OF FLYING CLOUDS AND CHINA CLIPPERS: Splendid Isolation (Part Four)

CCLXXVII

The contraction of the United States’ economy was matched by a contraction of its world view. As things worsened, the nation as a whole seemed to withdraw into itself, reflecting only on its own woes. It was a dangerous development, this fundamental misunderstanding that what was happening in France or in Germany or Japan or Hungary had no impact on the average American man in the street. During the Great Depression Americans fled their problems by escaping to the movies several times a week. Every movie was usually a double feature, and every double feature featured a cartoon and a newsreel. Americans in Ashtabula or Tulsa or Mankato or Massapequa could watch the imminent events of their time unfold on the screen, courtesy of Movietone or Pathe, and they could watch Bugs Bunny outwit Elmer Fudd, and they could watch Clark Gable or Gary Cooper act out their fantasies on-screen. And if they didn’t like that fantasy, the second feature (usually shown first) might be a Western with Hoot Gibson or a low-budget monster movie with Bela Lugosi. On Saturdays you could also watch a weekly serial. All this for a nickel. And while people watched the newsreels they weren’t (despite their imagery) anyone’s chief source of news. That remained the newspaper, and after that the radio.

Bugs Bunny (of Flatbush in Brooklyn, New York) was the stereotype of a fast-talking wisecracking kid from the streets. His adventures began in 1938. They made everybody laugh. And they still do

What people did see concerned them, but in an unexpected way. Perhaps there was just too much misery to go around, for most Americans shrugged off, at least at first, the moving pictures of Japanese soldiers marching into China, Italian soldiers marching into Libya and Abyssinia, and Spanish soldiers shooting men not in uniform (all this, despite Lowell Thomas’ dramatic narrations). They, for the most part, wanted none of it.

Republican Senator Gerald Nye (1892 - 1971) sat in the Senate from 1925 to 1945, a constant thorn in the side of the New Dealers. He was effective, but notorious. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote of him: “He hates [Wendell Willkie] even more than the British Empire”

One of the most passionate advocates for Isolationism (or Non-Interventionism as he preferred to call it) was Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota. Nye was famous for his political muckraking. In the 1920s he had uncovered the Teapot Dome Scandal that had stained the escutcheon of the Harding Administration. In 1934, he chaired a Congressional committee tasked to discover whether American involvement in World War I was driven by war profiteering.

Nye was usually considered a Republican Progressive and a Populist, but he was deeply opposed to anything he considered “Un-American”, especially immigrants (particularly from Eastern Europe or from south of the border) and Jews. Although Nye claimed to have “several splendid Jewish friends,” his anti-Jewish rhetoric grew more pointed as time went on.

As the Nazi state evolved, Nye became convinced that the reported anti-Semitism of the Nazis was a false flag flown by Communists and Socialists seeking support for so-called “globalistics”.

In 1937, he was instrumental in obtaining passage of a series of Neutrality Acts that limited President Roosevelt’s foreign policy authority.

Gerald L.K. Smith (L) (1898 – 1976) and his associate Bernard Doman with a copy of their colorfully-named American version of Der Sturmer. Smith used this photograph to announce that he was running for the Senate “as a champion of Father Charles Coughlin.”

Nye endorsed the far-Right demagogue Gerald L.K. Smith. Smith was a Minister turned pundit, and publisher of The Cross and The Flag magazine, which stated below its masthead its frank goal: “[To] Preserve America as a Christian Nation being conscious of the fact that there is a highly organized campaign to substitute Jewish tradition for Christian tradition.”

Smith in turn endorsed Father Charles Coughlin of Detroit, Michigan. Coughlin had originally supported unions and the New Deal, but bizarrely became an opponent of both Capitalism and Communism. He stated, “I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world's goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world's happiness.”

Father Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979)

Like Nye and Smith, Coughlin went down the rabbit hole, making attacks on the “Socialist” President Roosevelt, and upon free market capitalists ("exploiters"). He alleged the existence of Jewish conspirators in most organized activities, especially movies (a favorite target of Nye and Smith as well), and banking.

His diatribes became increasingly pro-Fascist, to the point where Joseph P. Kennedy (no friend of Roosevelt, Intervention, or of Jews, and a Catholic to boot) called Coughlin “a very dangerous proposition.”

Coughlin’s newspaper Social Justice on sale in New York City. Coughlin’s response to the German Kristallnacht anti-Jewish pogrom in 1938 was to blame “Syndicalists and Socialists” for the deaths of millions of Christians in the Soviet Union. New York City stations dropped him afterward, but in the face of sometimes violent protests

At his peak, Coughlin had a radio show and a newspaper Social Justice, with a circulation of 200,000. The show had 80 million listeners per week, and was a major forum for Americans espousing pro-Fascist, Anti-Capitalist, and Isolationist views. The newspaper echoed these ideas, once publishing the anti-Semitic Czarist forgery known as The Protocols of The Elders of Zion.

After Pearl Harbor Coughlin chose to continue his activities. In early 1942, the Church stepped in and threatened him with defrocking if he did not return to his pastoral duties and pastoral duties only. Coughlin went off the air and was largely unmissed, though he remained a parish priest until 1966.

There was, of course, the Isolationist spokesman Charles Lindbergh*, who trumpeted “America First!” and peddled race-baiting, and who, honestly, should have known better. He, more than anyone, knew that the oceans and the blue skies above them were no longer impassable barriers to the enemies of equality, life, liberty, and happiness.

“If one man could do it once, what if a lot of men did it together at the same time?” asked Hap Arnold, and it was a fair question. “What happens then to Splendid Isolation?"

Nye and Gerald L.K. Smith, and Father Coughlin were the media darlings of the time when Juan Trippe took back control of Pan Am in January 1940. It was obvious that the next few years would be anything but business as usual. Trippe had to read the wind to see what business there would be.