CONSPIRATORIAL POLITICS:
THE FRIENDS OF PROGRESS AND CALIFORNIA’S RADICALS OF THE RIGHT
IN CALIFORNIA DURING WORLD WAR TWO
Colin S. Hoffman
B.A., University of California, Davis 2004
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
HISTORY
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SUMMER
2011
© 2011
Colin S. Hoffman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
CONSPIRATORIAL POLITICS:
THE FRIENDS OF PROGRESS AND CALIFORNIA’S RADICALS OF THE RIGHT
IN CALIFORNIA DURING WORLD WAR TWO
A Thesis
by
Colin S. Hoffman
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Joseph A. Pitti, Ph.D.
__________________________________, Second Reader
Alfred E. Holland, Jr.
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Colin S. Hoffman
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Department Chair
Aaron J. Cohen, Ph.D.
Department of History
iv
____________________
Date
Abstract
of
CONSPIRATORIAL POLITICS:
THE FRIENDS OF PROGRESS AND CALIFORNIA’S RADICALS OF THE RIGHT
IN CALIFORNIA DURING WORLD WAR TWO
by
Colin S. Hoffman
This thesis offers an analysis of the activities of the radical Los Angeles anti-interventionist group the Friends of Progress
(FOP) during the 1940s. This group, while advocating non-intervention, also sympathized with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and
aggressively attacked the Roosevelt administration. Embracing the belief that sinister international forces were poised to destroy the
American way of life, the FOP adopted fascist propaganda to facilitate their campaign to inform and arouse the American public.
Their use of Nazi propaganda before and during World War II signified not only the influence of Hitler and Nazism but also the
prevalence of conspiratorial politics in Californian society. The same climate of paranoia that influenced the FOP also infused the
efforts by state and federal officials to eradicate radical wartime dissent and un-Americanism. A byproduct of southern California’s
radical politics of the 1930s, the influence of radical Right movements is critical to understanding California’s radical wartime
dissent—and its suppression—at the onset of World War II.
A number of historians have addressed the volatile nature of radical politics during the tumultuous 1930s; however, many
analyses either emphasize the re-emergence of the Left in U.S. politics or the larger radical Right organizations such as the German
American Bund, Father Charles Coughlin’s Union for Social Justice, or Huey Long’s Share the Wealth movement. Less known are
the smaller groups, like the FOP, that arose after the eradication of larger radical movements at the hands of the federal government.
Additionally, the onset of World War II often serves as a demarcation line separating the political unrest of the Great Depression from
the unifying experience of World War II. This work emphasizes southern California’s radicalism of the 1930s and its continuing
influence on California radicalism at the onset of World War II.
This thesis draws primarily on legislative records from the California Department of Justice, in particular the records of the
Attorney General, and California Appellate Court Third District records housed at the California State Archives. These records
provided an uncontested framework for establishing events chronologically and conceptualizing details underpinning key aspects in
the trial. Also important was the report of the California Joint Legislative Fact Finding Committee from 1943, which chronicled
California’s investigations into subversive activities using the testimonies of Committee investigators, investigators from public
organizations and suspected subversives. Other primary resources included contemporary accounts and political tracts, as well as
articles from the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine. Finally, secondary accounts also informed my analysis, with a reliance on
the work of Richard Hofstadter, Carey McWilliams, Kevin Starr, and David M. Kennedy.
The analysis of the Friends of Progress uncovered not simply a radical Right group ultimately indicted and convicted of
subversion under California law at the onset of World War II. Rather, the FOP also exemplified the continuity between southern
California’s radical Right movements of the 1930s and their continuation in the form of smaller anti-war organizations as the U.S.
entered World War II. The association of radical Right groups with extremism, anti-Semitism, and Nazism fed the ongoing
perception of Fifth Column infiltration and fueled California’s anti-subversion efforts during World War II.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Joseph A. Pitti, Ph.D.
_______________________
Date
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many contributed to the completion of this thesis. While I cannot thank them all here, I
want to extend my thanks to the history department of California State University,
Sacramento. I also wish to extend my appreciation and gratitude to Professors Pitti and
Holland for generously devoting their time to editing this thesis and making it a polished
historical work. I wish to extend additional heartfelt thanks and warmest appreciation to
Professor Pitti for his patience and guidance, qualities this writer appreciates immensely.
The entire staff at the California State Archives lent invaluable assistance and support
during my research, with a special thanks to archivist Jeff Crawford for his enthusiasm,
boundless curiosity and generous assistance in navigating the Noble case files. Without
his recommendation, this work may never have come to fruition. Most of all, I thank my
family for their faith and unwavering support.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................... vi
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION.……………………………………………………………………….. 1
2. FRIENDS OF PROGRESS, FASCISM AND THE THREAT OF WAR ........................ 33
3. THE TRIAL ...................................................................................................................... 62
Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 91
vii
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
The Second World War was the “good war,” a “people’s war.” Joining the Allied
fight against the totalitarian governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the United States
truly set out to mobilize itself into what Franklin D. Roosevelt called an “arsenal of
democracy.” In contrast to the more divisive experience of World War I, the attack on
Pearl Harbor fueled the determination of a large portion of the nation to do anything and
everything to achieve total victory. Film celebrities sold war bonds and ran the
Hollywood Canteen that would raise the spirits of soldiers going overseas. Children sold
soap, while their parents and other adults donated tires and scrap metal, volunteered to
package Red Cross kits, and endured the rationing of essentials, annoying air raid drills,
blackouts, and curfews. Ostensibly, a unified nation rose up against the forces of
totalitarian evil and for the preservation of democracy worldwide. However, this unity
proved deceptive, for a vocal minority of Americans still challenged the demand that the
United States should participate in World War II. Even after Washington’s official
entrance into the global conflict, radicals of the political right continued to denounce the
war and the supposed international conspiracy that had influenced the Roosevelt
administration to drive the United States into the conflict. Building upon frustrations left
over from the Great Depression, these radicals of the Right sought to inform Americans
about the true dangers facing the nation, create public support for renouncing American
involvement in the war, and ultimately remove the Roosevelt administration.
2
The Los Angeles-based Friends of Progress (FOP) represented one of those
radical groups. On the radical fringe of the anti-interventionist movement, FOP meetings
served as forums for uncovering the international conspiracy that had undermined
valuable economic reforms and had secretly coerced the American public into supporting
Washington’s war effort. Their increasingly hostile attacks, including a mock
impeachment trial of FDR, gained national attention and heightened pubic anxiety and
anger already inflamed by the onset of war in Europe. After the attack on Pearl Harbor on
7 December 1941, FOP members were arrested by the federal government as part of a
national sweep against potential subversive groups; however, U.S. Attorney General
Francis Biddle released FOP members on the basis of maintaining their right of free
speech. Feeling a renewed sense of confidence, the FOP brazenly escalated their verbal
attacks on the government. Their speeches accused American political leaders of outright
deception and military leaders of cowardice. They dismissed justifying the war based
upon the Japanese attacks on Hawaii and the Philippines. And, they claimed, the war,
fought to preserve freedom for the world, actually belied the elimination of civil liberties
under Roosevelt.
The renewed vigor of the FOP as a critic of American policy alarmed
Californians, who expected an invasion of the West Coast at any moment. This public
fear and anxiety—especially evident in 1942—created the impetus for Californians to
wipe out radical dissent for the duration of the war. The California Attorney General’s
Office and the California Legislature pursued the FOP in hearings before the California
Joint Fact Finding Committee for Un-American Activities and through investigations by
3
local patriotic groups. At the same time as the federal government indicted and convicted
group members for sedition, in effect sidelining FOP activities, California subsequently
prosecuted the group for failing to register as subversive agents of a foreign government.
For Californians and the nation, the FOP emerged as a prime example of the subversive
Axis “Fifth Column” within the U.S., and it even provided the basis for a Hollywood
movie.1
However, the FOP did not simply conform to the portrait of the patented fascist
organization of the 1930s. To be sure, the FOP did have distinct connections to the
German American Bund and other pro-Nazi groups; yet, the FOP also embodied the
political frustrations still raging because of the social and economic dislocations of the
Great Depression. The New Deal’s failure to truly solve America’s economic crisis,
despite a plethora of agencies and regulations, provided opportunities for a wide range of
political activists who sought reforms the New Deal would not seemingly undertake.
Many radical Right groups frequently grew out of a lineage of populist dissent during the
1930s, whether Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth,” Father Coughlin’s National Union for
Social Justice, the Silver Shirts, the German American Bund, or other similar extremist
groups.
Although these movements gathered a substantial amount of support, the
popularity of Roosevelt, the utopian nature and fascist trappings of many radical
1
FOP members Robert Noble and Ellis O. Jones provided the basis for the characters Robert
Nelson and Elliot Jennings in William Beaudine’s 1942 movie Foreign Agent, accessed on 1 March 2010.
http://imbd.com/title/tt0034748/trivia. The movie, set in Los Angeles, chronicled the efforts of the North
American Peace Organization, a front for Nazi agents, to steal the blueprints for filtered searchlights that
could spot planes at night, accessed 1 March 2010. http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/4956/Foreign-Agent.
4
movements, and the determined resistance from the political establishment limited their
appeal. The approach of war also diminished the reform impetus of the early New Deal
years by shifting the nation’s focus towards foreign affairs. This shift proved a critical
development because, by increasing the nation’s attention on international concerns,
Roosevelt appeared to radicals to shun the reforming impetus, thus contradicting the will
of the American people. Already marginalized and frustrated by the failure of extremist
movements of the 1930s, some radicals of the Right began to explain the domestic and
global conditions by drawing on sinister scenarios of conspiratorial forces undermining
American institutions and traditions. As the course of events rapidly developed contrary
to their world vision, a minority of radicals of the Right channeled their anger into
virulent rhetoric aimed at convincing Americans of the true dangers facing the country.
This aspect of political dissent has largely been largely overlooked by many analyses of
the home front in World War II.
The New Deal’s perceived failure contributed to the legitimacy of a worldview
sympathetic to answers provided in fascist and Nazi propaganda. For those Americans
who felt increasingly marginalized within society, radical Right platforms often
encouraged direct involvement in political processes and offered adherents a friendly
outlet to espouse their views. As this minority of Americans took to the political arena in
the 1930s and 1940s, both sides of the political debate defined themselves as the true
representatives of American ideals, vilifying their opposition, and ultimately setting the
stage for government suppression of wartime dissent. Through the example of the FOP in
wartime Los Angeles, this essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of the rise and
5
fall of right-wing dissent in California in the 1930s and 1940s and the wartime efforts to
suppress it.
Reconstructing this period in California history presents numerous challenges.
Indeed, California’s home front in World War II remains underrepresented, despite more
than fifty years of historical research by historians who have increasingly focused on a
greater inclusion of topics into the historical record.2 More often than not, histories of the
Second World War concentrate on military aspects, the workings of the federal
government and the growth of the defense industry, and how Americans endured the
stresses of the global war.3 Scholars, however, have typically ignored the small number
of Americans who refused to support what is generally considered the nation’s most
popular military conflict ever.
In assessing the conflict between civil liberties and national security in World
War II, historians have failed to forge a historical consensus. Roosevelt’s controversial
record on civil rights, his authorization of F.B.I. investigations of his critics, and the
ultimate success of wartime suppression measures have led some scholars to question the
president’s commitment to the Bill of Rights. At the same time, historians have often
allowed their ideological biases to color their interpretation on wartime civil liberties.4
2
Roger W. Lotchin, ed. The Way We Really Were: The Golden State in the Second Great War
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 2.
See William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) and
David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). While these works
provide excellent analyses of the American experience during World War II, they provide relatively short
descriptions of anti-intervention efforts and overlook wartime dissent.
3
Richard W. Steele, Free Speech in the Good War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 1.
Historical literature continues to reexamine FDR’s record on civil liberties during WWII, whether through
dissent suppression, his handling of German saboteurs, or the internment of Japanese, Italian, and German
4
6
Another difficulty is the public perception of the noninterventionist movement and the
radicals of the political Right. As Justus Doenecke writes, anti-interventionists “have
seldom done well before the bar of history” because, to most historians and the general
public, it was “criminal folly to have opposed major American efforts to check Hitler’s
Reich and Imperial Japan.” Not only did anti-interventionists suffer at the hands of prowar Americanism during the war, the negative stereotypes remain in the public
imagination to this day, tainting all opponents of the war as likely disciples of the
German American Bund or some other heinous fascist organization.5 Historians of the
home front have either largely dismissed the anti-intervention movement as unworthy of
discussion, or they portray the dissenters as representing the “people in the back parlors
who hated themselves or their lives,” or “crackpots working the back alleys” to present a
“hatred itself as a gospel.”6
Indeed, it is challenging to be sympathetic to radicals of the Right because, as
David Bennett points out, the writings left behind often demonstrate their own decided
lack of tolerance while at the same time calling for the summary eradication of
conspiratorial forces threatening to undermine America’s tolerant institutions without the
Americans during the war. In addition to Steele’s work, also see: Stephen Fox, Fear Itself: Inside the FBI
Roundup of German Americans During WWII: The Past as Prologue (New York: iUniverse Books, 2005.
Previously published as America’s Gulag: A Biography of German-American Internment & Exclusion in
World War II: Memory and History New York: Peter Lang Publishers, 2000.); Louis Fisher, Nazi
Saboteurs on Trial (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free
Speech in Wartime (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004)
5
Justus D. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention, 1939-1941
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 1.
6
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III: The Politics of Upheaval (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960; reprint, New York: Mariner Books, 2003), 82.
7
slightest regard to constitutional guarantees.7 Yet, radicalism of the political Right is part
of the American political tradition and, as historians continue to reassess radicalism of the
1930s and 1940s,8 it continues to provide a fruitful model to view the anxieties of
Americans in times of social upheaval while helping Americans to understand and
interpret their politics.
Significant for understanding the rise of radicalism of the Right is Richard
Hofstadter’s classic essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. According to
Hofstadter, American politics may not represent the rationally defined forum where
people outlined their interests and acted accordingly, because American politics are not
restricted to simply achieving particular interests. People also use politics to define and
express themselves, thereby exposing specific fears, values, and aspirations that exist
within a political milieu.9 Periods of dislocation and social stresses amplify anxiety and
uncertainty within a population, leading to emotional and, at times, irrational utilization
of politics to project feelings only marginally related to specific issues. In fact, public
reactions to political issues may depend more often on resort to the prominent use of
7
David Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 5.
8
See Richard Hofstadter The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
Inc., 1965; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 2008); Alan Brinkley Voices of Dissent (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc., 1982; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Geoffrey Smith To Save a Nation (New
York: Basic Books, 1973; reprint, Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1992); David Bennett The Party of Fear;
Kathryn S. Olmstead, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of
Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1971).
9
Richard Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, xxxiii.
8
symbolism.10 Hofstadter saw a correlation between the re-emergence of the radical
political Right and a “paranoid style” of politics, a view of the world that involves
feelings of persecution manifested in “grandiose theories of conspiracy.” This style of
politics was not restricted to individuals; rather, entire groups within a nation, culture, or
way of life might feel threatened and develop a deep sense of paranoid hostility. Viewing
themselves as unselfish and patriotic, right-wing paranoids, according to Hofstadter, were
aroused to feelings of righteousness and moral indignation against those who threatened
their social or economic status.11
This essay will show that the Friends of Progress reflected these paranoid
qualities during the course of their political activities. Hofstadter may have been
responding to the rise of Barry Goldwater, but his analysis of an American “paranoid
style” of politics applied to the tumultuous 1930s and maintains its relevance today.
Americans in the twenty-first century witness rapid social transformations based upon
evolutions in technology, the changing global role of the U.S., 9/11 and the “war on
terror,” conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, a severe economic recession, and the election
of the nation’s first African American president. Such challenges to the American social
fabric produce fears and anxieties that find representation in the Tea Party movement,
anti-illegal immigrant legislation, and images of un-American forces enlarging the U.S.
government and denigrating the American constitution.
10
Richard Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, xxxiii-xxxiv.
11
Richard Hostadter, Paranoid Style, 4-5.
9
Revisiting the story of the Friends of Progress sheds light upon another
tumultuous time, when Americans reeled from the worst economic depression in
American history, witnessed the rise of labor unions to an unprecedented level, and saw
the triumph of a welfare state that concentrated enormous federal powers in Washington.
Then, too, right-wing radicals concerned about the destruction of traditional America
organized into various political associations to fight back against the grand conspiracy of
international bankers, Communists and Socialists, Jews, labor unions, and Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. One such group was the FOP. The study of this organization may
enable historians to better understand the rise of the modern Right in California, the quest
by California to crush the dissident endeavor during World War II, and perhaps shed light
on the attraction and early usage of a paranoid style in American politics.
Biographical information and written sources related to the FOP are extremely
limited. The members of the FOP left no diaries, accumulated correspondence, or body of
literature that might be consulted by the scholar. Therefore, this work reconstructs the
fragmentary story of Robert Noble and the Friends of Progress largely through the
records of the Court of Appeals of California, Third District, the California Joint Fact
Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, the Los Angeles Times, Time, and a
variety of other contemporary accounts. There was “surprising little conflict between the
parties as to the basis facts” in the Noble case,12 allowing the historian to confidently use
court records and investigative reports to establish a sound foundation for the sequence of
12
Opinion by Court of Appeals of California, Third Appellate District, People v. Robert Noble et
al., Crim. No. 1816, 24 April 1945, 3, accessed 9 April 2009.
http://w3.lexisnexis.com/research2/delivery/download/retrieve.do?/filename=Robert_Noble.pdf.
10
events. This work also relied on the records of the California Department of Justice,
including the Office of the Attorney General, to incorporate investigations by local units
of the FBI and patriotic groups, to place the FOP within California’s civilian defense
efforts, and to respond to Axis Fifth Column threats.
To understand the position of the FOP, one needs to begin with World War I.
Prior to 1917, the Progressive movement sought an expansive agenda of reforms that
sought to reshape the nature of big business and American society to achieve results
oriented towards society’s common good. The Great War proved to be the high point of
this reform effort, providing an opportunity to construct a wartime model for a peaceful
progressive utopia.13 Mobilizing the nation for this crusade required the federal
government to centralize and control a strict war economy; however, as Michael McGerr
outlines, this war economy also unleashed unrest at home. With wartime inflation, the
cost of living soared and the tax burden increasingly fell on middle class Americans.
Labor strikes increased, as the federal government granted unions the right to organize
and bargain collectively for the duration of the war. The migration of blacks to cities
upset racial relations and led to deadly race riots and the resurgence of the Klu Klux
Klan. At the same time, numerous Americans harbored the false notion that their country
was being inundated by waves of Europe’s most undesirable immigrants-men and women
with radical political ideologies vastly at odds with American traditions. To prevent the
subversion of the United States by the hordes of southern and eastern European
13
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in
America (New York: Free Press, 2003; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), xiii-xvi.
11
anarchists and socialists, the American public pushed Congress to initiate bigoted
immigration restrictions. A war ostensibly devoted to the triumph of international peace
and progress instead created domestic turmoil that threatened American democracy.14
Another aspect of this federal control involved the overselling of the war by
government propaganda agencies. In the same way that Progressives sought to remake
American society through reforms, they also extended the power of government to
guarantee public support for the war.15 Because the enemies of the United States did not
launch an attack on American soil, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson
struggled to arouse the support of the American people, many of who sympathized with
the European country of their birth or that of their parents. Structurally, the need to foster
patriotic loyalties to the United States resulted in the creation of the Committee on Public
Information (CPI), under the direction of George Creel. This federal agency spewed tons
of pamphlets, news releases, speeches, newspaper editorials, political cartoons, and
motion pictures designed to mobilize ardent support for the crusade against Prussian
militarism, while simultaneously demonizing the German enemy in the most vicious
manner. The CPI produced anti-German war movies, highlighted German atrocities,
excoriated German culture, and falsely charged German Americans with countless acts of
sabotage and subversion. Outrageous nativistic propaganda alleged, for instance, that
butchers of Teutonic origin were filling sausages with glass, that German American
nurses were putting bacteria in Red Cross medical supplies, and the innocuous-appearing
14
15
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent, chapter IX.
William H. Thomas, Jr., Unsafe for Democracy: World War I and the U.S. Justice Department
Covert Campaign to Suppress Dissent (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 6.
12
Turnvereins were centers of military training for German Americans sympathetic to the
Kaiser.16
President Woodrow Wilson likewise fanned the anti-German hysteria by
announcing the sinister intrigue “actively conducted in this country” by “dupes of the
Imperial German government.”17 The issue of loyalty became essential for national
security, as the CPI and Wilson attacked those in opposition to the war. President Wilson
warned dissenters soon after the American entry that any disloyalty would be “dealt with
a firm hand of stern repression.” Disloyalty, to Wilson, was “not a subject on which there
was room for … debate.”18 If Wilson’s statements accorded with the 1916 Democratic
platform that expressly condemned any group or individual who might undermine
national unity, the president now began to argue for new legislation to suppress disloyal
activities.19
The Wilson administration sought to control dissent using the judicial and law
enforcement departments of the federal government in combination with civilian groups.
Less than three weeks after entering the war, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917,
which declared it illegal to “make or convey false reports or false statements with intent
to interfere” with the success of the U.S. military or “promote the success of its enemies.”
The new law further made it a crime to hinder military recruiting, or in any way “cause or
Susan Canedy, America’s Nazis: A Democratic Dilemma (Menlo Park, California: Markgraf
Publications Group, 1990), 9.
16
17
Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (New York: W.W. Norton and
Company, 2004), 153-4.
18
Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times, 137.
19
Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times, 145.
13
attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty” among the
troops.20 Using “cautionary visits” to pacifists, isolationists, socialists, union organizers,
German Americans, African Americans, and anti-war ministers, Justice Department
detectives undertook a massive campaign of intimidation and suppression of dissenters.
Moreover, from the spring of 1917 until the end of the war, chauvinistic vigilantes
frequently humiliated “unpatriotic” Americans and immigrants by forcing them to kiss
the American flag, while at the same time tarring and feathering those perceived as
particularly disloyal. The U.S. Justice Department did its part by deporting foreign
opponents of the Great War.21
Passage of the Alien Act of 1918 especially facilitated the federal government’s
efforts to expel any alien who belonged to an anarchist organization. Washington,
furthermore, denied accused foreign radicals the right to appeal their deportation or even
a right to counsel, despite the government basing its indictments on information gathered
in secret investigations and from secret witnesses. The amendment to the Espionage Act,
the Smith Act of 1918, strengthened the government’s ability to prosecute opponents of
the war by preventing anyone from writing, printing, or otherwise using language that
questioned the policies and practices of the U.S. government or its military. Each law
expanded Washington’s authority to quell civic unrest that could erupt, especially with
the looming threat of vigilante violence. To many Americans, the oppressive propaganda
campaign and the legal prosecutions of dissidents demonstrated a fearful concentration of
20
Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times, 151-152.
21
William H. Thomas Jr., Unsafe for Democracy, 3-6; Susan Canedy, America’s Nazis, 8.
14
power and aroused post-war demands to end the assault on the civil liberties of
Americans once and for all.
American involvement in the war did result in the Allied defeat of Imperial
Germany and the Central Powers; yet, Wilson’s efforts to implement his Fourteen Point
peace plan failed to halt territorial aggrandizement and the imposition of severe
reparations upon the losing nations. Rather than having a peace with no victors, ensuring
a world “safe for democracy,” the war appeared to cement a European status quo. World
War I produced disillusioned Americans, including the future FOP co-founder and
speaker Robert Noble. A pacifist whose family had encouraged him from childhood to
pursue a career in religious studies, Noble enlisted in the Navy in November of 1915, but
found that he disliked the military and soon deserted, leading to his initial arrest and
incarceration. Noble, however, promptly fled his prison ship, returning home until his
mother sent him back to the Navy. But he returned home once again, working for a
telephone company briefly before being re-arrested and sentenced to Portsmouth Prison.
Ordered to active duty in Europe with U.S. entry into the war, Noble refused and earned
himself a dishonorable discharge.22 Convinced of his moral rectitude, Noble felt justified
in his actions and took pride in his expulsion from the Navy, beginning a life-long
commitment to opposing war. The war, then, developed Noble’s sense of pacifism and
left him with the memories of intrusive government control and the suppression of free
speech.
22
California Legislature, Report of the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities
in California to California Legislature, Fifty-Fifth Session (Sacramento: California State Printing Office,
1943), 260, accessed on 15 May 2009.
http://ia700304.us.archive.org/6/items/reportofjointfac00calirich/reportofjointfac00calirich.pdf.
15
While no record exists of his early life or detailing his motivation for coming to
California, the image of the state’s incomparable prosperity of the 1920s lured many to
the West Coast and it is a reasonable to assume that Noble was among them. In any case,
according to contemporary chroniclers of the Ham and Eggs Movement, Winston and
Marion Moore, Noble found a lucrative job as a radio promoter and public speaker in
California, earning generous fees for motivational speaking on behalf of merchandizing
organizations and service clubs.23 Noble also dabbled in the real estate market, achieving
enough success that “when real estate began to slow down and then back up, Noble just
leaned on his oars and coasted.”24 Surrounded by fellow migrants likewise seeking a new
start in life, Noble reinvented himself in the Golden State, while achieving a modest level
of financial security and social stability.
In a period of extreme social and economic dislocation that strained the very
fabric of American society, Americans directly experienced an unleashing of political
activism resulting from the dual shock of the Depression and the advent of the New Deal.
The Wall Street crash of 1929 exposed ongoing economic problems hidden by the
appearance of prosperity in the “roaring 20s.” Large numbers of immigrants and racial
minorities remained on the margins of American life and this continued to arouse
concern, angst, and nativist reaction. Numerous farmers continually grappled with debt as
mechanization found its way onto the farm and surpluses grew, while in many respects,
23
Winston Moore and Marian Moore, Out of the Frying Pan (Los Angeles: DeVorss & Co.,
Publishers, 1939), 16-17.
24
Winston Moore and Marian Moore, Out of the Frying Pan, 17.
16
other farmers remained “untouched by modernity.”25 Despite the beginnings of black
migration northward, African Americans remained mostly confined within a Jim Crow
South. Labor tried to organize but felt the fierce antagonism of both officially sanctioned
reprisals and opposition from local patriotic groups. Women continued to be isolated
within the home. Poverty remained entrenched despite the appearance of prosperity in the
1920s, reflecting, according to David Kennedy, the “human wreckage of a century of
pell-mell, buccaneering, no-holds barred, free-market industrial and agricultural
capitalism” that reflected the deeply rooted structural inequities in American society. The
crash of the U.S. financial system threatened to cast more and more Americans
downward, exposing the dark underside of American economic and social inequities.26
This shifting cultural, social, and economic foundation created a sense of instability and
anxiety at the apparent erosion of traditional American norms, leaving Americans to
wonder if society would ever again recover its social equilibrium and financial solvency.
The election of Roosevelt in 1932 created a sense of hope; yet, by late 1934, the
lack of recovery increasingly led to opposition from the political Right and the Left. The
Roosevelt administration’s actions may have limited the damage but, as Kennedy writes,
by 1935 “recovery was no where in sight.” With little tangible evidence of success at
ending the Depression, agitation for radical alternative solutions grew. Indeed, by mid-
25
David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 16.
26
David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 168.
17
decade, the “curious passivity” of the American people yielded “to a mounting sense of
grievance and a restless demand for answers.”27
This quest for panaceas that would redress the problems created by the Great
Depression aroused radical opposition from across the political spectrum, as a plethora of
unorthodox economic and political programs promised what the New Deal seemingly
would not do. According to Alan Brinkley, a number of the protest movements of the
mid-1930s emerged as “an urge to defend the autonomy of the individual and the
independence of the community against encroachments from the modern industrial
state.”28 Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin, in particular, “presided over a popular
insurgency more powerful than any since the populist movement of the 1890s.”29 Both
charismatic leaders drew heavily upon populism and socially progressive ideas that
continued to resonate with many Americans in the 1930s. Rooted in American
conscience, these older reform traditions often served as a defense against what many
considered foreign and more radical solutions to their problems. The Depression, the
ongoing effects of industrialization, and the recovery efforts of an expanding federal
government challenged the established social fabric. The largely middle class nature of
Coughlinites and the adherents of Long’s Share the Wealth program reflected the
discontent of a large swath of Americans who lived precariously on the fringe of material
comfort. What they had acquired led them out of the lowest rungs of society and,
27
David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 189.
28
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1983), x-xi, 4-6.
29
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest, ix.
18
whatever their specific level of comfort, they had a stake in their local community and
their newly won status.30 The vague and elusive character of these movements allowed a
wide array of people to interpret and adapt specific elements to fit individual and local
needs.
For Depression-era California, long dominated by the Republican Party, the 1930s
represented a decade of incredible political and social upheaval and conflict. As Kevin
Starr wrote: “the inner landscape of California … showed constant signs of stress as
Right battled Left in a struggle that acted out on behalf of the rest of the nation a scenario
of possible fascism and Communism in these United States.”31 Like many other radicals
in California, Noble’s political activities blurred the lines between the political Left and
Right. Although a devout anti-communist, Noble supported liberal movements that
proposed left-leaning procedures to achieve recovery. However, his involvement with
these California radical movements also provided a solid foundation for his subsequent
affiliation with the radical Right.
Noble’s first documented association with a radical cause occurred with Upton
Sinclair’s End Poverty In California (EPIC) campaign for governor in 1934. This
movement reflected the dire conditions in southern California, namely Los Angeles
County, the home of the EPIC movement.32 The lack of productive industries, the
unrealistic lure of the movie industry, the end to the oil and real estate booms, and the
decline of the tourist trade all produced an overabundance of unemployed individuals
30
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest, 198-200.
31
Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), vii.
19
who had until recently belonged to the middle and lower middle class. This large cohort
of disaffected Angelenos now sought jobs as well as answers to their abject condition.
For a person facing an uncertain future, like Noble, EPIC provided a detailed
explanation for the crisis and a pseudo-scientific plan for recovery. I, Governor of
California, and How I Ended Poverty; A True Story of the Future detailed Upton
Sinclair’s sobering depiction of California in the Depression. A “strange paralysis” had
“fallen upon this land,” he wrote, where fruit crops rotted on the ground and vegetables
were “dumped into the bays” because there was no market for them. Meanwhile,
thousands wandered hungry and homeless, while homes existed that “no one was allowed
to occupy.” Indeed, a million people who wanted to work were prohibited from doing so,
while another million were being “taxed out of homes and farms to provide the money to
feed those starving ones who would be glad to earn their food but are not allowed to.”33
This “greatest crisis in our history,” noted Sinclair, rested on the long-standing
governance by a “business autocracy,” one that produced a “continuous struggle between
that autocracy and our potential democracy.” Insiders controlled chain banks, railroads,
and the public services, where they exploited “men and women as commodities” and
“excluded every man and woman who is not their servant from public life.” The
following two or three years, predicted Sinclair, would witness the “final battle,” where
32
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (New York: Duell, Sloan &
Pearce, 1946; reprint, Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, Publisher, 1973), 297.
33
Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future
(Los Angeles: n.p., 1933), 4-5.
20
“one side is going to destroy the other.”34 Sinclair linked his own limited political appeal
in the past to the popular delusion of economic prosperity, arguing that, “as long as the
present system feeds the people, they will keep on voting for it. But wait until it can no
longer feed them.”35
Sinclair’s conspiratorial politics, a style seething within California during the
Depression, resonated with Noble. Like others drawn to California by visions of
prosperity and the opportunity to remake one’s self, Noble initially achieved a certain
amount of economic success that now stood to vanish because of the Golden State’s
dismal condition. But Sinclair’s blueprint promised Noble and thousands more hope that
within two years California would rise out of its abyss through the creation of expertly
supervised land colonies for the unemployed, the pursuit of multiple types of agriculture,
and the construction of adequate housing that included co-operative kitchens and
cafeterias, together with rooms for social purposes. As each colony grew, living
conditions would grow from sustenance living to a lifestyle of comfort. Each colony
would develop into a “cultural center,” providing their residents with branch libraries,
theatres, and lecture halls to “explain the principles of cooperation.” Finally, the
establishment of general stores within each colony would offer at-cost goods to members
of the community, which they would purchase with scrip money issued by the state. This
34
Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty, 4.
35
Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty, 7.
21
novel approach would enable California to create competitive private producers that
would be able to support the unemployed and yet make profits.36
To support all this, Sinclair argued for the necessity of redistributing wealth
“either by legal enactments or by violent revolution; and we have not much longer in
which to make the choice.” He proposed erecting public corporations to handle industrial
production and land development. People would be encouraged to remove their money
from the public banks, to cede it and the banks to the State, and in the process develop a
statewide system of industrial production. Californians who had met the residency
requirement of three years and were at least sixty-years-old would receive an old-age
pension of $50 each month. This program for the elderly would be paid by increasing
taxes on the wealthy and on private utility corporations. For Sinclair, his EPIC program
had to be understood before it would garner the support of Californians. “The first step
towards educating the public,” wrote Sinclair, “was to have a propaganda group
organized in every neighborhood in the State,” and these groups required little or no
money because “a copy of the book [his book] was all that was needed.”37
For its supporters, EPIC painted a utopian portrait of social equality and a lack of
want. State intervention guaranteed a basic level of sustenance, distributed wealth, erased
class lines, and foretold a future of prosperity and security. However, for other
Californians, EPIC represented a distinct threat. Hollywood moguls opposed Sinclair and
EPIC because of Sinclair’s vision of a state-run movie studio and his scathing attack on
36
Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty, 14-16.
37
Upton Sinclair, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty, 25.
22
Hollywood in his book Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox. The movie industry’s
animosity towards Sinclair led to the creation of doctored newsreels depicting the
followers of the EPIC movement in the most negative manner.38 California’s major
newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oakland Tribune, and the Los
Angeles Times attacked Sinclair by using damning snippets from Sinclair’s books and
articles, while condemning his radical plans for California. Sinclair’s forecast of the
unemployed rushing to the Golden State to enjoy the fruits of his welfare program served
as the fodder for anti-EPIC billboard messages, mailers, and radio spots that warned of
hordes of bums infesting California.39
Earl Warren, at that time District Attorney of Alameda County, watched with
horror the rise of Sinclair’s EPIC program and its frontal assault on capitalism. Warren
believed that Sinclair augured the end of civilized democracy in California and that the
gubernatorial campaign was not so much a campaign between the two major political
parties as “a crusade of Americans and Californians against Radicalism and Socialism.”40
EPIC violated Warren’s centrist commitment to a capitalist society tempered by
progressive reforms and represented a dramatic example of dangerous subversion by
home-grown radicals of the kind he would battle throughout his political career. The
popular district attorney, a Hiram Johnson Republican, not only ran for re-election in
1934, but he used his campaign to help undermine and ultimately defeat Sinclair in
38
Jim Newton, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (New York: Riverside
Books, 2006), 81-82.
39
Jim Newton, Justice for All, 82.
40
Jim Newton, Justice for All, 83.
23
Alameda County and elsewhere in the state. Historian Jim Newton suggests that Warren
may have even used secret payments to Sinclair’s Democratic opponents in the
primary—or perhaps voter-suppression measures—in his efforts to waylay the EPIC
movement.41
While the concerted campaign against Sinclair succeeded, EPIC’s influence
stretched beyond the 1934 gubernatorial race. Although Sinclair exited from the political
stage after his defeat, others took up the torch on behalf of the reform cause. Robert
Noble, for one, determined that Californians might best accept the EPIC program if it was
separated from the two-party system and the promise of state support. At the same time,
the EPIC crusade offered Noble lessons that later would influence his own political
strategy. Most importantly, Noble recognized that Sinclair had presided over a political
campaign that struck a chord with the disenfranchised in California, exemplified by their
ardent devotion to the EPIC cause, as indicated by the persistence after 1934 of numerous
New Economy barber shops, EPIC cafes, and “plenty-for-all stores,” and Sinclair
portraits in the most remote and inaccessible communities in California.42 The continued
popularity of these EPIC-spawned institutions spoke to the latent power that grass roots
organizations could have outside of the political mainstream, for although Sinclair had
run as a Democrat, EPIC reoriented the possibilities of government in the daily lives of
Californians.
41
Jim Newton, Justice for All, 83-85.
42
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: Island on the Land, 298.
24
Noble also emulated EPIC’s call for immediate action, consistently pointing out
the failures of the New Deal on weekly radio appearances. Like Sinclair, Noble portrayed
the nefarious influence of moneyed powers dictating decisions, whether in Hollywood or
in California’s politics. Effectively exploiting the milieu of despondence that
characterized southern California, Noble gradually raised his public visibility as one of
several heirs to the EPIC movement. With greater confidence in his own ability to sway
the public and with greater firmness in his conviction, Noble began to expand his efforts
at arousing the discontented masses to action.
By 1935, Noble’s following was large enough to begin exerting pressure on local
politicians, as he exemplified by his confrontations with Los Angeles Mayor Frank L.
Shaw over the latter’s use of the city police department’s “Red Squad” to quell political
opposition. Originally established by city officials to ferret out communists and socialists
throughout the metropolis, the Red Squad under the command of Captain William “Red”
Hynes broke up meetings in halls and public parks, employed a network of spies and
informers to disrupt unions, and incited violence towards suspected communists.43 But
when members of the Red Squad allegedly clubbed two female anti-war protestors on the
campus of Los Angeles Junior College, Noble gathered several hundred followers to
descend on Mayor Shaw’s office to protest police brutality. Noble used the confrontation
to publicize his anti-war views, his unconditional support for free speech, and his deep
fears of government tyranny. Although fiercely anti-communist, Noble nonetheless
43
Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land, 291.
25
openly questioned both the appropriateness of the city’s Red Squad, which discouraged
freedom of expression, and the high financial cost of its operation.44
Noble also began to connect to other movements. Noble interested himself in the
work of Father Charles Coughlin, using the radio priest’s material in his own radio
speeches. Traveling in Louisiana for the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Noble
became acquainted with Huey Long’s Share the Wealth campaign. Noble, moreover,
expressed an early interest in the pension system advocated under the Townsend Plan and
spoke nightly on the plan, although he ultimately disagreed with its support of chain
stores.45
Noble also expanded the theory of scrip money developed by Yale’s Irving
Fisher—one of the country’s most celebrated economists, devising his own plan to utilize
substitute currency to provide the basis for implementing elderly pensions and
stimulating economic recovery. Why would Noble be attracted to the idea of pensions?
For one, pensions had served as a major ingredient of the EPIC movement, making the
elderly a major component of Sinclair’s movement. More importantly, because
Roosevelt’s Social Security benefits were not scheduled to kick in until 1942, pensions
for California’s aged were sorely needed and could again become the basis of a
formidable old-folks’ offensive, akin to Francis Townsend’s movement, which had
originated in Long Beach and then had become a powerful national crusade that
pressured FDR to enact Social Security in 1935.
44
“Charges of Clubbing Taken Before Mayor,” Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1935, A3, accessed
5 June 2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/392857021.html.
45
Winston and Marian Moore, Out of the Frying Pan, 20-23.
26
Aging Californians formed a prominent feature of the Southland’s demographic
landscape in the 1930s—one that, when coupled with California’s direct democracy
reforms of the early twentieth century, afforded a powerful political voice to a large
segment of California’s population. Of course, the pension issue also invited the attention
of ambitious politicians who might build a mass movement around the large cohort of
seniors in Los Angeles and its environs.46 Noble’s attachment to pension plans reflected
his recognition of one source of anxiety and fear endemic to southern California and one
that could yield a platform for larger political programs.
Ever since the 1870s, southern California had attracted retirees from the rest of
the nation. Boosters touted the region’s climate, its relatively sparse population, and the
countless array of sanitaria, spas, and resorts that promised to extend considerably the life
span of any resident of the area. The marketing of southern California as a veritable
utopia in which to spend one’s golden years represented a calculated plan by town
builders and land speculators.47 It required a full-scale advertising to broadcast images of
a mythical California, an enchanted Eden of oranges, mission bells, cheap land, and
eternal sunshine. Inspired by the writings of Helen Hunt Jackson and Charles Lummis
and orchestrated by the Los Angeles Times under Harrison Otis and Harry Chandler, the
46
Daniel J.B. Mitchell, Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly: Historic Social Movements and Their
Lessons for Our Aging Society (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 2000), 15-16.
47
25.
Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1992),
27
public relations effort transformed Los Angeles from the 187th largest city in the US to a
metropolis one million in less than a generation.48
As migration to California increased, the demographics in Los Angeles shifted
noticeably. Those aged over 50 in 1930 represented almost a third of the California
electorate and, though the aged were dispersed throughout the population, forty per cent
of Californians lived in Los Angeles County.49 Even before the Depression, senior
citizens in the United States endured a precarious existence. In 1928, sixty-five per cent
of the American population received some form of assistance from their children. Only
six states had any form of old-age assistance programs, and the federal government had
no history of providing aid to the aged. If only 184,000 out of fifteen million or so seniors
in the country enjoyed any legally mandated assistance at the end of the 1920s, the
Depression exponentially exacerbated the dire need for old-age relief.50 As California’s
aged suffered economic distress, a politician who could forge a cohesive plan and devise
an adequate framework to explain it would enthrall substantial numbers of supporters. If
properly mobilized and courted, the huge bloc of geriatric voters in California had the
potential to instantly make their ringmaster a powerhouse in state politics.51
The elderly consistently provided the grassroots support for Noble in his efforts to
realize his California Pension Plan as well as later to bring success to the Friends of
48
Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 25.
49
Daniel J.B. Mitchell, Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly, 21.
50
Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams, 134.
51
Daniel J.B. Mitchell, Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly, 20-22.
28
Progress. With his support base increasingly aroused, Noble sought action at the state
level. In 1937, he visited the state Assembly to argue his pension plan. Joined by
hundreds of his followers who traveled to Sacramento by special trains and caravanned
by car, Noble mobilized a large rally in a local auditorium before going to the Capital.52
The scheme proffered the legislators was the same one he had hawked on his radio
program in Los Angeles, which proposed to allow all Californians sixty and over to
receive $25.00 in scrip every Monday morning from the state treasury. This “money,”
which had to be spent in the coming week, would provide needed income for the aged
and stimulate local economies.
Noble’s radio speeches inspired widespread support for the economic panacea and
encouraged the formation of numerous clubs and alliances devoted to making the scheme
a reality. To finance an initiative drive to amend the state constitution, Noble solicited
pennies, nickels, and dimes from his radio audience. When he failed to win the
legislature’s support in Sacramento, he felt compelled to enter into a short-lived alliance
with two brothers, Willis and Lawrence Allen, both shady promoters, to help develop and
market the pension plan for the upcoming elections. The Allen brothers desired the
significant amounts of money Noble collected in dues and, over time, succeeded in
effectively sidelining Noble, ousting him from the pension movement and establishing
direct control over a movement to be known now as “Ham and Eggs.”
“New Pension Plan Offered,” Los Angeles Times, 15 April 1937, 5, accessed 5 June 2010.
http:/pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/395102861html.
52
29
Noble fought his marginalization from the pension movement he had created. In
1937, Noble organized a protest against radio station KMTR, seeking equal radio airtime
to oppose the Ham and Eggs movement and continue his campaign against Los Angeles
politicians. Noble urged an audience of 1,800 at the Trinity Auditorium to picket the
KMTR station as well as the radio station owner’s automobile agencies every Sunday
until they obtained free scheduled times for Noble’s speeches. A flag-waving Noble and
three hundred or so followers protested at the radio station until police dispersed the
demonstrators with tear gas, allegedly to deter the 2,000 additional followers said to be en
route to the rally. Police arrested Noble on suspicion of grand theft bunco and extortion
charges and also charged him for violating a city ordinance prohibiting Sunday parades
and failing to obtain a permit for a parade. Four others were charged for “assertedly
picketing illegally, blocking the sidewalk at 1028 North Cahuenga Boulevard, resisting
an officer and parading without a permit.”53
The charges against Noble resulted from the belief that the “asserted picketing”
constituted extortion because it compelled KMTR to offer free radio time to avoid what
the station owner claimed was Noble’s promise of violence against the station. The
prosecution’s contention of grand theft bunco derived from Noble’s failure to keep
records of donations designed to support radio and print advertising, auditorium rents,
and additional expenses. While Noble contended that he could document all monies, the
local authorities in fact determined that $29,000 worth of funds could not be explained.
“Age Pension Promoter Jailed in Riot,” Los Angeles Times, 18 October 1937, 1, accessed 5 June
2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/397039241.html.
53
30
Police seized numerous letters from some of Noble’s followers who had previously
donated money, and, for the prosecution, these letters allegedly proved many of Noble’s
adherents were in dire financial straits and would benefit from the return of the money.54
The trial resulted in Noble’s conviction for violating the picketing ordinance. The
trial also illustrated the anxiety created by Noble’s outspoken political activities. On one
side, the Los Angeles Police Department and city officials considered Noble’s political
activism and its potential public support so threatening that it needed to be suppressed,
even with violent and extralegal methods. Initially attributing the detonation of a tear gas
bomb to the protestors, Captain Earl E. Kynette, the head of the department’s Red Squad,
subsequently admitted setting off the bomb during the arrests because he anticipated
violence. He even opened a photographer’s camera to search for firearms because of a
fear that smuggled weapons were going to be employed at the rally. As Captain Kynette
said: “we were told…[the protestors] were coming with thirty-thirty rifles.”55
For Noble, the suppression of their political activities reinforced his belief in the
corruption of California’s political system, fanning the flames of Noble’s fiery rhetoric
and encouraging him to redouble his efforts to achieve what he considered necessary
reforms. Following his incarceration, Noble confronted the Police Commission,
demanding the immediate elimination of the Red Squad, the summary removal of the
Chief of Police, and the resignation of the commission if it continued to sanction police
“Age Pension Promoter Jailed in Riot,” 1; “Age-Pension Promoter’s Writ Plea Dismissed,” Los
Angeles Times, 31 October 1937, A3, accessed 5 June 2010.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/397048131.html.
54
“Bombing Told in Noble Case,” Los Angeles Times, 6 November 1937, A8, accessed 5 June
2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/397096491.html.
55
31
misconduct. When the Commission avoided the issue by disavowing jurisdiction and
quickly adjourning, Noble addressed a throng of followers and called on the public to
demand the abolition of the citizen’s body. He next recited his police record to the
assembled crowd, lamenting the high cost in tax dollars and proffering it as proof that the
LAPD still employed specialized squads to monitor and harass any opposition to the
mayor. When Noble failed to gain face-to-face access to the mayor, he turned the
mayor’s large front lobby … “into an auditorium” for some three hundred people who
had gathered.56
Noble also used his incarceration to remain in the public eye, using his stay in jail
as a forum to further express his views. In fact, while in custody, Noble announced his
intention to run for governor in 1938 on his platform of pension reform. “Poison the
politicians and purify the state” served as his motto, indicating Noble’s growing sense of
frustration and suspicion towards California’s politicians.57 Noble felt betrayed by
Culbert Olson and the Democratic Party because Olson appeared to endorse his pension
plan only as a means to “secure his nomination for Governor.” Even though thousands of
voters had expressed their readiness to support Olson because they had confidence in his
ability to keep his campaign promise and implement Noble’s pension system, the
nominee of the Democratic Party had instead proceeded to sidetrack the issue through a
series of maneuvers that allowed the Olson forces to gain control of the convention.
56
“Noble Attacks Police Board,” Los Angeles Times, 30 March 1938, A3, accessed 5 June 2010.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/399035391.html.
“Bombing Told In Noble Case,” Los Angeles Times, 6 November 1937, A8, accessed 5 June
2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/397096491.html.
57
32
Ultimately, according to Noble, Olson and the Democratic Party completely ignored the
pension plan and instead adopted a platform “replete with weasel words similar to the
Republican platform.”58
By this time, however, the looming threat of war in Europe captured the attention
of Americans. Noble, like many Americans, supported a non-interventionist position and
backed organizations that actively fought against United States involvement in Europe.
Nevertheless, the lingering Depression left Noble’s vision for political change unfulfilled.
While radical reform movements supported by Noble had yielded ephemeral
achievements, a resurgence of a unified and determined political status quo thwarted
efforts at meaningful social change, such as those by the EPIC and Townsend
Movements. Noble personally experienced repression, corruption, and incarceration.
Now he witnessed a nation that had failed to achieve a suitable economic recovery or
initiate true economic reforms. Now, the United States crept slowly towards involvement
in a foreign conflict that he bitterly opposed, with the Roosevelt administration betraying
the will of the American people with its support of Great Britain against Germany. These
international developments fuelled Noble’s deep angst, a feeling that would be expressed
within the anti-interventionist movement.
Earl C. Behrens, “Noble Scores Olson Race on $30 Pension Program,” Los Angeles Times, 22
September 1938, 16, accessed 5 June 2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/399567771.html.
58
33
Chapter 2
FRIENDS OF PROGRESS, FASCISM, AND THE THREAT OF WAR
The Los Angeles based Friends of Progress, to many Americans, developed as a
homegrown organization that sought the establishment of a dictatorship in one form or
another. It did not feel constricted by either having to directly advocate communism or
fascism. Indeed, groups like the Klu Klux Klan, the League to Save America First, the
Christian Patriots, the National Copperheads, and the Friends of Progress could be
equally guilty of using the leadership principles of Hitler and Mussolini. Images of Nazi
domination overseas and their seeming acceptance by sympathizers in the United States
fueled fears that a homegrown fascism could arise and usurp power. This anxiety
contributed to the creation of federal and state un-American activity committees to
determine the extent of subversive infiltration into the United States and “educate” the
general public about any dangers within their midst. As German armies overran much of
Europe at the beginning of World War II, the Fifth Column appeared to be decisive in
assuring the success of Nazi victories. Honed to perfection by fascist aggressors, this new
style of warfare, which depended on local collaborators to undermine the government
from within, provoked considerable anxiety among Americans. Washington and the
national press quickly assumed the widespread presence of similar seditious infiltrators in
the American heartland. Radical groups with their anti-Semitic speeches, fascist
trappings, and claims to free speech rights only seemed to confirm the menace of an
active Fifth Column and its threat to national security. When the United States entered
34
the war, American leaders intensified their call for suppressing so-called “fascist” groups
that, through their opposition to the war, seemingly acted as agents of the Axis powers.
“In retrospect,” William Leuchtenburg writes, “we can see that Americans fretted
too much about the danger of fascism,” but nevertheless the totalitarian movement “did
muster a disturbing amount of support.”59 As Americans watched with alarm as the
German Wehrmacht expanded territorially after 1935, reclaiming the Rhineland, uniting
with Austria, and, in 1939, taking Czechoslovakia, Nazism joined Communism as a
feared ideology in the American political consciousness. Americans also witnessed the
growing severity of anti-Jewish policies, culminating in the horrific Kristallnacht pogrom
of November 1938. Yet, even as the threat of a European war approached, Americans
remained polarized between those who favored aiding the Allied powers either through
direct intervention or financial aid and others who hoped to remain aloof from foreign
entanglements.
This so-called “Great Debate” featured anti-interventionists who spanned the
political spectrum and advocated stances ranging from absolute pacifism to defense of the
Western Hemisphere. Interventionist arguments, too, ran the gamut from a major
commitment of financial aid and supplies to the Allied cause to outright and direct
military involvement on their behalf. As Roosevelt reinterpreted or bypassed the
Neutrality Laws, whether through Cash and Carry, Lend-Lease, escorting naval convoys,
or the arming of merchant ships, the movement towards intervention escalated and the
59
William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc. 1963; reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 276.
35
more militant of the Right began to assert their dissatisfaction with Washington’s
burgeoning policies. In fact, some isolationists began to forge what they viewed as a
credible theory blaming the drift toward internationalism on conspiratorial forces both
within and without the United States. According to this conspiracy theory, the British and
Jews, for instance, shaped the decisions of Americans in government and on Main Street.
To discredit Roosevelt and other globalists, isolationists unabashedly employed antiSemitism and other negative verbal assaults. Conversely, interventionists, and
subsequently most Americans, increasingly associated these more radical isolationists
with subversion and un-Americanism.
According to the California Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American
Activities, anti-Semitism and organized racial prejudice were “as un-American and as
subversive as … Nazism and Communism” and were “the spearhead of Nazi
penetration—a softening-solvent for panzer divisions and collaboration with the New
Order.”60 The persecution of the Jews in Germany produced outrage and sympathy from
the American people. Horrified Americans watched as the German government banned
Jews from professions, confiscated Jewish businesses and property and stripped them of
their citizenship. While the German government downplayed the severity of Jewish
conditions, reports of persecutions filtered into the Roosevelt administration from
overseas diplomats and reporters. Concerned Americans expressed sympathy towards the
Jewish plight but remained committed to maintaining the restrictive immigration quotas
60
California Legislature, Report of the California Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American
Activities in California to the California Legislature, Fifty-fifth Session (Sacramento: California State
Printing Office, 1943), 247, accessed 15 May 2009.
http://ia700304.us.archive.org/6/items/reportofjointfac00calirich/reportofjointfac00calirich.pdf.
36
enacted after World War I. The prevalence of unemployment, nativism, and antiSemitism in the United States encouraged the maintenance of severely restrictive
immigration quotas that hindered any true cohesive effort to help European Jews.61
The United States’ lurch towards war, however, brought out the “true”
Americanism of the nation and focused attention on the critical importance of unity and
tolerance. Because the actions of the radical Right—especially its anti-Semitism—
threatened to associate the war effort more closely with Judaism and thus potentially
divert critical support for the war, it became imperative for national security purposes to
identify anti-Jewish bigotry with Nazism, intolerance, and totalitarianism.
False popular notions that Jews represented a foreign element advanced American
anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s and led many to continue to view Jews as
dangerous aliens who swelled the ranks of communistic and un-American groups. Failure
to convert to Christianity particularly facilitated the perception that Jews did not desire
assimilation, thereby hindering their efforts to gain acceptance in American society. As
Leonard Dinnerstein pointed out, this spurious idea received wide circulation in religious
publications like the Christian Century.62 As a Christian magazine that supported
nonintervention, the Christian Century hoped to analyze the "Jewish Problem.” Despite
editorials and articles apparently sympathetic to the plight of Jews, however, the
Christian Century employed language that furthered the argument that Jews should
embrace Jesus Christ and, thus, become “real” Americans. The magazine opined that
61
David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press 1968; reprint, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 3.
62
Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994),
109-110.
37
Jews attempted to “pluck the fruits” of a democratic society “without yielding to the
processes of democracy.” According to the Christian Century, the difficulties between
Christians and Jews existed within a dynamic society that Jews failed to assimilate into
because Jews would “never command the respect of the non-Jewish culture” because they
chose to remain segregated from society within their own communities.63
Those who questioned the loyalty of Jews to their specific interpretation of an
American Way routinely linked them to international conspiracies. Christian
fundamentalists particularly equated Judaism with communism and insisted that America
must continue to combat the Soviet threat by preserving the United States as a “Christian
nation. Others believed that Hitler’s vicious persecution of the Jews signified God’s
retribution or, as evidenced in The Alabama Baptist, that the Jews had earned the ire of
Christians because of their insatiable dedication to material gain, their boundless avarice,
their unctuous sanctimony, and their predilection to membership in radical organizations
such as the Communist Party.64 Not only advocated by some Christian groups, these
perceptions drawn from centuries of anti-Semitic stereotypes also found avid adherents in
the national government. Elected leaders frequently fell prey to manufactured stories of
Jewish schemes to achieve world domination and some actively supported anti-Semitic
groups. Representative Jacob Thorkelson of Montana, for example, worried about a
“conspiratorial group of international financiers, mostly Jewish in faith and communistic
in principles” who sought to involve the country into war. Senators Gerald Nye, Burton
63
Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 109-110.
64
Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 111.
38
K. Wheeler, and Robert Reynolds openly aligned themselves with known anti-Semites.
Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas praised the “good” work of Father Charles Coughlin—
the rabidly anti-Jewish radio priest—and Senator Paul McNary of Oregon even resisted
to have any dealings with Jewish bureaucrats. Congressman Fred C. Gartner of
Philadelphia expressed enthusiastic support for the German American Bund
(Amerikadeutscher VolksBund), Representative Hamilton Fish allowed the Silver Shirts
to distribute materials through his mail franking privileges granted by the House, and
Martin Dies of Texas reminded his Congressional colleagues that anti-Semitism was not
a crime.65
In California, latent anti-Semitism coexisted and flourished with the successive
waves of immigrants and the images of the Golden State that led them to cross the nation
looking for a better life. Taking their cue from the booster propaganda of Charles
Lummis and the local Chamber of Commerce, writers antiquarians, and publicists in the
Southland portrayed Los Angeles as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon
racial odyssey and established the “script” for the real estate speculation in early
twentieth century Los Angeles.66 Until the late 1930s, the dominance of the Republican
Party in California emanated from this initial origin myth, which not only lured thousands
of Midwesterners and their devout servility to the GOP to the shores of the Pacific Ocean
but found representation in the image of Iowa Hawkeye native Herbert Hoover and his
brand of reform ideals. Indeed, according to Kevin Starr, Hoover’s brand of
20.
65
Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America, 135-136.
66
Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1992),
39
progressivism “struck the deepest possible chord in California’s inner political self,”
attracting middle and upper class whites wanting to relocate to a land of sun and political
enlightenment. Many of these transplanted Californians—weaned on the same sacred
precepts of rugged individualism, personal initiative, and self-reliance that animated
Herbert Hoover, similarly shared the Stanford graduate’s animus against big government,
big business, and big labor. At the same time, they no doubt embraced the thirty-first
president’s abiding faith in engineering and scientific efficiency.67
As southern California experienced continuous waves of immigration from other
regions of the U.S., anxiety spread within a white community witnessing its numerical
eclipse as well as its loss of social and economic status. In an effort to recover its
dominant position, the white elite closed ranks against non-WASPs, particularly L.A.’s
Jews who heretofore had served as an integral element in the city’s ruling aristocracy. By
the early 1900s, elite Jews began to find themselves ostracized from corporate
directorships, law firms, philanthropies, and social clubs that many had helped to
establish. As Jewish bankers suffered from the rise of branch banking, California’s
growing anti-Semitism drove them and many other members of the “Jewish Old Guard”
to retreat into their own segregated culture.68
Jews, too, found themselves virtually locked out of oil speculation in southern
California. Armed with the financial equivalents of restrictive covenants, exemplified by
separate stock pools for Jewish and gentile capital, the oil industry effectively kept out all
67
Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 198.
68
Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 116.
40
but the entrenched elite establishment.69 In Hollywood, with its high numbers of affluent
Eastern Jews associated with the film industry, the new social mandate banned Jews from
the most prestigious country clubs and their children from the best private schools. Studio
boss Louis B. Mayer, for instance, was excluded from social inner sanctums enjoyed by
mid-level WASP realtors and used-car dealers.70 Even Warren Olney III, California’s
Deputy Attorney General and later a prosecutor for the FOP trial, carelessly took to
doodling swastikas on memos to the Jewish lawyers who worked with him in the District
Attorneys Office until he learned the true nature and extent of the German persecution of
the Jews.71 Though often subtle, American anti-Semitism was pervasive and furnished
the fertile ground for conspiratorial politics by offering the radical Right with a tangible
culprit to explain a failed status quo. Because of its importance to the Nazi ideology,
Americans increasingly looked upon blatant anti-Semitism as positive proof of
membership in or sympathy towards Nazi Germany. The presence of the German
American Bund in the U.S. cemented that association in the minds of many Americans,
especially in southern California.
The German American Bund had a long and visible presence in both California
and the nation. Originally known as the Friends of New Germany (FONG), this
69
Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 116-117.
70
Mike Davis, City of Quartz, 119.
Warren Olney III, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration in the Earl Warren Era,” Earl
Warren Oral History Project interview conducted by Miriam F. Stein and Amelia R. Fry, 1970-1977
(Berkeley: Regional Oral History Project, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1981),
197, accessed 2 February 2009.
http://ia700307.us.archive.org/35/items/enforcementjudi00olnerich/enforcementjudi00olnerich.pdf.
[Hereafter: Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration”].
71
41
movement largely attracted recent immigrants from Germany to the United States who
had experienced the horrors of the Great War and the subsequent chaos it produced in
Germany. Upon Adolf Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933, the group sought to
promote Hitler’s vision for a united community of all Germans, regardless of their
present country of residence. In accordance with the dictates of Nazism, the Bund’s
mission involved making all Americans of German extraction aware of their
“Germanness” and their obligation to the Vaterland.72
The German American Bund’s presence in southern California began with the
creation of the Germanic Bund, a Los Angeles-based pro-Nazi group similar in most
respects to the Friends of New Germany. In 1933, its leader, Ernst Rheydt-Dittmar,
sought to expand his organization’s appeal to a larger segment of L.A.’s German
American community by developing after school German language programs for
children. The group must have had a certain amount of success because, coming under
increasing pressure from the local Friends of New Germany chapter, Rheydt-Dittmar
merged with it in July of 1934.73 The group’s activities in Los Angeles centered on the
Deutsches Haus, a combination meeting hall and restaurant. Social gatherings and
meetings took place there and it served as the headquarters of the Western Division of the
Bund. Large-scale social activities, namely the yearly celebration of German Day, took
place in Hindenburg Park. In addition, according to the local chapter of the American
Legion, several bookstores in Los Angeles sold cultural and political materials relating to
72
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1929-1941 (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1974), 140.
73
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 184.
42
Germany and the Nazi Party, most notably the Aryan Bookstore within the Deutshces
Haus, the Continental Book Shop on West 7th Street, and the National Book Mart on 5th
Avenue.74
However, in looking at the appeal of the Bund, the dominant attraction to German
Americans proved to be neither the concept of racial or Germanic superiority, but rather,
according to Sander A. Diamond, the recovery of personal economic and social status.
Indeed, a significant portion of the membership consisted of skilled vocational workers
who found their professions increasingly obsolete in the industrialized post-war world,
leading to fears of further proletarianization and loss of prestige. Often forced to find
work outside of their occupational specializations, these Bundists suffered severe
hardships during the Great Depression. First and second generation immigrants—and
especially recently naturalized German Americans—showed they were particularly
susceptible to the Nazi credo, which attributed all Teutonic misfortunes, including the
Kaiser’s defeat in 1918 and the ravages of the Great Depression, to the “ubiquitous”
Jews. Intense fear drove German Americans to the Bund, including a dread of
communism, Jews, and further proletarianization or unemployment.75 Jews also supplied
the Bundists with a nemesis they automatically blamed for the Bund’s own problems,
74
Americanism Committee of the American Legion, 17th District, Department of California,
Report #1, “Subversive Activities in the America First Committee In California,” 10 October 1941, 7,
accessed 2 February 2009. http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/THR-AF12.PDF. [Hereafter
referred to as Americanism Committee of the American Legion, 17 th District, “Subversive Activities”].
75
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 150-152.
43
including the pressure from federal bodies dispatched to investigate the Germanic
organization.76
When internal and external forces split up the Friends of New Germany, it was
reformed in 1936 under the supervision of Fritz Kuhn as the German American Bund.
Kuhn adopted the authoritarian leadership principle used in the Nazi party, eschewing the
title of president and adopting the title of Führer. He also demanded strict loyalty and
created a command structure that replicated the leadership principle at the national,
regional and local levels. To maintain order at rallies and celebrations, the Bund
expanded the OD, the Order Division, as a para-military police force. And in an effort to
replicate Nazism in the United States, the Bund fostered parades, torch-lit rallies, youth
camps, elaborate uniforms, and robust militarism. On German Day, the Bund sponsored
large and exuberant celebrations that featured both the Nazi swastika and Old Glory
flying side by side. Indeed, Kuhn made concerted efforts to coordinate the Bund with
unaligned German and American organizations to give the appearance of unity between
German American and non-German groups.77 The Bund disseminated its literature
through its own publishing corporation and undertook aggressive marketing campaigns.78
By June 1937, Kuhn shifted the Bund’s anti-Semitic campaign to focus on “Gentile
America” in an effort to lure other native-born whites to his movement. Furthermore,
taking note of the Dies Committee’s preoccupation with the Communist threat, Kuhn
76
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 152, 155-156.
77
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 244.
78
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 232.
44
decided to emphasize his group’s militant anti-Communist and isolationist position,
thereby hoping to capture the support of isolationists, anti-Semites, and right-wing
organizations.79
In the minds of most Americans, the increasingly flamboyant and bellicose
methods of the Bund became associated with thugs and racists. After the Kristallnacht
pogrom of 1938, Americans began to link Nazism and the Bund to repression, violence,
and aggressive territorial expansion. A Nazified Europe seemed a greater reality,
especially after the German Anschluss with Austria and the taking of Czechoslovakia.
The presence of 22, 000 attendees at the 1939 celebration of Washington’s Birthday in
New York’s Madison Square Garden marked its high point before concerted
governmental efforts to disband the organization succeeded by 1941. While never
attracting a mass following, the Bund and its raucous Storm Troopers imprinted itself on
the public mind in the aftermath of the Washington birthday rally. To many Americans,
Nazi demonstrations convinced them that a native totalitarian dictatorship in the United
States was entirely feasible, or, at the very least, the introduction of a Nazi Fifth Column
that would prepare North America for military occupation by the Third Reich.80
This fear of subversion contributed to a concerted reaction against any perception
of un-American activities at the national, state, and local levels. For one, it led to the
creation of the Un-American Activities Committees at the state and federal levels. In
March of 1934, the U.S. House of Representatives authorized the investigation of un79
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 316-317.
80
Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United States, 21.
45
American activities by a special committee under John W. McCormack of Massachusetts
and Samuel Dickstein of New York.81 The McCormack-Dickstein Committee
investigated suspected Nazi activities, in particular the Friends of New Germany, and
found it “for all practical purposes the American section of the Nazi Party.82 Four years
later, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to convene the House Committee to
Investigate Un-American Activities, chaired by Representative Martin Dies and
commonly referred to as the Dies Committee, with investigating “the extent, character,
and objects of un-American propaganda activities in the United States.”83 The Dies
Committee, like its predecessor, emphasized the public exposure of un-American
activities and utilized hearings before the U.S. Congress to extol the dangers facing the
nation. As an example, the Dies Committee sent John C. Metcalfe, a newspaperman, as
its paid investigator to join and infiltrate the Bund and report his findings. In his first
appearance before the Dies Committee, Metcalfe testified that the Bund was a “hateful”
Nazi network with 500,000 U.S. sympathizers. When recalled, Metcalfe amplified his
analysis, calling the Bund a “fighting subversive force” that had penetrated into U.S.
navy yards and aircraft factories and one that could “muster a force” of 5,000 soldiers. He
told of Bundsman Albert Zimmer maintaining double sets of bookkeeping records
because of the silent, wealthy contributors from American industries that helped support
81
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, Vol. III: The Politics of Upheaval (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1960; reprint, New York: Mariner Books, 2003.), 85.
“National Affairs: Bund Banned,” Time, 14 March 1938, accessed 12 January 2010.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,759273,00.html.
82
83
Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to
the War on Terrorism (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 245; Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi
Movement in the United States, 280.
46
the movement. Metcalfe also revealed the explicit German authorization for Kuhn to
personally handle disputes between Bund groups, German consular agents, and the
German Embassy.84 The Committee’s proceedings and the spectacular nature of the
testimonies received widespread coverage by the media and accelerated the pace of
investigations at the state level.85
In the Golden State, California’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American
Activities sought to ferret out potential subversive organizations within the state and the
German American Bund also became a primary target of their efforts. The Tenney
Committee, named for its chairman Jack Tenney, was especially concerned with any
interference with the National Defense Program and looked for activities that would
render “the people of the State … less fit, physically, mentally, morally, economically, or
socially …” Any organization dominated or controlled by a foreign power or any activity
that obstructed or hindered defense programs, the operation of state agencies or
governmental policies, or educational institutions required investigation.86 Investigators
for the Tenney Committee infiltrated suspected organizations and attended meetings and
rallies, all the while documenting the membership and content of the proceedings.87
“Congress: Hitler’s Shadow”, Time, 10 October 1938, accessed 12 January 2010.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,883694,00.html.
84
85
Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times, 246, Sander A. Diamond, The Nazi Movement in the United
States, 281.
86
Edward L. Barrett Jr., The Tenney Committee (New York: Cornell University Press, 1951), 11-
87
Edward L. Barrett Jr., The Tenney Committee, 19-20.
13.
47
In addition, local patriotic and community organizations also joined the crusade to
eradicate any Nazi menace in California. In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Community
Relations Committee was formed in 1933 and may have been the first of over one
hundred locally organized Jewish defense organizations in the United States that arose
during the 1930s. Created in response to Hitler’s ascension to power and rising antiSemitism, the Los Angeles CRC’s informant network and reporting system infiltrated and
exposed L.A.’s Nazi and fascist anti-Semitic organizations. The CRC gathered pertinent
information about the militant radical Right groups in southern California and then
brought this data to public attention whether through the use of its own News Research
Service or by exchanging the information with state and federal governments.88 One such
group was the Friends of Progress and CRC informants chronicled FOP meetings from
September of 1941 until the FOP members went to trial. Their reports provided valuable
data for the investigation of the FOP by the Attorney General’s Office by articulating the
content of FOP meetings and providing copies of handbills and literature that was sold at
the FOP meetings.89
Also active in southern California was the American Legion. The 17th District of
the American Legion formed an Americanism Committee, under Chairman Ben S. Beery,
Institutional Sketch, “An Inventory to the Los Angeles, California-Community Relations
Committee Records”, Manuscript No. 619, accessed on 4 August 2011.
http://americanjewisharchives.org/aja/FindingAids/La-crc.htm.
88
89
The Noble Case files within The Department of Justice Office of the Attorney General
Collection at the California State Archives has a wealth of informant reports contained in two folders:
R177.095, box 184, folders 18 and 19. Informants commented on crowd attendance and composition,
speech content, the various movements of FOP members and their associates, and the selling of radical
literature during FOP meetings. Often, each meeting will have several informants in attendance; therefore,
there are often multiple reports with varying degrees of detail.
48
to investigate the subversive and un-American influences in the American First
Committee in California after a petition to the national America First headquarters failed
to achieve results.90 Despite the demise of the German American Bund in 1939, to the
Americanism Committee, the exodus of Bund members into various anti-interventionist
organizations and local patriotic groups was particularly alarming. To the Americanism
Committee, the Bund had aligned itself with anti-intervention efforts and unsuccessfully
attempted to align itself with the most prominent anti-intervention group, the America
First Committee. Reports from America First Committee meetings in southern California
detailing booing and hissing at the mention of prominent members of the Roosevelt
administration or interventionists merely confirmed the suspicion that there was a
widespread infiltration of the America First Committee in the state.91
The results of the American Legion’s 17th District Americanism Committee
investigations were compiled into a report titled “Subversive Activities in the America
First Committee” in October of 1941.92 According to the report, membership in the
German American Bund was, at one time, easy to discern. Bund members “had no
hesitancy in parading in Stormtrooper uniforms and in displaying the Swastika flag.”
Seemingly “overnight,” however, the Bund had changed. When the Bund disintegrated in
1939, the “‘National Fuehrer’ ordered the destruction of membership lists,
90
Americanism Committee of the American Legion, 17th District, “Subversive Activities, 1.
91
Americanism Committee of the American Legion, 17th District, “Subversive Activities,” 1-3.
92
Ben S. Beery, testimony for prosecution, 28 April 1942, Transcripts-Grand Jury, People vs.
Robert Noble et al., April 28-May 5, 1942, R177.100 189/24, 9-10, Department of Justice-and Office of the
Attorney General Records, Criminal Case Files, Noble Case Files, California State Archives, Office of the
Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
49
correspondence and other records.”93 The Americanism Committee was alarmed about
the subversive activities of former Bund members and one of those activities involved
anti-interventionist efforts and the America First Committee. Because the language used
in certain America First Committee meetings correlated with statements often found in
German propaganda, it indicated the extent to which Bundists had infiltrated the America
First movement for “the express purpose of presenting their subversive propaganda to
those sincere isolationists who have been attracted to meetings of America First.” There
was “practically no difference between the activities of these persons when functioning
on behalf of the America First Committee and when functioning on behalf of the
subversive channels with which they identified.” As a result, subversives took over
America First meetings by a gradual but complete “switching of the organization’s policy
from one that merely encourages the theory of defense through isolation, to a policy of
sponsoring the indiscriminate spread of hatred, confusion, dissension, defeatism, and
various other elements of the propaganda line set down by the Nazi government for its
agents in the United States.”94
While many Americans considered advocating isolationism and anti-Semitism as an
indication of sympathy or support for Nazi ideology and, thus, a threat to national
security, to members of the FOP, Jews were at the center of the conspiratorial forces
leading the United States to war and the FOP set out to bring this news to the public. As
Robert Noble explained at a 13 September 1941 FOP meeting in Los Angeles: “In the
93
Americanism Committee of the American Legion, 17th District, “Subversive Activities,” 5.
94
Americanism Committee of the American Legion, 17th District, “Subversive Activities,” 18.
50
last six months there has been a great number of anti-Semitic organizations start up.
There must be a reason for this, so [Charles] Lindbergh is right; they’d better be careful.
They control everything, government, radio, press.”95 Early on, however, Noble
attempted to clarify his anti-Jewish position by singling out Jewish interventionists.
Noble agreed with Charles Lindbergh that “many Jewish people were asking for war.”
But he did not condemn the fine honest Jewish individuals who are sincerely working for
peace…. [W]e are not condemning the Jewish people as a race, only those who are trying
to force this country into war.”96 Additionally, Noble did not “intend to stand here and
persecute the Jewish people. They are a fine people, very intelligent and honest. I want
that clearly understood. The Jewish people are honest and hard working. They have
contributed some of our finest citizens. One of the greatest men we ever had or will have
is Jewish Albert Einstein.” 97 But these brief, early attempts to rationalize anti-Semitism
deteriorated as Noble increasingly accused Jews of undermining the anti-war cause and,
by 11 October 1941, Noble declared himself officially anti-Semitic. When recounting the
picketing of Dr. Beauschamps, a dentist advertising in the Los Angeles Daily News,
Noble believed that “… the only people who have been giving us trouble down at the
picket line are the Jewish people. So tonight I have something to declare. I have quit my
Informant Report 5961, 15 September 1941, 1, Sacramento “S” Files: News Research, R177.095
184/18, Department of Justice and Office of the Attorney General Records, Criminal Case Files, Noble
Case, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California. [Hereafter: Noble
Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095 ###/## where ###/## designates box/folder location].
95
96
Informant Report 602#(number obscured), 21 September 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News
Research R177.095, 189/18, 1.
97
184/18.
Informant Report 6046, 24 September 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
51
Jewish doctor and my Jew lawyer; and I now declare myself anti-Semitic, from now on.”
Convinced that all advertisements in the Los Angeles Daily News were “controlled by
Jewish warmongers,” Noble sent a warning that “all would be boycotted.”98 Noble again
reiterated that he was not against Jews personally, but believed that their businesses
would have to be boycotted to stop their warmongering.99
However, the FOP’s use of anti-Semitism was not restricted to anti-interventionist
causes alone. It also called up Jewish stereotypes emphasizing Jewish foreignness and
their alleged refusal to assimilate. Commenting on investigations into anti-Jewish
discrimination in the defense industry (although he failed to attend the legislative
hearings), member Frank King told the audience at a FOP meeting that he had compiled
his own list detailing why the defense industry did not hire non-Aryan help. Jews, he
declared, were inefficient, inexperienced, more likely to be late, given to drink and other
excesses, possessed a low standard of morality and cleanliness, and their personality
defects caused other employees to refuse to work with them.100 Jewish immigrants, added
King, had had a choice when they settled in America: they could have elected to
assimilate or—as they chose ultimately—to live as a separate race, but also to endeavor
to achieve major control of the government and other important American institutions. To
King, Jewish refusal to integrate within German society exposed their long-held desire to
98
Informant Report 6154, 14 October 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 1.
99
Informant Report 6155, 12 October 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 4.
Informant Report 6286, 29 October 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 1-2.
100
52
capture control the German government. If they had barely failed in achieving
domination over Deutschland, they were undertaking a similar quest in the United
States.101
The FOP also attributed the anti-Semitic campaign in Germany to that country’s
successful economic reform and recovery. Noble opined that “the Jewish people want
you to go to war just because they hate Hitler.” Noble emphasized how “Hitler took away
a false money and profit system, and in return he gave his people social reforms and jobs
for everyone. He put the people to work and fed everyone.” For Noble, Hitler’s ability to
initiate reforms and provide jobs were achievements not experienced by Angelenos.
Therefore, “instead of hating Hitler we should look into these things and find out more
about things over there.”102 The Germans, through their anti-Jewish policies, had begun
to reform their society and show signs of recovery. The FOP suggested that the United
States would have to emulate Hitler’s methods and policies if Americans hoped to
achieve their own high level of security and prosperity.
The FOP also associated the Jewish conspiracy with the British and, like other more
militant noninterventionists, stressed Britain’s insatiable appetite for ever more colonies
around the globe. The FOP condemned Britain as an island nation that ruled tyrannically
over a vast and exploitive empire.103 The sheer size of the Empire and its mistreatment of
101
Informant Report 6476, 16 November 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 3.
102
Informant Report 602# (last number not visible), 21 September 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files:
News Research R177.095, 184/18, 3.
103
Justus D. Doenecke, Storm on the Horizon, 203.
53
subject peoples helped to form the core of the FOP’s belief that Britain only sought to
defend its territories and maintain its global dominance. To that end, the British now
sought to drag the United States into war.
For instance, at the 8 November 1941 FOP meeting in Los Angeles, a guest speaker
only identified as Captain Murray, allegedly a former officer in the British Army, laid out
the “true” nature and intentions of British policy. While Americans were urged to “fight
for the democracy of Joe and Winny” and were to “take freedom to the whole world as
Roosevelt says,” Murray portrayed British goals as much less idealistic. Indeed, British
tactics involved first ascertaining the wealth of a potential colony and whether the
indigenous population could be subdued. Military occupation had little to do with
bringing democracy or other benefits to the natives. Self-interest, continued Murray,
explained the British clash with the Boers and the eventual incorporation of South Africa
into the British Empire. The pattern of conquest was also evident in India, where Britain
initially relied on Scottish merchants and Christian missionaries to make inroads on the
subcontinent. After a time, imperial soldiers followed, subduing the people of India under
the yoke of the British Empire. To preserve their empire held by force, Murray claimed,
the British had manipulated the United States to enter World War I and were now
endeavoring to do the same in the present war.
The British were also inherently untrustworthy. Following the Great War, Murray
claimed to have been sent to Syria to watch the French, even though they were British
allies. An alcoholic Winston Churchill, with shoulders already “drenched in blood” from
the Gallipoli fiasco, added fresh blood to his resume when he authorized the firing on the
54
French fleet when they were British allies and did not even have their steam up.104
According to the FOP had always caused the United States trouble, beginning in the
Revolutionary War and then again in 1812 when the British stopped American ships.
Britain then encouraged the Confederacy in the Civil War in every way possible and
almost entered the war on the Southern side.105 Finally, according to Noble, the current
war had started because Hitler was forced to take action in Poland because the meddling
fingers of Britain, which were reaching into every country in Europe. In fact, Polish
atrocities committed against the Germans and instigated by the British served as the
specific casus belli.106
To the FOP, Roosevelt’s cooperation with the British and the Jews represented a
betrayal of the American people. Roosevelt knowingly pursued a course towards war and
refrained from disclosing all the pertinent facts or motives behind his actions. The LendLease program appeared to be nothing less than a reprise of America’s gradual slide into
belligerency in 1917. By not making his true motives clear Roosevelt deceived Congress
into approving the legislation because “it would not have been passed if the Congressmen
had known it was a war measure.” Further, the American people would not have stood
for it if they had known that it would raise taxes. According to Robert Noble, Lend-Lease
increased “the price of butter from 32 cents to 46 cents a pound. And then butter is sent to
Informant Report 6434, 9 November 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 2-4.
104
105
Informant Report 6505, 23 November 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 4-5.
106
184/18, 7.
Informant Report 6395, 2 November 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
55
England while you cannot have it. And hardly anyone can afford eggs. That is the
underhanded way that the American people have been deceived. They have been drawn
by deception step by step, a little at a time.”107 Roosevelt’s support of using convoys and
armed merchant ships in the Atlantic served to further confirm the existence of deception.
With the Greer sinking, Noble wondered how Roosevelt had known that the Germans
had the only submarines in the area. He disputed that the German submarine had fired to
sink the ship; rather, Noble argued that Churchill and Roosevelt needed an excuse to get
the U.S. into war because “the people of the United States are unwilling to go to war.
They decided that in order to give the president a reason for delivering the speech he did
the other night, that some ships needed to be fired upon and sunk so that the people of the
United States would accept this war.”108
Like many noninterventionists, the FOP dismissed the publicized eight main points of
the Atlantic Charter, hypothesizing that Churchill and Roosevelt had actually crafted a
possible armistice that would award Europe to Germany and establish a United States of
Europe. Britain would be permitted her navy and, under the terms of the arrangement, it
would operate in tandem with the U.S. navy. British interests, too, would shift
exclusively to the Far East, where they already were ensconced, and they would continue
to try to “keep India in slavery so that the nobles of England can continue to live.”109
107
Informant Report 5927, 9 September 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 4.
108
Informant Report 6024, 13 September 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
184/18, 2-3.
109
184/18, 8.
Informant Report 6153, 5 October 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
56
Another major objective of the FOP involved divulging the truth of the infamous
“secret map” of South America, a map that Noble and the other FOP members believed
to be fraudulent and originating from British sources. On 27 October 1941, Roosevelt
seized the opportunity to alert the nation to the Nazi threat by promoting an allegedly
German-made map purporting to show the future organization for German controlled
Central and South America. Roosevelt argued that the Germans had“…ruthlessly
obliterated all the existing boundaries…” and had “divided South America into five
[future] vassal states ...” Because Panama was among the new territories, the proposal
directly threatened the Panama Canal and thus the national security of the United States.
To Roosevelt, the map dramatically revealed the grand Nazi design for South America
and, ultimately, the United States.110 In hindsight, however, historians now know that the
map was stolen, doctored by British intelligence agents, and given to the Roosevelt
administration. The map, “Air Traffic Grid of the United States of South America’s Main
Lines,” was drawn by German officials and chronicled U.S. air routes between major
cities and, in notes along its margins, referred to the production, storage, and shipment of
aviation fuel at these sites.111 Whether or not Roosevelt knew about the map’s lack of
authenticity, this episode boosted his efforts to galvanize support for his Atlantic policies.
In February 1941, an American public opinion poll indicated that eighty-six per cent of
respondents favored a declaration of war if “any European power” attacked a Latin
110
Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage (New York:
Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002), 126.
111
Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War, 127-128.
57
American country; public sentiment on this issue remained steady for the rest of the year.
Historians agree that the spurious map enabled Washington to provide a simpler
explanation to the American people about why they were going to war again. Rather than
relying on sophistry or evoking the memories of Americans dying on the battlefields in
1918, the map—like the Zimmerman Telegram earlier—unequivocally established
Germany’s plans for aggression in the Western Hemisphere and its utter disdain for the
Monroe Doctrine.112
The map generated suspicion though. Already troubled by British efforts to influence
Washington, Assistant Secretary Adolf Berle—as well as other State Department
officials—warned that British intelligence officials were manufacturing documents
purporting the existence of various Nazi conspiracies in South America. Of course, the
British hoped to entice American diplomatic and military support by creating an acute
sense of fear over the future security of a hemisphere endangered by Nazi subversion.113
For the FOP, of course, the map provided yet another egregious example of British
propaganda and the subversion of America’s sovereignty and power. Ellis O. Jones—
leader of the isolationist National Copperheads—argued, as did the German government,
for the map’s immediate publication. When Roosevelt simply refused to release it to the
public, ardent isolationists and pro-Germans condemned the president and dismissed the
map issue as a total hoax. Additionally, when Captain Murray spoke to a FOP audience
112
John F. Bratzel and Leslie B. Rout, Jr., “FDR and the ‘Secret Map’,” The Wilson Quarterly
(1976-) 9, No. 1 (New Year’s 1985), 168-9, accessed on 16 March 2010.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40257685.
113
Bratzel and Rout, Jr., “FDR and the Secret Map,” 172.
58
on 8 November 1941, he threw additional suspicion onto the British origin of the map by
declaring that the British had a history of falsifying maps for propaganda purposes. He
told the audience that Roosevelt “could have received it from the British. They make
maps. I know because I did it for them in France.”114
This sampling of FOP arguments defined the parameters of their conspiratorial belief
that international Jews, the British, and a complicit Roosevelt were leading the U.S. into a
war that would ultimately destroy the nation. To broadcast their opposition on a larger
scale, the isolationist group decided to hold a mock impeachment of Roosevelt. Elected
to serve the people, Roosevelt—the FOP charged—had disregarded the will of the people
and had done the opposite of what they wished. Thus, beginning on 29 November 1941,
the Friends of Progress opened impeachment proceedings and began to present
“witnesses” attesting to Roosevelt’s “guilt” in failing the American people. One witness
represented America’s defeated farmers that suffered under Roosevelt’s ineffective
agricultural policies. Wearing a sign marked “A Bit Wiser-AAA Farmer,” he testified
that Roosevelt failed Americans by delineating two sets of farmers operating under New
Deal programs. On one side were elite “association farmers,” “just a corporation of
capitalist investors whose job was merely to exploit” and control the “assassinated
farmer,” represented by himself. While Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment
Administration (AAA) urged the “assassinated farmer” to restrict the raising of crops and
114
184/18, 3.
Informant Report 6434, 9 November 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News Research R177.095,
59
livestock, the government failed to live up to its end of the bargain, resulting in the
farmer losing his farm.115
Another witness, the “American Mother,” further indicted Roosevelt and the New
Deal for “destroying food that was given by the grace of God to the people, instead of
using it to bring more to the people, or keep it for a time of need.” The severe food
shortage in turn yielded malnourished American boys who would be deemed medically
unfit. Roosevelt, by breaking his promises to keep Americans out of the war, “betrayed
the wishes of American mothers who wanted to raise their sons to work and live in
America, not to fight and die on foreign soil.” Nine years of Roosevelt had concluded the
ghastly scenario, where American boys would potentially die to bolster foreign markets
and preserve the British Empire.
According to the witnesses at the trial, the American Mother’s predicament should
not have been a surprise, for Roosevelt’s family behavior, reflected in their many
divorces, had always been hostile to the idea of the American home. Roosevelt’s
mendacity, together with his authorizing the destruction of crops under the AAA,
amounted to religious sabotage. The “Dole-Less Pensioner” added to the torrent of antiFDR criticism by claiming that the additional fifteen dollars that assisted her regular
pension had been “taken away.” At a time when the cost of living was on the rise,
especially the cost of food, the federal government exacerbated the condition of the
elderly. In fact, according to an unidentified member of the audience, it was “a matter of
Informant Reports 6597, 3-5 and 6598, 2-4, 8 December 1941, Noble Case, “S” Files: News
Research R177.095, 184/19.
115
60
record” that Congress had passed a bill authorizing the retiring of army mules on a
pension of a dollar a day while, at the same time, the federal government only deigned to
provide fifteen dollars to the states for pensioners like themselves. “Blighted Youth,”
moreover, had graduated in 1933 but still could not find a job. Indeed, despite the
promises of Roosevelt, unemployment figures remained largely the same as they had
been nine years earlier, and the only future the president offered youth seemed to be the
opportunity to die on foreign battlefields.116
The mock impeachment trial generated a good deal of attention. It also commanded
the attention of the FBI, whose presence at the FOP meetings had became a common
occurrence. The court proceedings marked the apex of the isolationist organization’s
notoriety prior to U.S. entry into war. The cavalcade of anti-FDR testimonials trumpeted
the rhetoric of profound social marginalization and frustration and reminded observers
that the New Deal, for all its ballyhoo, had failed to reverse the pattern of economic and
social inequality highlighted by the Great Depression. But for the FOP, the New Deal
represented much more than a political debacle. It signified a tragic betrayal of the
American people.
Expressing the abysmal anxieties felt by many Americans during the chaotic 1930s,
the FOP trafficked in bigotry and embraced ugly stereotypes that too often meshed with
its members’ warped worldview. While both federal and California officials had
monitored, yet tolerated, the activities of the group, the entry of the United States into the
Informant Reports 6597, 3-5, and 6598, 2-4, 8 December 1941, “S” Files: News Research,
Noble Case R177.095, 184/19.
116
61
war altered the relationship between governments and radical groups like the FOP.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, the FBI arrested Ellis O. Jones and
Robert Noble as part of a larger round up of potential subversives and enemy aliens.
Their quick release, ordered by U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, emboldened them
with a sense of security under the Constitution’s right to free speech. Their subsequent
hostile attacks upon American participation in World War II involved the use of racial
invectives that only exacerbated nativistic tensions in a state already reeling from antiJapanese sentiment. As defeats mounted for U.S. forces in the Pacific and as many
Americans trembled in fear of a possible invasion of the West Coast, FOP accusations of
military cowardice and ineffective leadership triggered public outrage against what many
viewed as a treasonous organization. Legal reprisals directed from Sacramento and
Washington, D.C. soon followed.
62
Chapter 3
THE TRIAL
In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Friends of Progress suspended
its unfinished impeachment trial of Roosevelt while the isolationist organization
reevaluated its future. Because the United States had sustained a direct attack, prominent
anti-interventionist groups like the America First Committee shut down and threw their
support behind the war effort. Despite their continued commitment to anti-interventionist
ideals, isolationists concluded that the time for debate had passed and “it was the duty of
every citizen to stand behind the government to the uttermost” in the American war
effort.117 Some neutrality advocates also feared that persistent opposition to the war
would either give their political enemies an excuse to question their patriotism or provide
the opportunity for pro-fascist elements to take control of the organization when the war
ended.118 But, unlike the America First Committee, the FOP soon elected to resume its
opposition to the military conflict—a fateful decision that put the defiant group on a
direct collision course with the federal and state authorities and assured that various FOP
leaders would eventually suffer prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment.
After the United States entered the war, the California’s Office of the Attorney
General (AG) initially refrained from acting against the FOP. Prior to the war, as Warren
Olney noted, “none of the things that they [the FOP] were doing or saying were
117
Michele Flynn Stenehjem, An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee
(New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House Publishers, 1976), 116.
118
Michele Flynn Stenehjem, An American First, 117.
63
violations of state law.” Indeed, he added, “Their activities were beyond our reach as
state law officers.” The California AG’s office, therefore, categorized the FOP as a
federal concern and responsibility.119 But if jurisdictional murkiness also plagued the
federal government’s ability to prosecute the radical Right, so did the legal protection
afforded by the First Amendment to speech, even when uttered by staunch enemies of the
United States. While pro-fascist groups aggressively operated in the open throughout the
1930s, they stopped short in calling for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
Often, the best the authorities could hope for were indictments based on charges of
criminal libel, but proving such a charge in court proved extremely difficult.120
Nevertheless, as the huge surge of defense spending after 1938 began to stabilize and
expand the American economy and improve social conditions, extremist and pro-fascist
organizations lured fewer and fewer acolytes. Even notorious figures like Father Charles
Coughlin, William Dudley Pelley, and Gerald Burton Winrod appeared less menacing in
a nation unified by the common cause of eliminating fascist totalitarianism. And, to be
sure, the federal government forced Father Coughlin off the air and banned his
publications from the U.S. mail. Similar pressure from Washington spurred Pelley to
disband the Silver Legion of America and concentrate on remaining out of North
Warren Olney III, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration in the Earl Warren Era,” Earl
Warren Oral History Project interview conducted by Miriam F. Stein and Amelia R. Fry, 1970-1977
(Berkeley: Regional Oral History Project, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1981),
242, accessed 2 February 2009.
http://ia700307.us.archive.org/35/items/enforcementjudi00olnerich/enforcementjudi00olnerich.pdf.
[Hereafter: Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration”].
119
120
Richard W. Steele, Free Speech in Wartime (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 146.
64
Carolina jails. The Department of Justice had also forced the dissolution of the German
American Bund and imprisoned Fritz Kuhn.121
While federal actions reduced the size and influence of the major extremist groups of
the right, smaller groups now emerged as more vociferous and, in the public’s mind, just
as threatening. Indeed, local and national media maintained intense coverage and,
together with the ongoing efforts of antifascist patriotic groups, publicized any statement
of disloyalty by these “un-American” elements and brought it to national attention.122
However, despite this widespread scrutiny and federal pressure, not all pro-Axis
organizations were cowed into submission.
When the FOP resumed its activities after a brief respite following Pearl Harbor, the
group’s speeches again challenged the justification of U.S. involvement in the war.
Robert Noble boldly asserted: “I see no reason why we should not be thinking the same
as we’d been thinking last week … all is fair in love and war … Japan has done a good
job in the Pacific. A lot of good has been done.” Through these words, Noble hoped to
convey his hope that Americans would begin to realize “now what they [the Japanese] are
capable of doing” and that the war was “going to destroy America.” Noble further opined
that Japan had attacked Hawaii because “ownership was use,” and that, because the
Japanese had “been using Hawaii” more than Americans, the Imperial Government never
recognized the Pacific Islands “ as belonging to the US.”123 Ellis O. Jones likewise
121
Richard Steele, Free Speech in Wartime, 144.
122
Richard Steele, Free Speech in Wartime, 150.
Informant Report 6678, 12 December 1941, Sacramento “S” Files: News Research R177.095
184/18, 1-2, Department of Justice and Office of the Attorney General Records, Criminal Case Files, Noble
123
65
articulated the belief that people should rule “the place where they inhabit.” Indeed,
according to Jones, Europe should be governed by Europeans, Asia by Asians, and the
Americas by Americans. Based on this view, the FOP leaders questioned the legitimacy
of Washington’s rationale to fight a war in the Pacific. After all, only a generation earlier,
the U.S. government had authorized Admiral George Dewey’s bombardment of Manila,
ensuring the “liberation” of the archipelago from an imperial European power that had
exploited the Filipino population for nearly four centuries. The subsequent uprising of the
Filipinos against their recent emancipators led the United States to occupy a nation that
had endeavored to set up its own democracy, and by doing so challenged Japan’s
emerging hegemony in Asia. Indeed, America’s intrusion into the Mikado’s sphere of
interest, along with Washington’s rejection of the principle of “Asian for Asians,” made
war between the two ambitious nations inevitable. At the same time, the preponderance
of Japanese and Hawaiians over the meager number of Caucasians confirmed Jones’
conviction that the United States should never have taken possession of the Hawaiian
Islands.124
In light of the provocative statements by Noble and Jones, it hardly seems surprising
that the FBI quickly moved against the FOP. Just four days after Pearl Harbor, federal
agents rounded up members of the FOP, part of a larger anti-sedition dragnet that yielded
fifteen arrests during the night in and around Los Angeles. These arrests marked the
Case, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California. [Hereafter: “S”
Files: News Research, Noble Case R177.095 ###/## where ###/## designates box/folder location].
124
184/18, 3.
Informant Report 6677, 12 December 1941, “S” Files: News Research, Noble Case R177.095
66
culmination of investigations into subversive activities going on “for many months.”125
U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle subsequently ordered their release and then
dropped the charges of sedition, believing that “free speech as such ought not to be
restricted.” U.S. Attorney William Fleet Palmer declared, “The Attorney General wants
to give every advantage of free speech and, of course, we will take action as soon as court
convenes Monday to seek the release not only of Noble and Jones, but of all other
persons in the case.” When requesting that District Attorneys forward information on
which arrests already had bee made, Biddle and the Justice Department “took the view
that at this time every reasonable attempt should be made to maintain both free speech
and public safety and that freedom of speech should be curtailed only when public safety
is directly imperiled.”126
Upon release, the FOP’s leaders exuded a rejuvenated confidence and a renewed
commitment to their cause. FOP handbills appeared announcing the creation of a “People
Congress” for 1942. As the pamphlet advertised, the Bill of Rights truly had become a
“living document” through the “courageous efforts of the leaders and members of the
Peoples Congress,” and that there was no time to waste “in establishing and extending the
[Constitution’s] benefits … to all the people.” Additionally, it was now more important
than ever to “stand solidly against further dastardly and ‘un-American’ assaults upon the
sacred principles which are the very foundation stones of our country.” The FOP
125
“Noble, Former Pension Leader, Taken by FBI,” Los Angeles Times, 12 December 1941, 8,
accessed 5 June 2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/414201761.html.
“Robert Noble Case Dropped,” Los Angeles Times, 21 December 1941, A1, accessed 5 June
2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/414233291.html.
126
67
promised audiences “full and complete” reports by key operatives and special agents of
the “Friends Bureau of Investigation.”127 Ultimately, the Peoples Congress aimed to
restore America to Americans, redeeming the U.S. government from the “Anglophiles,
war-mongers, and democracy-wreckers.” Moreover, the FOP vowed to reclaim California
from the “Olsons and Downeys and other politicians” and to cleanse Los Angeles and its
surroundings of those “more interested in special interests than in the welfare of the
people as a whole.” Because the isolationist organization expected the “new leadership”
to develop in accordance with “Charles A. Lindbergh’s repeated suggestions” it urged its
followers to “stay with Robert Noble until he [rose] where he belong[ed] as a great leader
of America.”128
This replenished vigor within the FOP also found expression in its ardent defense of
free speech. Although members often anticipated their arrest at any moment, they took
great pride in presenting themselves as martyrs for their cause. As Noble later stated: “I
fully expected to go to prison for the things I did in this room, until this conflict is over
and maybe longer, and that is where I would want to be if I could not exercise my
freedom.”129 In public declamations, the group’s leaders increasingly complained about
the government’s misuse of anti-sedition laws to suppress freedom of speech. Noble
criticized the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798, blaming the ignorance of the times for
Informant Report 6837, 6 January 1942, “S” Files: News Research, Noble Case R177.095
184/18, 1-2.
127
128
Friends of Progress handbill numbered 6918, 12 January 1942 and Informant Report 6938, 22
January 1942, 1,“S” Files: News Research, Noble Case R177.095 184/18.
129
184/18, 1.
Informant Report 6938, 22 January 1942, “S” Files: News Research, Noble Case R177.095
68
their passing. To Noble, the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 embodied a period in
American history that not only witnessed the approval of slavery but embraced the false
notion that the nation was founded on the Bible. Relying on the authority of the Founding
Fathers, Noble informed one crowd of supporters that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander
Hamilton had each railed against imprisoning dissidents for simply “talking.” Hamilton,
who considered these measures plainly unconstitutional, had in fact represented critics of
American policy charged under the speech-stifling laws. The re-introduction of the Alien
and Sedition Laws in 1917 occurred, according to Noble, because of Wilson’s “foreign
crusade” to involve the United States in World War I, a conflict not in the American
interest. Nonetheless, a compliant High Court granted constitutional sanction to Wilson’s
efforts to muzzle anti-war sentiment in the United States.130
The FOP’s renewal of purpose also aroused its most confrontational anti-war rhetoric
in early 1942. At the 4 February FOP meeting, Noble accused American military leaders
of cowardice and needless slaughter. For instance, he charged General Douglas
MacArthur with murdering Filipinos by continuing the war and insinuated that he did not
use white soldiers to defend the islands. He called on MacArthur to surrender and get out
of the Philippines. Noble, at the same time, opined that the futility of the American
military position resulted from the deceptive tactics of President Franklin Roosevelt,
Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. The inability of
the United States to move supplies past the Japanese and to combat zones that needed
them revealed that these top officials had lied about America’s preparedness and naval
130
184/18, 1.
Informant Report #103, 5 February 1942, “S” Files: News Research, Noble Case R177.095
69
capabilities. The military’s ignominious setbacks in the South Pacific and elsewhere
demonstrated that the “little brown men [were] too much for the American Army and
Navy.”131 The U.S. armed forces, continued Noble, were “honeycombed” with
incompetent upstarts, with the heads of the Navy and Army representing “an incompetent
swivil [sic]-chair newspaper politician” and a “sour-pus, over-age corporation lawyer”
respectively. And at the head was a Commander-in-Chief who was the “most
wisecracking promise-breaker of all time.”132
As the FOP intensified its criticisms to discourage the war effort, the mood of the
American public grew less tolerant of uncontrolled free speech during wartime.
Roosevelt received a barrage of mail lamenting the spinelessness of U.S. Attorney
General Francis Biddle in tolerating domestic criticism from individuals and groups
sympathetic to the Axis Powers. Many of the correspondents demanded an immediate
end to anti-war talk, which no doubt offered aid and comfort to the enemies of the United
States. President Roosevelt responded to the public demands with memos inquiring about
the U.S. Justice Department’s response to radical groups and, during Cabinet meetings,
pressuring U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle to adopt a tougher stance towards
opponents of the war.133 In correspondence with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Roosevelt
linked national security to the successful suppression of fascist rhetoric, noting that recent
Informant Report to Jack Tenney, 5 February 1942, “S” Files: News Research, Noble Case
R177.095 184/18, 1.
131
132
Informant Report 7096, text of FOP mailer, 10 February 1942, “S” Files: News Research,
Noble Case R177.095 184/18, 3.
133
1962), 238.
Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,
70
remarks by William Dudley Pelley “came pretty close to seditious.” The president
likewise hinted that the war offered an opportunity to undertake a purge of the nation’s
more extreme dissidents and their treasonous propaganda. “Now that we are in the war,”
Roosevelt declared, “it looks like a good chance to clean up a number of these vile
publications.”134 Pressure thus mounted on Biddle to indict seditionists, ultimately
leading him to alter his stance and begin to prosecute radical groups vigorously.
As the federal government debated the proper course of action, the increasing
virulence of FOP meetings got Los Angeles residents “stirred up about it; [and] they
didn’t like it.”135 The ongoing activities of the FOP constantly reminded Californians of a
potential Fifth Column threat, a fear that the California Attorney General Earl Warren
encouraged through his public campaign of vigilance in late 1940 and throughout
1941.136 Made particularly vulnerable by its extended coastline, California seemingly
represented a prime target for future attacks or an outright invasion. The string of
American military defeats following Pearl Harbor, coupled with submarine attacks off the
West Coast, amplified the belief that California was the next target of Axis aggression
and kept Californians on edge. The report of General John L. DeWitt, the top Army
commander of the West Coast, further confirmed public fears when it associated the
absence of sabotage with “exercised control” and predicted that future acts of sabotage
134
Richard Steele, Free Speech in Wartime, 150-151.
135
Warren Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration,”243.
136
Warren Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration,” 201-202.
71
would come on a mass scale.137 As incoming letters to Attorney General Warren
indicated, alarmed Californians sought more governmental action to assure the security of
California.
In a letter to California Attorney General Earl Warren, W. H. Prescott of
Sacramento personified the wartime hysteria that pervaded the state. He believed, for
example, that, although propaganda had Californians “looking in the skies for invasion of
sabotage men,” he believed they were “being landed by submarines right now on our
coast…every sheriff whose county has coast highways should have stop stations every
ten miles with motorcycles concealed one quarter of a mile on each side to prevent cars
from turning around.” Authorities, he urged, were to “look for young husky men whose
hair might be wet and clothes showing evidence of being folded or wrinkled” and to
“search cars for any bathing apparel, also waterproof bags which they strap around them
for clothes.” Additionally, he advised, police should stop all “cars bearing four or five
young men” and regard such passengers as “suspects.” The attorney general, moreover,
should investigate “all transactions concluded since December 1941 [involving] homes
located between cities on coast highways” where “quantit[ies] of men’s suits, shoes, etc.”
might have been hidden and a possible headquarters for saboteurs might have been
established. For Prescott, the presence of Axis infiltrators was “a possibility of which I
believe to be a reality.” He thus recommended that his precautions “should be taken
throughout the United States coastlines.” Finally, Prescott admonished California
Governor Culbert Olson of “the danger of permitting enemy aliens to own or operate
137
Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority, 215-216.
72
motor vehicles in any form to commit sabotage with” and lamenting that “so far nothing
has been done.”138
In another representative letter, Los Angeles District Attorney John F. Dockweiler
warned of the dangers of the alien situation in Los Angeles County and the inherent
difficulties associated with relocation. When discussing the Niesi, the American born
Japanese, Dockweiler ultimately decided that “they [were] Japanese first and Americans
second.” Because the Nisei were “carefully taught the traditions and customs of Japan
and a loyalty and reverence for the Japanese empire and its rulers” and “because of their
deep-rooted racial characteristics and instincts,” Dockweiler determined that “Americans
cannot afford to rely upon any of the Japanese, whether alien or American-born.”
Therefore, he concluded, “their presence anywhere in the theater of operations along the
Pacific Coast, in our opinion, represents a very real source of potential danger.”139
A letter from J.N. Froome, sheriff of Tehama County, urged state action to
prevent the sabotage of the region’s bridges and the deliberate setting of fires in the dry
seasons. Froome, too, believed that “all enemy aliens should be treated alike” and that
government officials should “not wait until the damage is done before … [they] act.”
Believing in the notion that blood is thicker than cultural assimilation, Froome supported
the removal of the American-born Japanese. After all, they were “only one generation
138
Letter from W.H. Prescott to Attorney General Warren, January 1942, Civilian Defense FilesAliens, Nationals, Subversives, General (100-E-Z) 1942 R177.089 182/32, Department of Justice and
Office of the Attorney General Records, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State,
Sacramento, California. [Hereafter referred to as Civilian Defense Files R177.089 ###/## where ###/##
designates box/folder location].
139
Letter from John F. Dockweiler to Warren, 19 February 1942, Civilian Defense Files R177.089
182/32, 2-3.
73
away from the land of their parents and many have been sent to Japan and returned to the
United States. This is in my mind leading to the fact that a Jap is still a Jap and should not
be treated as a citizen.”140
In a letter to both Earl Warren and Thomas C. Clark, Coordinator of Enemy Alien
Control of the Western Defense Command, J.W. Jones recommended the removal of all
Japanese regardless of citizenship because “that cloak of citizenship should not be
permitted to interfere with our more complete protection.” He added, “We cannot afford
to discriminate. All must go. Furthermore, when this war is over, we must not ever permit
them to return and become part of this country. They do not assimilate and we do not
want them.”141
As Californians pleaded for greater security and radicals continued to espouse
their platforms, the searing rhetoric employed by all sides began to affect “friendly
aliens.” At the center of controversy was the ambiguous definition of patriotism. For
example, in a letter to Earl Warren dated 12 March 1942, Melecio G. Vera, a Filipino,
asked Warren for help in obtaining a house for himself and his wife. The title company,
complained Vera, had refused to issue the final title because of the “peculiar status” of
Filipinos after U.S. entry into the war. To be sure, said Vera, “I understand the reason
why the State of California is strict against us.” But—he asked Warren—“don’t you
think, sir, that the actions of Filipinos in the Bataan Peninsula is a sufficient proof of our
loyalty to America?” Now that his friends and relatives were standing beside American
140
Letter from Sheriff J.N. Froome to Warren, 27 February 1942, Civilian Defense Files R177.089
183/5.
141
Letter to Earl Warren and Thomas C. Clark from J.W. Jones, 10 February 1942, Civilian
Defense Files R177.089 182/32.
74
troops “defending the so-called democratic ideals,” Vera judged that “the time has come
for us to ask for justice.” After all, President Roosevelt had recently opened the door for
citizenship to those Filipinos who had served—or would serve—in the American armed
forces. Devoted to the democratic ideals of the United States, Vera, like many Filipinos
and first generation Filipino Americans, simply sought help from the Attorney General of
California in order to obtain security through home ownership for his family citizens “for
the rest of their lives.”142
The Roosevelt administration expressed sympathy for California’s escalating
demand for Japanese removal and control of enemy aliens. Even U. S. Attorney General
Biddle seemingly acquiesced in the adoption of “probable cause” stipulations when they
concerned search warrants for the Nisei. Despite the firm assurances of the FBI and the
U.S. Justice Department that they had eliminated the Fifth Column threat through their
summary arrests of Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s most dangerous agents and
sympathizers after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on 19 February
1942 authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans on the Pacific Coast to internment
camps inland.143
As California’s efforts to crush seditionists escalated, Biddle’s order to release the
jailed FOP members proved highly offensive to Californians. Earl Warren, California’s
attorney general decided to take legal action “if we could find any state law that was
142
Letter from Melecio G. Vera to the Attorney General, March 12, 1942, Civilian Defense Files
R177.089 183/1.
William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War
Two (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 231-2.
143
75
being violated by these people.” According to Warren Olney, the FBI gave the California
Attorney General’s Office their “blessing,” telling them that, if they could find a way, to
“lock them up.”144 In light of the isolationist organization’s slurs against General
MacArthur, Warren first considered using criminal libel as the basis of his case against
the FOP. Prosecuting criminal libel involved proving a desire to “maliciously and falsely
make accusations against another that inure him in his profession and demean him….”
Because of McArthur’s status as one of the nation’s highest-ranking wartime officers, the
accusation of cowardice marked “about as tough a statement as you can make about
him.”145 After consulting the Pentagon, California’s Office of the Attorney General
moved against the FOP, arresting the controlling members. The crack down generated
considerable publicity, to the point Warren Olney III came to believe that California’s
defense of a military general against libel “got under the hide of the U.S. Attorney
General” because, without notice, Biddle ordered the federal arrests of FOP members for
sedition.146 Nudged by California to take action, Washington thus now took charge of
prosecuting pro-Axis sympathizers.
By April of 1942, Robert Noble and Ellis O. Jones found themselves in federal
court in Los Angeles and charged with sedition. Their crime involved “a conspiracy to set
in motion—at a time of great national crisis—an insidious force for disloyalty, disruption,
and disunity” through their lectures that were designed to “obstruct recruiting and the sale
144
Warren Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration,” 244.
145
Warren Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration,” 244.
146
Warren Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration,” 245.
76
of war bonds and undermine confidence in the ability of war leaders.”147 Specifically, the
complaint stated that on 4 February 1942, the FOP leadership “unlawfully, knowingly,
willingly and feloniously, when the United States was at war, [made] and [conveyed]
false statements with intent to interfere with the operation and success of the military and
naval forces of the United States and to promote the success of their enemies.” At the
time, Noble and Jones claimed that the United States was engaged in a “phony war,”
where “MacArthur’s stand in the Philippines [was] not bravery but damn foolishness”
and “the intelligent thing to do would be to surrender.”148 When jury deliberations began,
Judge Ralph E. Jenney issued what the Los Angeles Times called “a history-making
decision,” endeavoring to define the subtle differences between what Americans may in
times of peace and war. To Judge Jenney, “freedom of expression [was] not a freedom to
do wrong with impunity and it does not imply the right to frustrate or defeat the discharge
of governmental duties during wartime, upon the performance of which the actual
freedom of all of us may possibly depend.” The public, added Jenney, did have the right
to discuss public affairs but rights like those of life, liberty, and property, were “subject to
those legal restraints which separate or distinguish right from wrong.” Congress was
perfectly within its rights to formulate the laws under which Noble and Jones were to be
tried because, in addition to encouraging the spread of truth through open frank
discussion, the legislative body was equally responsible for the maintenance of order, the
147
“Noble Given Five Years; Jones Four,” Los Angeles Times, 21 July 1942, 1, accessed 5 June
2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/416155491.html.
“Noble, Jones Found Guilty of Sedition,” Los Angeles Times, 12 July 1942, 1, accessed 5 June
2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/416130281.html.
148
77
training of men and women for national defense, and for the conduct of war activities.
Judge Jenney further conceded that wartime speech “cannot be as free as in times of
peace without the danger of its abuse to the detriment of our war policies.”149
The federal government framed its case against Noble and Jones around the
notion that the two men had undermined the war effort by belittling the brave actions of
General MacArthur and other war heroes. Denigration of prominent military figures in
turn diminished Washington’s recruiting effort and hence jeopardized the nation’s ability
to defeat the Axis powers.150 The trial ended with the conviction of Noble and Jones.
Jenney sentenced Noble to a five-year prison term and Jones to four years. For all
practical purposes, the two agitators were put away “for the duration [of the war]”
without—as the Los Angeles Times noted—“being treated with undue severity.” While
Judge Jenney considered Noble and Jones’ utterances dangerous and potentially
damaging to the nation at war, he also felt that longer sentences would have unduly
amplified the actual importance of a group whose “practical accomplishments were much
less than their venom.” A strong government, said Jenney, could afford to be lenient,
whereas a weaker government that lacked real popular support might be compelled to
strike viciously hard.151
“Noble Jury Deadlocked for Hours,” Los Angeles Times, 11 July 1942, 1, accessed 5 June
2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/416128091.html.
149
150
“Punish Noble, Jurors Asked,” Los Angeles Times, 10 July 1942, 8, accessed 5 June 2010.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/416126091.html.
“Proper Penalty,” Los Angeles Times, 22 July 1942, A4, accessed 5 June 2010.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/416159451.html.
151
78
Yet, this was not good enough for Californians. Immediately following the federal
trial, Noble and Jones were moved to Sacramento to join the other members of the FOP
“governing body” to face charges of failing to register under California’s Subversive
Organization Registration Act of 1941. This law required the registration of “every
corporation, association, society, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, and …
every other body or organization composed of two or more persons or members” [that]
“directly or indirectly advocates … overthrowing the Government of the United States, or
of this State … by force or violence …” The law stipulated that any subversive
organization that was “subject to foreign control,” whether through loans or direct
financial support or any indirect affiliation with a foreign government or any its “political
subdivisions,” needed to register with the California Secretary of State within sixty days
of the law’s enactment and within ten days following the creation of such a group. To
register, groups needed to detail the addresses of member branches; the names,
nationalities and addresses of its officers; the qualifications for membership; and its
assets as well as any contributions received. Any violation of the registration law by an
officer or controlling member of a “subversive organization” constituted a felony.152
While the federal government considered the actions and speeches of the FOP seditious
and a potential impediment to the war effort, the state of California characterized the FOP
as an essential component in a subversive Nazi plan to prepare the United States for
invasion.
152
Opinion of the Court of Appeal of California, Third Appellate District, People v. Robert Noble
et al, 3 Crim. No. 1816, 24 April 1945, 1-2, accessed 9 April 2009.
http://w3.lexisnexis.com/research2/delivery/download/retrieve.do?/filename=Robert_Noble.pdf.
79
In the appellate trial, the prosecution sought to show much more than what the
subversion charge would demonstrate. As argued by Warren Olney, the Friends of
Progress represented not merely “a group of local malcontents” who “may have bitterly
criticized the administration and perhaps gone too far in the language which they used in
a critical sense.” Rather, the FOP were truly subversive “in the sense that they were
deliberately and intentionally giving aid and comfort to our enemies, and that they were
advocating and teaching treason against this country and against this state.” Additionally,
Olney and the prosecution believed that these “objectives of the organization were
established in collaboration with an agent of a foreign government.”153
The association of FOP members with the German American Bund emerged as
the essential component in the case. The establishment of the FOP began, argued the
prosecution, only after a federal edict had ordered the disbandment of the Bund, and the
FOP had carried “on the Nazi line ever since.” The state of California set out to “connect
them [the FOP] with the Bund days” and to demonstrate that, by “spreading
dissatisfaction throughout the state by meetings and printed material,” the FOP had—and
continued to—involve itself in subversion.154 According to the prosecution, the
defendants controlled the FOP and, “behind the smoke screen of bogus patriotism and
fake religion, the organization was engaged in a systematic attempt to break down the
153
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, 3 July 1942, proceedings had upon arraignment, pleas of
not guilty and setting of cause for trial, People v. Robert Noble, et al., Court of Appeal of California, Third
Appellate District, R139 3 CRIM 1816, vol. 1, 73-4, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of
State, Sacramento, California.
“Man At Noble Meetings Denies He’s Subverter,” Los Angeles Times, 8 April 1942, A3,
accessed 5 June 2010. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/414546851.html.
154
80
morale of the United States.” In essence, this activity “was itself an attempt to aid and
assist the governments of Germany and Japan and of Italy in their attempt to overthrow
us on the field of battle.” Indeed, the prosecution intended to show that the FOP
functioned as “nothing more than a Fifth Column for the Axis powers in the Southern
California area,” one that “advocated and advised and taught adherence to the Axis
powers and [gave] aid and comfort to them in their attempt to overthrow our government
by the violence of war.”155
In order to prove that the FOP operated as “a propaganda agency of the Axis
powers and had no purpose or program except the dissemination of Axis propaganda,”156
the prosecution outlined a Nazi two-part plan for world dominance. The first phase,
carefully fashioned so as to appeal to all persons of German ancestry, regardless of
citizenship, sought “to bring into the Nazi fold all of the millions of persons in the United
States whose forefathers were of Germanic origin.” Any German with Nazi sympathies
would be included, thereby creating a united Teutonic bloc throughout the country that
would be capable of taking political action when ordered to do so by “its Nazi masters.”
In the United States, declared Warren Olney III, the Nazis surrounded their activities with
the “aura of Americanism.” Indeed, to obscure and conceal their true intentions, Hitler’s
followers drew on the hallowed images of George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and
155
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble
et al., R139 3 Crim. 1816,Vol. 1, 329-330.
156
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble
et. al., R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. 1, 331.
81
Abraham Lincoln as symbols of American patriotism around which the Nazi organization
could be fashioned.157
The second phase featured psychological warfare through the surreptitious
creation of “innumerable organizations and societies” of non-Germans that would foment
internal strife in the dominant society. These groups would achieve their destabilizing
goal by spreading “differences of opinion,” provoking “mutual hatred and distrust,” and
by casting “suspicion” on the nation’s leaders. Lacking concrete programs, these newly
formed organizations existed merely “for the creation of revolutionary unrest, to weaken
and dissolve the unity of the country, and to thus open the way for the united, better
organized, Nazi element.”158
According to the prosecution, the FOP actively participated in both aspects of the
Nazi plan. The radical speeches of the Friends’ leaders illustrated their contribution to the
second phase of the plan, because their fiery rhetoric aroused non-Germans to sympathize
with Axis causes. And, to be sure, the California group’s association with the German
American Bund implicated the FOP with phase one. The McBrides and the Van Meters
had attended closed meetings of the Bund on 22 February 1939, October 1940, and May
of 1941. Daniel and Baron Van Meter, the McBrides, and Noble were even present at the
18 October 1941 Bund meeting where national leader Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze instructed
157
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble
et al., R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. 1, 346-347.
158
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble
et al., R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. 1, 347-348.
82
the audience to support the America First Committee.159 For the prosecution, the
attendance of FOP members at closed Bund meetings clearly demonstrated that, through
their association, the Friends of Progress “assisted,” from time to time, and in different
ways, in carrying out the Bund program. The State of California thus concluded that the
Bund was “in large part responsible for the presence of…[the] defendants in the activities
in the FOP, and that their participation in the FOP was in at least some degree due to the
suggestion of Wilhelm Kunze, National Führer of the German-American Bund.”160
In contrast to the federal trial, where the U.S. Justice Department held Noble and
Jones were largely responsible for the content and direction of FOP activities, the State of
California made Fritz K. Ferenz, a native of Austria, the central figure in its legal
proceedings. Ferenz’ participation in or association with organizations like the German
American Vocational League, I.G. Farben, VPA Organizations Abroad, Hitler Youth in
USA, and Winter Help Abroad proved damning because American officials considered
all of these groups part of a Nazi network of “undercover operations designed to
penetrate secretly the economic, social, and political institutions of the United States.”161
A letter written by Ferenz to a “high Nazi official” shortly after Hitler’s accession
to power equally served to solidify the state’s case against the FOP leader. In his
correspondence, Ferenz had endeavored to explain his qualifications and experience in
159
Opinion of Court of Appeal of California, Third Appellate District, People v. Robert Noble et
al, 24 April 1945, 6.
160
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble
et al., R139 3 Crim. 1816,Vol. 1, 348-349.
161
Warren Olney, “Law Enforcement and Judicial Administration,” 199.
83
the field of propaganda, had submitted the German Consul in Los Angeles as a reference
for his loyalty to National Socialism, and then had volunteered his services as a Nazi
propaganda agent in the United States. The State of California alleged that the German
government had not only accepted Ferenz’ proposal but that thereafter until the “very
date of his arrest,” this man, “with extraordinary zeal” and by “every means possible
[had] continued to further the ends of Hitler’s Fifth Column in America.” Indeed,
maintained Warren Olney III, Ferenz was the “real brains” in the FOP and the
“ostensible” head of the organization. Noble and Jones, in fact, acted as no more than
“the mouthpieces—loudspeakers if you like—for the ideas and suggestions of Hitler’s
agent.”162
Arguing that the actions of the FOP embodied the infiltration of the Nazi Fifth
Column, the prosecution connected the FOP’s speeches and other pronouncements
directly to Nazi and Bund sources. Harold N. Graves, acting director of the Foreign
Broadcast Monitoring Service of the Federal Communications Commission, testified that
all Axis governments beamed propaganda into the United States by short-wave radio. A
“theme by theme, item by item” analysis of the Axis radio transmissions demonstrated,
Graves declared, that the FOP’s party line coincided almost identically with the Nazi
propaganda campaign except for the Californian organization featuring greater sympathy
towards Japan and being even more critical of the President.163 For the prosecution, the
162
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble
et al, R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. I, 348-9.
163
Warren Olney, for the Prosecution, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble
et al., R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. I, 340-341.
84
FOP’s inclusion of data and stories from the German Library of Information (GLI) best
showed the pernicious influence of Nazi propaganda.
Because the FOP distrusted any data emanating from the Roosevelt
administration, the group’s speeches, public forums, and printed literature typically relied
on the GLI, which not only was accessible to all Americans but represented ideals that
Noble and other viewed as entirely consistent with the American Way. In other words,
the defense claimed that the FOP simply drew on information that was freely available to
“any person in this courtroom [and] any person in this nation who wanted to possess it”
could do so “merely by going to the public library…[or] to the public newsstands and
buying various publications published in this country … [or] by subscribing to
magazines, by reading daily newspapers; by reading various columns.…”164 One did not
have to be a supporter of National Socialism, much less an agent of the Third Reich to
obtain and use the material from the GLI. Based in New York City, the clearing house
“sent out its publication to college professors in American universities, to the leading
educators, to leaders in American life, to the judges on the benches in the various
courts—not to all of them, but to any who wished it, and to probably some without asking
for it.” Moreover, the defense continued, nothing in the materials received from the
German Library of Information forced “anybody in our country [to] become a German,”
tether themselves to the Third Reich, “or become attached to Hitler, or anyone else.”
Rather than furnishing material to advance a subversive cause, the GLI offered
164
Robert Noble, for the Defense, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble et
al., R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. 1, 357.
85
information that “was simply toward the end that American citizens not remain ignorant,
not knowing what was going on in this world.” In any event, Noble insisted that all
American citizens had the right to search for and read anything that could enlighten
them.165
Yet, the close links between Ferenz’ long history of marketing and displaying of
German films and literature, and Nazi propaganda apparatus appeared to the State of
California as indisputable evidence of Fifth Column infiltration. The prosecution brought
Ralph Haswell Lutz, professor of history and director of the Hoover Library of War,
Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, to testify about the German propaganda
network. Intimately involved in Attorney General Earl Warren’s investigations into
subversive activities, Lutz had sought to illuminate the role of various administrative
bodies of the Third Reich, the Nazi Party, and their connection to the German film
industry.166 He found that Hitler’s absolute control of government power extended to his
country’s motion picture companies and the distribution of German films. Through his
Film Chamber, Hitler controlled all cinematic production as well as the dissemination of
every motion picture at home and abroad. Additionally, the Nazi government had
licensing control and no film escaped the influence of Propaganda Minister Joseph
Goebbels or his subordinates at the Film Chamber.
165
Robert Noble, for the Defense, opening statement, 12 August 1942, People v. Robert Noble et
al., R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. I, 358-359.
166
Dr. Ralph Haswell Lutz, for the Prosecution, direct examination, 2 October 1942, People v.
Robert Noble et al., R139 3 Crim. 1816, Vol. X, 4603-4619.
86
Ferenz owned the Continental Books Shop on West 7th street in Los Angeles and
displayed German-made films for the public. Depicting the heroic rise of fascism in
Germany, the triumphal entry of the Wehrmacht into Austria and Czechoslovakia, and the
glorious German Olympic games of 1936, German films were replete with “frequent
scenes…showing the enthusiasm with which the German people hailed Hitler” and the
“great demonstrations by the people in support of Hitler.” Because of the powerful
impact of Nazi propaganda, members of the film audience routinely rose, saluted images
of Hitler when they appeared on screen, and shouted vigorous “Sieg Heils.”167 If the films
Ferenz displayed could elicit such strong emotional responses from the predominately
German American patrons that elected to attend these films, the prosecution feared, his
directly supplying the FOP with the materials and secretly conducting the operations of
the group threatened to erode California’s defenses against Axis subversion.
This firm possibility that Nazi propaganda might arouse FOP sympathizers to
seditious activity justified the State of California’s effort to suppress FOP activities. The
initial state trial, from 3 August 1942 to 22 October 1942, yielded the conviction of
several FOP adherents for failing to register as subversive agents of a foreign
government. In their subsequent appeals, the defendants continued to maintain that their
ideals conformed to the lofty tenets of American culture and should have enjoyed
protection under the First Amendment.
Despite their convictions and imprisonment in California, Robert Noble and Ellis
O. Jones, Gerhard Wilhem Kunze, and twenty-six other Nazi sympathizers were rounded
167
Opinion of the Court of Appeals of California, Third Appellate District, People v. Robert Noble
et al, 24 April 1945, 6.
87
up by the federal government and subjected yet again to another prosecution. Marked by
frequent interruptions, disorderly conduct, and the death of the presiding judge, the
“Great Sedition Trial of 1944” in Washington D.C. was never brought to a conclusion.
On the other hand, in 1945, the Court of Appeals of the Third District finally rendered its
ultimate verdict on the FOP leaders’ challenges to the State of California’s assertion that
they were members of a controlling body of a seditious organization and that, as agents of
a foreign government, they advocated the violent overthrow of the United States. The
Court conceded that statements heard at FOP meetings were “well calculated to incite the
indignation of every right-thinking and patriotic American.” Indeed, “vicious and
unreasoning attacks were made … flagrant appeals to false and sinister racial theories”
[were proposed][and] “leaders of our republic, including our President, were grossly
maligned.” In the end, however, the Court determined it could not uphold the conviction
under a law that required proof that a group advocated the overthrow of the government
by force and violence. While the Friends of Progress did indulge “in intemperate,
unreasoning, sinister, and iniquitous criticism of our form of government, our officials
and our allies” and “praised a different form of government,” the prosecution did not
present enough evidence to support the conviction.
The Court also dismissed the charges of foreign control. A careful study of the
record “fail[ed] to disclose any evidence upon which a finding could be based, either by
inference or otherwise, that the policies of the Friends of Progress, or any of them, were
determined by or at the suggestion of Ferenz.” Even if Ferenz functioned as an agent of
Germany—and the Court doubted that allegation, the prosecution had not furnished
88
enough evidence to prove that the policies and practices of the FOP “were determined by
or [acted upon] at the suggestion of an agent of a foreign government.” More importantly,
the Appellate Court questioned the very basis of California’s anti-fascist laws, partly
because they clashed with existing federal laws dealing with the same issues, leading the
judges to admit frankly “that we are in doubt as to the constitutionality of the Subversive
Organization Registration Act .…” Although the Court confessed that it found it
unpleasant to reverse the convictions, it concluded that “if our judicial system is to be
true to the highest traditions of our jurisprudence, an appellate tribunal should not shirk
its responsibility where the record fails …”168
By the time the Court of Appeals ruling came down in late April 1945, the war in
Europe was winding down and, though the war in the Pacific would grind on for another
five months, Californians’ anxiety about the threat of fifth columnists had largely abated.
Few Californians criticized the verdict, and possibly some agreed with the tribunal that
while the actions of the FOP had been extreme, distasteful, and founded on ungrounded
assumptions, they did not represent the actions of subversive Nazi agents seeking to
overthrow the governments of California or the United States. As the nation approached a
triumphant conclusion to a ghastly world war, the residents of California likely
recognized that they, like many fellow Americans, had responded to a decade and a half
of extreme crisis and uncertainty in a manner that bordered on the hysterical. The
pervasive apprehension produced by the devastating Great Depression, the strain and
scission of neutrality, and the participation in a global war whose outcome remained in
168
Opinion of Court of Appeals of California, Third Appellate District, People v. Robert Noble et
al, 24 April 1945, 16-21.
89
doubt fueled profound and widespread fear about the possible collapse or conquest of the
nation. In all of American history, perhaps only the Civil War had caused similar angst.
In this social milieu, radicals on both ends of the political spectrum utilized the
chaos of the times as an opportunity to assert the fundamental flaws of democratic
capitalism and innate superiority of their own ideological system. For the radical Right,
this time of upheaval represented a perilous deviation from traditional American ideals
set forth by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution and a betrayal of the American
people by international conspirators and moneyed interests. Though most Americans felt
alienated, if not threatened, by what they considered foreign ideologies, a sufficient
number in the southern California considered the status quo to be more menacing to their
conception of true Americanism than any philosophy from overseas. As this study has
indicated, it was the volatile mixture of supporters of National Socialism, radical
adherents of isolationism, and rabid nativists in Southern California that eventually
coalesced together as the Friends of Progress, The German American Bund, and other
groups to proffer a new vision of America. These Californians attended the FOP rallies,
cheered the Axis, excoriated the forces of international conspiracy, and mocked and even
condemned American leaders. And, as with all wars in U.S. history, strident anti-war
dissent challenged government officials to extend the Bill of Rights to those who
seemingly gave aid and comfort to the enemies of the country. Though the United States
perhaps avoided committing the gross violations of civil liberties that characterized its
involvement in the First World War, the Roosevelt administration did imprison 120,000
persons of Japanese ancestry in desolate camps and succumbed to fear-mongering by
90
jailing and relocating a number of individuals of Italian and German ancestry.
Californians too succumbed to wartime anxiety and fears of subversive infiltration. As a
result, when Washington failed to display proper temerity in muzzling obnoxious and
repugnant critics of American war policies, the State of California enacted its own
legislation to allow it to take action and punish seditious behavior. Men like Robert
Noble, Ellis O. Jones, Fritz Ferenz, and the Van Meter brothers were consequently
arrested, convicted, and incarcerated by California for their traitorous speech. In
hindsight, the actions of Californians towards groups like the FOP appear to be
unnecessary and, perhaps even draconian. However, for many Californians in the
Southland at the time, the legacy of economic uncertainty and fears of subversion united
with the very real possibility of military defeat at the onset of World War II. Such a
convergence of forces led those of the Golden State to demand concerted and decisive
actions to provide for national security.
Initially, the Friends of Progress stands out as an example of a subversive, proAxis anti-war organization that ran afoul of federal and California sedition and
subversion laws. However, a closer inspection reveals the content of opposing visions of
Americanism in the 1930s and early 1940s and use of conspiratorial politics in
advocating for those particular perspectives. Often overlooked, the Friends of Progress
demonstrates the importance of California’s radical movements of the 1930s to the
development of rabid anti-intervention efforts and wartime dissent in southern California.
It also highlights the role of conspiratorial politics during the tumultuous 1930s and
1940s and its influence on California’s battle against subversion.
91
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