and continued for nearly two and a half pages...

..."Hardly a day goes by," wrote William Shirer, "that they [these three papers] are not cited by Goebbels to prove one of his points." And as I stood on the Chicago sidewalk and looked at the impressive office building of the Tribune, with McCormick sitting high up in his ivory tower I recalled the righteous indignation of Congressman Elmer J. Holland which he expressed so eloquently in the Congressional Record.

Despite their cloak of prosperity, their fine building...these three papers are in spirit and in conduct members of the "vermin press." Separate their editorials from the trappings of a large city newspaper, publish them as a separate book, and read them as a continuous theme. You will see their net effect is to preach defeatism among our civilians and mutiny among our soldiers, to spread dismay among out allies, and to create joy in the hearts of our enemies...

This is no small matter...This means that approximately 5% of the total population of these United States is being daily exposed to the virus of Fascist philosophy -- to the direct assault of the enemy propaganda campaign. No propaganda broadcast of the Axis radio -- no enemy leaflets -- can reach so many Americans as do these Fascists of the native brand.

With deadly effect the corrupt Parisian press poisoned and paralyzed the spirit and morale of the French. And -- when we recall that the total circulation of the most powerful members of this venal press reached less than one half of one percent of the total population of France -- we can clearly judge the danger with which we are faced.

It is not necessary to be in contact with the enemy in order to bring him aid and comfort. It is only necessary to share a common hatred; to desire the same results; to think in the same patterns...This is a foreign war, yet it is also a war of ideas...To the end that this group consists of Americans, Mr. Speaker, this war is a civil war as well as a foreign war. It cannot be won until our enemies at home are conquered and rendered harmless.