Authors: Ira Katznelson
55
Cited in Ted Morgan,
Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Random House, 2003), p. 186. In 1942, Dies ran unsuccessfully in a June 1941 special election for an open Senate seat following the death of Morris Sheppard, a contest, won by Governor Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, in which the winner was trailed by Congressman Lyndon Johnson by just over a thousand votes.
56
Its full name was the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and Propaganda in the United States.
57
For a discussion of the McCormick-Dickstein committee, see Walter Goodman,
The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp. 3–23. A contemporaneous and adulatory treatment of Dickstein can be found in Dorothy Waring,
American Defender
(New York: Robert Speller, 1935). Though a Tammany Hall Democrat, he was supported when he first ran for the House in 1922 by the local Republican Party in order to defeat the Socialist House member, Meyer London. For a consideration of the largely unsuccessful attempt by the Nazi movement to rally German-Americans to their cause, see Sander A. Diamond,
The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–1941
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). Dickstein, we now know from the Venona transcripts, was almost certainly a Soviet spy between 1937 and 1940, having volunteered his services at Washington’s Soviet embassy. His monthly stipend of $1,250 in exchange for mostly useless information led Soviet authorities to assign “Crook” as his code name. See Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev,
The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America—the Stalin Era
(New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 142–48. Dickstein, who had been born in Lithuania, represented the Lower East Side of New York City in Congress.
58
D. A. Saunders, “The Dies Committee: First Phase,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
3 (1939): 229–30.
59
Michael Wreszin, “The Dies Committee 1938,” in
Congress Investigates: A Documented History, 1792–1974,
vol. 4, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Roger Bruns (New York: Chelsea House, 1975) pp. 2930, 2929. The two nonsouthern liberal Democrats on the committee, John Dempsey of New Mexico and Arthur Healey of Massachusetts missed most of the committee’s hearings, “compelled by the exigencies of seeking re-election to be absent.” See
New York Times,
January 8, 1939.
60
This theme emerges in the contemporaneous overview by Father August Raymond Ogden,
The Dies Committee: A Study of the Special House Committee for the Investigation of Un-American Activities, 1938–1943
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1945). See also Nancy Lynn Lopez, “Allowing Fears to Overwhelm Us: A Re-Examination of the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities” (Ph.D. dissertation, Rice University, 2002).
61
Saunders, “The Dies Committee,” p. 233. Murphy, who had served as the last governor-general of the Philippines between 1933 and 1935, and the first U.S. high commissioner from 1935 to 1936, before his election as governor of Michigan, served as attorney general of the United States in 1939 and 1940, the year he became a justice of the Supreme Court, where he served until his death in July 1949. A strong supporter of civil liberties, Murphy delivered the keynote address to the Conference on Civil Liberties in the National Emergency, which was organized in 1939 by the American Civil Liberties Union. See Sidney Fine,
Frank Murphy: The Washington Years
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984).
62
Morgan,
Reds,
p. 188.
63
Ibid., p. 206.
64
Ibid., pp. 214–16. During the run-up to the 1940 campaign, the future Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, spoke out in defense of civil liberties and criticized the committee’s handling of Earl Browder and Fritz Kuhn, the leader of the German-American Bund, in an article entitled “Fair Trial,”
New Republic,
March 18, 1940, pp. 370–73. Willkie argued that “among the so-called great powers . . . the United States stands alone in its practice of the belief that the State is designed to serve and protect the liberties of the individual,” and that “even a Nazi is still entitled—in America—to fair treatment under the law” (pp. 370, 371).
65
Stewart Henderson Britt and Selden C. Menefee, “Did the Publicity of the Dies Committee in 1938 Influence Public Opinion?,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
3 (1939): 449–57.
66
New York Times,
January 5, 1939.
67
Walter Lippmann,
New York Post,
January 11, 1940; cited in Benjamin Ginzburg,
Rededication to Freedom
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), p. 89.
68
Only Vito Marcantonio, who represented East Harlem in New York and had switched from the Republican Party to the American Labor Party before his election to the House in 1938 (he had previously served from 1935 to 1937), spoke against the bill in the House.
69
Hadley Cantril,
Public Opinion, 1935–1946
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1951), p. 130. Strikingly, fully 40 percent of CIO union members backed drastic action.
70
Stone,
Perilous Times,
pp. 251–52.
71
By early 1941, the Department of Justice’s press releases of January 10, 13, and 14 were reporting that a total of 4,912,817 aliens had registered under the provisions of the Smith Act. See
Monthly Labor Review,
March 1941, p. 666.
72
Athan Theoharis, “The Truman Administration and the Decline of Civil Liberties: The FBI’s Success in Securing Authorization for a Preventive Detention Program,”
Journal of American History
64 (1978): 1012–13.
73
Stone,
Perilous Times,
p. 286;
Washington Post,
December 10, 1941.
74
Cited in Goodman,
The Committee,
p. 99.
75
Stone,
Perilous Times,
p. 275 (italics in original). The constitutional scholar Mark Graber has rightly reminded us that while wars in the United States have put restrictions on individual liberty, “some civil rights and liberties have been unaffected by war,” and these can vary under different circumstances. The more the country requires mobilization, and the more its enemies stand for the elimination of rights, the more likely it is that citizen liberties will be preserved. Crucially, he adds, “the beneficiaries of the civil right or liberty are . . . identified as loyal Americans.” This was precisely what was at stake in the civil liberties violations in World War II. See Mark A. Graber, “Counter-Stories: Maintaining and Expanding Civil Liberties in Wartime,” in
The Constitution in Wartime: Beyond Alarmism and Complacency,
ed. Mark Tushnet (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 95, 97.
76
Michael Dobbs,
Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
77
An important study is Louis W. Koenig,
The Presidency and the Crisis
(New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944).
78
Albert L. Sturm, “Emergencies and the Presidency,”
Journal of Politics
II (1949): 135.
79
Rebecca S. Shoemaker,
The White Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004), p. 152.
80
Cited in Sturm, “Emergencies and the Presidency,” pp. 121–44. This decision upheld the use of emergency power by the state of Minnesota to deal with housing’s foreclosure crisis, despite the fact that emergencies do not create power for the state. The basis for government’s violating existing contracts, the Court argued, is that emergency situations can justify the usage of already-existing powers that are not used in more settled times.
81
Edward Samuel Corwin,
Total War and the Constitution
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 37 (italics in original).
82
Matthew J. Dickinson,
Bitter Harvest: FDR, Presidential Power, and the Growth of the Presidential Branch
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 172–73; Brian Waddell,
The War against the New Deal: World War II and American Democracy
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), p. 55.
83
See http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15806#axzz1aHyjbUYi.
84
See http://www.usmm.org/fdr/emergency.html.
85
New York Times,
December 9, 1941.
86
For a discussion, see Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Imperial Presidency
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 113.
87
Corwin,
Total War and the Constitution,
p. 65 (italics in original). Christopher H. Pyle and Richard M. Pious call this event “the most aggressive assertion of the ‘stewardship theory.’” See Pyle and Pious,
The President, Congress, and the Constitution: Power and Legitimacy in American Politics
(New York: Free Press, 1984), p. 72.
88
Sturm, “Emergencies and the Presidency,” p. 134. The threat to act without congressional approval was not carried out. The mandate he wanted in order to stabilize prices and wages was conferred by passage, on October 2, of the Stabilization Act of 1942. The Office of Economic Stabilization and the fixing of prices and wages were announced the next day in the president’s Executive Order 9250.
89
New York Times,
September 8, 1942;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
September 8, 1942;
Los Angeles Times,
September 8, 1942.
90
Corwin,
Total War and the Constitution,
pp. 64, 65. This claim was identical to the definition of prerogative power that John Locke had offered in his
Second Treatise of Civil Government
: “This Power to act according to discretion, for the publick good, without the prescription of the Law, and sometimes against it.” See John Locke,
Two Treatises of Government,
ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 375.
91
Wall Street Journal,
December 16, 1941;
Washington Post,
December 17, 1941. Two days earlier, the president had celebrated the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and contrasted its guarantees of freedom with Nazism’s goal to “overthrow throughout the earth the great revolution of human liberty of which our American Bill of Rights is the mother charter.” See
New York Times,
December 16, 1941.
92
Committee of Records of War Administration, Bureau of the Budget,
The United States at War: Development and Administration of the War Program by the Federal Government
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946).
93
Ibid., pp. 220–21.
94
For histories of the agency, see Allen Irving Safiano,
The Office of War Information
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968); Constance Ruth Lael, “The Office of War Information: The Integration of Foreign Policy and Foreign Propaganda, 1942–1945” (Ph.D. dissertation, Wake Forest University, 1978).
95
U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 2. For an overview, see Luther Gulick, “War Organization of the Federal Government,”
American Political Science
Review
38 (1944): 166–79.
96
See https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/margo/www/govstat/secwpa.htm.
97
See http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5154. J. R. Minkel, “Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese Americans in WWII,”
Scientific American,
March 30, 2007, p. 3; “Papers Show Census Role in WWII Camps,”
USA Today,
March 30, 2007.
98
Roger Daniels,
The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), pp. 85–88, 91, 97, 105.
99
Robinson,
A Tragedy of Democracy,
p. 54.
100
Goodman,
The Committee
, pp. 128–29.
101
Morton Grodzins,
Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 19–128. For a discussion of the hardening of West Coast opinion in favor of removing all Japanese, including citizens, see
New York Times,
March 1, 1942.
102
Before the war, Japanese-Americans vigorously protested their second-class status, especially the unwillingness of the Pearl Harbor naval yard to hire them. See
Washington Post,
July 28, 1940. Some functions of civilian government were restored in March 1943. Under martial law, the government conducted tens of thousands of military trials, numbering 22,000 in 1942 alone, with convictions rates exceeding 99 percent. See Fred I. Israel, “Military Justice in Hawaii, 1941–1944,”
Pacific Historical Review
36 (1967): 243–67.
103
Chicago Daily Tribune,
March 4, 1942.
104
See Stephen E. Ambrose and Robert H. Immerman,
Milton S. Eisenhower: Educational Statesman
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). For a discussion of Canadian internment policies, see John Stanton, “Government Internment Policy, 1939–1945,”
Labour/Le Travail
31 (1993): 203–41.
105
“The government of the American Republic was a naked dictatorship for its 70,000 Japanese-American citizens of the Pacific Coast.” See Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship,
p. 283. By contrast, Italians and Germans were not removed from their homes because there was no equivalent pressure to do so from below, since political leaders, including President Roosevelt, thought the Japanese posed the greater danger as a racially inassimilable group, and because the number of potential internees numbered in the millions. For a discussion, see Feldman,
Manufacturing Hysteria,
pp. 179–80. Small numbers of Italian and German detainees were held during the war at Justice Department detention camps in Idaho, Montana, Texas, and New Mexico.