anti-Semitism – The Indiana History Blog

“Shamerican” William Dudley Pelley: Self-Styled Fascist Leader & Noblesville Publisher

William Dudley Pelley with Silver Shirt “L” emblem on shirt, courtesy of the William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Legion of America Collection, Indiana State Library.

William Dudley Pelley tapped into a small, but growing contingent of Americans who admired Hitler’s fascist agenda, particularly his oppression of the Jewish population. With the formation of the Silver Shirts in 1933, Pelley not only cultivated a degree of power and influence, but amassed a small fortune through his “‘fanatical and misled followers.'”[1] Using his North Carolina printing press, the “little Fuehrer” disseminated fascist tenets and groomed a Christian-based militia, with the goal of overthrowing the American government.[2] Throughout his life, Pelley spun together political ideologies and spiritual dogmas to suit his needs.

After evading serious punishment following a House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities hearing, he transferred his operation to Noblesville, Indiana in 1940. There, he established the Fellowship Press with the assistance of former state policeman and Klan leader Carl Losey. However, the men underestimated the resistance they would encounter in the conservative Indiana town, already humming with the manufacture of war munitions.

Hoosiers hotly rejected Pelley’s extremist propaganda. Their resistance, along with congressional investigations and consistent local media reporting, helped stamp out the efforts of “America’s No. 1 seditionist,” who posed a tangible threat to America’s national security during a period of global unrest.

William Dudley Pelley in American Magazine (March 1918), accessed Ancestry Library.

The son of a Methodist minister, William Dudley Pelley was born in 1890 in Massachusetts, where he developed an affinity for the written language. According to Jason Daley’s Smithsonian Magazine article, Pelley wrote prolifically in his youth and by the age of 19 had developed “ideas about how Christianity would have to morph if it were to survive in the modern world.”[3] He quickly parlayed his literary skills into a career, writing short stories for publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Washington, D.C.’s Sunday Star, and Red Book Magazine.[4] Pelley experienced some success as a script writer in Hollywood, where he likely learned the value of image. He employed his trademark goatee, bespoke suits, and plume of cigarette smoke to project an air of poise and authority. Through his persona, Pelley convinced others that he was a visionary, quite literally.

In 1929, Pelley detailed an existential experience in his American Magazine article, “Seven Minutes in Eternity—the Amazing Experience that Made Me Over.”[5] He claimed he had communed with spirits and even Jesus Christ himself. Perhaps the instability of the early Great Depression years attracted some Americans to the man who claimed to possess answers about the future. By 1931, Pelley garnered enough support that he was able to move to Asheville, North Carolina, where he opened a publishing company.[6] Initially focused on metaphysical topics, he pivoted to right-wing fringe issues via publications like The New Liberator (later Liberation).

Letterhead from letter to Mr. Sallume, December 9, 1933, William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirt Legion of America Collection, S1050, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, Indiana State Library.

According to WNC Magazine, in 1933—the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany—Pelley put these ideals into practice by forming the Silver Legion of America. Better known as the Silver Shirts, Pelley envisioned the group to operate as a “‘Gentile American Militia.'”[7] The Silver Shirts emulated Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (the “Brown Shirts”) paramilitary organization, as uniformed Legion members quietly mobilized across the country in defense of racial purity. They were guided by Pelley’s alarmist publications, which espoused a mosaic of “isms,” including isolationism, anti-Communism, and, most staunchly, anti-Semitism. The New Republic described his ideology as “‘a mad hodgepodge of mystic twaddle and reactionary, chauvinistic demagogy.'”[8]

Pelley’s publications not only drew the attention of a congressional committee that investigated un-American activities, but ultimately led to his arrest for financial crimes.[9] Perhaps these charges were unsurprising, considering members had to divulge their income, banking institution, and real estate holdings on their membership questionnaire.[10] In 1935, a jury found Pelley guilty of violating North Carolina’s “Blue Sky” laws after he misrepresented the value of Galahad Press’s stock. In other words, he bilked investors for personal gain.[11] However, Pelley managed to avoid prison time after agreeing to a set of conditions, which included “good behavior for five years.” Such probation terms would prove difficult for a man of his temperament.

In fact, his legal woes and notoriety seemed only to embolden Pelley. Just months after his sentencing, Pelley announced his candidacy for president via the national Christian party, running on the platform of “Christ and the Constitution.”[12] His ill-fated run garnered less than 2,000 votes. As he had many times, Pelley didn’t dwell on the loss and instead shifted focus. He turned his attention back towards expanding the Silver Shirt Legion.

Pelley (middle of the second row to the bottom) and Silver Legion members in front of the Silver Lodge, Redmond, Washington, ca. 1936, courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

According to the Legion’s handbook, entitled One Million Silver Shirts by 1939, the group sought to make it illegal for American Jews to own property in “‘any city but one in each state.'”[13] The handbook also proposed dismantling President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. It called for the repeal of congressional measures enacted to bolster the depressed economy, such as the Social Security Act and National Labor Relations Board. And, Pelley instructed his 25,000 followers, if doing so “‘meant force it meant force.'”[14] According to Daley’s Smithsonian piece, in 1938, the organization “began a big membership push and started showing signs that it was moving towards violence.”[15]

Indeed, National Guard officer and ENT specialist Dr. Samuel Rubley, of Logansport, Indiana, later testified that he requested the Silver Shirts dispatch him to Detroit.[16] There, he reportedly mobilized a Legion “cavalry,” tapping into the growing Klan presence in the region. Dr. Rubley taught classes like horsemanship to Klansman, as well as reserve officers and their wives. These efforts were undertaken, he said cryptically, in an effort to prepare to “‘defend their homes.'” He anticipated that “the snows would be dyed red in Detroit,” as the nation would again be at Civil War over clashing political ideologies. Dr. Rubley admitted later that he had been “listening too much to ‘alarmists'” and “‘became inflamed for a while until it became a little too fantastic.'”[17]

Dr. Rubley’s statements certainly lent credence to the sentiments of an unnamed columnist in the Indiana Bremen Enquirer, who wrote:

that Mr. Pelley should be able to muster a group of followers calling themselves Americans, who had so little understanding of the fundamental basis of Americanism, is a sorry commentary upon the intelligence and understanding of a considerable sector of the American people.[18]

Map, created by Joseph P. Kamp, 1941, M002 Bilbo Collection, Box 1000, Folder 15, accessed Digital Collections at the University of Southern Mississippi. Note: webpage allows users to zoom in to further explore map.

The individuals described in the editorial sought to foment unrest in the name of patriotism and the doctrine of isolationism. While the United States had officially maintained neutrality in World War II, by 1940 it supplied money and munitions to aid Allied resistance efforts. As France struggled desperately to hold off Nazi forces, President Roosevelt delivered an address warning of the dangers of an American “fifth column.”[19] This column was comprised of subversive elements, who tried “to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and, eventually, a state of panic. . . . The unity of the State can be sapped so that its strength is destroyed.” The “fifth column,” Roosevelt asserted, operated like a “Trojan Horse,” which would ultimately betray “a nation unprepared for treachery.” Those inside the bowels of the horse not only opposed war against Hitler, but attempted to undermine efforts to halt his advancements.

The House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (HUAC)—better known as the Dies Committee—formed to investigate such subversive groups, including the German-American Bund and Communist Party USA. In 1939, the committee opened an investigation into Pelley, finding that he had been “operating on a nationwide basis,” and that his exploits spanned cities like Detroit, New York, Boston, and even Windsor, Ontario and Villa Acuna, Mexico.[20] Via this network, the committee determined that he disseminated material from the German Ministry of Propaganda, suppressing or misrepresenting its origins to Legion members.[21] The Dies Committee also highlighted his failure to pay his income tax, despite “publishing and distributing for personal profit.” This lucrative material included “booklets and pamphlets containing scurrilous statements, half-truths, re-prints of propaganda of a foreign power, and un-American and unpatriotic material, statements and propaganda.”

Poster, Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, In Our Own Backyard – Resisting Nazi Propaganda Exhibit, courtesy California State University, Northridge, accessed calisphere.org.

By the fall of 1939, Pelley faced a two-front war. The Dies Committee subpoenaed him to appear for a hearing and North Carolina Judge Zeb Nettles signed off on a warrant for his arrest, having violated the terms of probation with his behavior.[22] This behavior, Judge Nettles alleged, consisted of consorting with “‘enemies of American institutions,'” attempting to overthrow the government via his publications, and leveling “‘disgusting epithets at the office of the President of the United States.'”[23] But Judge Nettles and Dies Committee members would be remiss if they expected Pelley to turn himself in. He had apparently been laying low in the State of New York to prepare for another charge of embezzling funds from the Legion.[24] In fact, famed columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell received information that Pelley, whom he deemed a “Shamerican,” had disguised himself and was hiding in Yorkville, NY. Winchell had heard Pelley was “in need of a physician because he is suffering from fear and shock.”[25]

Perhaps breaking under unrelenting pressure, the ever-elusive Pelley emerged publicly and appeared before the Dies Committee in Washington, D.C. in February 1940.[26] Despite Winchell’s reports, when Pelley at last took the stand before the committee, he was the pinnacle of poise.[27] When pressed about his un-American activities and denouncement of the Dies Committee, he had quite the about-face. Amused columnists noted that Pelley now “thoroughly approves the committee’s work” and offered a “handsome apology” for his past actions. The Palladium-Item reported that Pelley told the group demurely that “‘meeting the committee face to face and finding out what a fine group of Christian gentleman you are'” had changed his mind. He tried to assure the committeemen that, in fact, the Legion was actually a pillar of democracy, as one of its goals was to halt Communism in America. Unfortunately, Pelley conflated Communism with Judaism, and openly admitted his anti-Semitism.[28] However, he assured HUAC that since its committee had proven they took the Communist threat seriously—just by virtue of the committee’s formation—he would gladly dissolve the Silver Shirts.

“Pelley’s Wait Before Surrender to Dies Seen as Legal Move to Escape Prison Term,” Evansville Press, February 10, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

Pelley’s assurances rang hollow and, as he stepped off the witness stand, Washington police arrested him on behalf of North Carolina officials.[29] He was released on bond after a couple days. In the unfolding months, the Dies Committee renewed its scrutiny, listening to testimony that Pelley had planned to march on Washington with the goal of becoming dictator of the United States.[30] With the walls seemingly closing in, Pelley sought to relocate.

Just days before Christmas 1940, two moving vans departed Biltmore, North Carolina. Throughout the evening, they transported files and printing equipment to a former box factory in Noblesville, Indiana, where former state police officer and Klan member Carl Losey awaited.[31] William Dudley Pelley had appointed Losey president of his new publishing company, Fellowship Press. Newspapers speculated that Losey’s close friend and former Klan Grand Dragon, D. C. Stephenson, would assist in the new endeavor once he was released from his prison sentence for murder. Stephenson vehemently denied any connection to Pelley.[32]

“Noblesville Stirred as Silver Shirt Founder Seeks to Locate Plant in City,” Anderson Dailey Bulletin, January 4, 1941, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.

Having experienced the notoriety that came with the Stephenson trial, Noblesville residents wanted nothing to do with the Silver Shirts leader. Regarding Pelley’s move, one editorialist wrote, “We do not want our state to become a center of agitation for intolerant anti-Semitism, American Fascism, and sympathy for Hitler’s Nazism.”[33] Losey tried to assuage their concerns by telling reporters that the forthcoming publication was “‘strictly a magazine for businessmen.'”[34] It would focus solely on political and national events, he assured, saying, “‘I feel that the people are not getting all the truth out of Washington and we propose to get and publish the truth.'”

Pelley himself told the Indianapolis News on Christmas Day that no “‘deep and dark exploits'” were afoot, that his press would only print commercial and “esoteric and metaphysical books.”[35] Seemingly aligned with the caring spirit of the season, he told the paper that he had indeed dissolved the Silver Shirts and would “‘conform my activities to the support of the Dies committee and the government’s efforts to keep this country neutral and at peace.'” Pelley failed to assuage the Dies Committee, however, who sent an investigator to Noblesville, just a couple days after these statements. They sought to investigate the leader of what they dubbed the “New Front,” and learn more about how Pelley financed the operation, the contents of the publications, and the activities of his friend Losey.[36]

An exasperated Pelley told the Indianapolis News that he came to “Indiana for a supposed period of respite from the investigations and persecutions out of Washington and elsewhere covering the last eight years.”[37] He had been living with like-minded benefactors in Indianapolis and commuting to his Noblesville company, despite trying to minimize his role there.[38] The Indianapolis Star reported that Noblesville residents had mixed opinions about Pelley’s presence, with a minority willing to give him a chance to prove the legitimacy of his press. Many others felt like one editorialist, who wrote that the city was “‘heavy at heart,'” and that:

‘If Mr. Pelley and his associates have selected Noblesville as a screen for unfair practices, they will find it extremely difficult to foster such literature upon the community. We sincerely hope they will devote their time and energies to beneficial works that will be a credit to local residents.’

Governor M. Clifford Townsend had no qualms about denouncing Pelley’s activities. While he did not mention Pelley by name, he released a statement on December 28 stating, “‘I feel that it is the opinion of the people of Indiana that there is no place in this state for any organizations or groups which advocate in principle, policies or practice any un-American doctrine.'”[39]

Noblesville Ledger owner D.M. Hudley, too, had no tolerance for Pelley. Before buying the box factory, Pelley, using a fake name, approached Hudley about purchasing the Ledger outright, enticing him with a $10,000 cash down payment.[40] Once Hudley discovered Pelley’s identity and intentions, he turned him away and reported him directly to the Dies investigator temporarily residing in Noblesville. The investigator also had an ally in the Indiana post of the American Legion. Legion representative William E. Sayer stated that the organization was monitoring Pelley, as it “‘is interested in seeing that no Fascist organization or any other group of that type is established in Indiana.'”[41]

Word of Pelley’s presence spread, eliciting a flood of newspaper editorials and even some threats from disapproving Hoosiers. A writer for the Bedford Daily Times stated passionately:

“Hoosiers, notwithstanding, are firm in their belief of freedom of the press. . . . But, if Mr. Losey is supported directly or indirectly by Mr. Pelley, then it is high time that action be taken to rid our state of both! We of Indiana cannot afford to have the good name of our state so besmirched, and it is better that we act early, than late. Borers are not so easily stopped after they have begun their task–they soon work under cover and then, the damage is done.”[42]

Another editorialist wrote to the Richmond Palladium-Item that Indiana, due to its central location, was fast-becoming an “important manufacturing center of military equipment and supplies.”[43] Given this, the writer found it especially “disquieting” that a “notorious American Fascist” had moved his company to the area. One Elwood resident stated in The Call-Leader that “Mr. Pelley’s very presence lends anything but dignity to the situation” and that “As far as Hoosiers generally are concerned, this ‘fountain of Fascism’ can bubble elsewhere.”[44]

“Noblesville Stirred as Silver Shirt Founder Seeks to Locate Plant in City,” Anderson Daily Bulletin, January 4, 1941, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.

Losey claimed that the deluge of resistance included a letter “‘threatening to blow the place up and attempting to kidnap his night watchmen.'”[45] Days later he requested that Noblesville police officers investigate individuals who threw a rock through the plant windows in the early morning hours before fleeing in an automobile.[46] Losey increased secrecy around the plant’s efforts and tried to temper concerns by telling the Indianapolis Star that Fellowship Press’s magazine would focus on isolationism. He noted that “‘The object of our publication is to keep America Christian and to keep American boys out of a foreign war.'”[47]

The first issue of Pelley’s new publication, the Weekly Roll Call, confirmed Hoosiers’ skepticism. It included conspiratorial, anti-Semitic cartoons. One depicted Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins ignoring the economic plight of Americans, while providing idyllic homelands for Jewish refugees.[48] Hoosier retailers demonstrated their opposition to such material by refusing to distribute the Roll Call. The Indianapolis Star reported that “Sale of the first issue, placed on the stands late last week, was slight, with ‘plenty of leftover copies.'”[49] Floundering, Losey was let go, and Pelley took full control of Fellowship Press.[50]

Indianapolis News, July 28, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

He leveraged his press weeks later, seemingly to resurrect the Silver Shirts. In April 1941, North Carolina authorities appealed to Indiana for help in extraditing Pelley, on the grounds of violating the terms of his probation. Pelley printed and circulated 10,000 copies of a letter requesting support from Silver Shirt Legion members, who resided in twenty-two states.[51] Alas, his devoted readership failed to mobilize and ultimately he returned to North Carolina to answer to the charges.

With Pelley’s case pending, an event occurred that would change the course of history. On December 7, 1941, Japan bombarded an American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise attack prompted President Roosevelt to issue his “Day of Infamy” speech and Congress to declare war on Japan. In an editorial, Pelley wrote solemnly, “It is time for patriotic wisdom, calmness and courage. We must devote ourselves towards winning the war. Let no one capitalize on the war.”[52] He announced the suspension of Roll Call, stating that for the foreseeable future, Fellowship Press would only print biographies and spiritual material. Of the Silver Shirts, he would ensure that they were at the military’s beck and call. The Noblesville Ledger suggested his pandering stemmed from fear that the patriotic fervor would negatively influence his upcoming hearing in North Carolina.

Courtesy of The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, accessed iapsop.com.

Although Pelley suspended the Roll Call, his press continued publication of The Galilean, marketed as a spiritual magazine. [53] With the U.S. fully entrenched in war, the U.S. Post Office barred its distribution and U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered Pelley’s arrest on the grounds that it violated the Espionage Act of 1917.[54] He was charged with attempting “to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and naval forces of the United States of America.'” On an April morning in 1942, FBI agents pounded on the door of George B. Fisher, who had previously donated $20,000 to the Silver Shirts. They were correct in their belief that Pelley was laying low at his Darien, Connecticut residence. The Silver Shirt leader arose from bed, was handcuffed, and transported to the Marion County Jail. That same day, his 21-year-old son entered the Army.[55]

As Pelley sat in jail, awaiting friends to transfer bail money—one offered to sell his $27,000 Meridian Street property—he chain smoked and expounded on his philosophies to the police marshal. With characteristic bluster and showmanship, he gladly “posed for photographs, amiably answered most questions and skillfully parried others.”[56] Bail money arrived a few days later and the Indianapolis News reported that he “was neatly dressed and puffing on a pipe when he was brought from his cell.”[57] Pelley reunited with his daughter, Adelaide, at the federal building in Indianapolis, where his sedition trial would take place.[58]

Indianapolis News, July 20, 1942, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.

In late July 1942, Pelley and two Fellowship Press associates arrived at the federal court in Indianapolis for the “first major sedition prosecution in America since Pearl Harbor.”[59] They faced several counts, including attempts “to interfere with the operation and success of military and naval forces of the United States and to promote the success of its enemies.”[60] At the time of their trial, these enemies were undertaking the systematic deportation of Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. “Final Solution” architect Heinrich Himmler had recently instructed doctors to conduct medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camps.

As millions experienced unspeakable suffering abroad, Hoosiers were summoned to determine the fate of William Dudley Pelley and his c0-conspirators. The all-male jury hailed from cities around Indiana and belonged to a variety of professions, including engineering, farming, and insurance sales.[61] The trial captivated the nation, as many wondered if the untouchable Pelley would finally experience harsh consequences.

Check back for Part II to learn Pelley’s fate, would ultimately be decided in an Indianapolis courtroom. We’ll also delve into “Soulcraft,” the theology Pelley developed later in life. Based out of Noblesville, Soulcraft Press published works about his new spiritual belief, which incorporated the occult and the extraterrestrial—not unlike the emergent religion of one L. Ron Hubbard.

Notes:

[1] “Pelley Forces Trial Here After His Seizure as Enemy of U. S.,” Indianapolis News, April 4, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “America’s No. 1 seditionist” quote from “Pelley’s Case May Not Take So Much Time,” Noblesville Ledger, July 30, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[2] “‘Little Fuehrer’ Moves In,” The Republic (Columbus, IN), December 27, 1940, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.

[3] Jason Daley, “The Screenwriting Mystic Who Wanted to Be the American Fuhrer,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 3, 2018, accessed smithsonianmag.com.

[4] “William Dudley Pelley,” U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, June 5, 1917, accessed Ancestry Library; William Dudley Pelley, “Idols Mended,” The Red Book Magazine (November 1922): 83-87, accessed Archive.org; William Dudley Pelley, “There Are Still Fairies,” The Sunday Star (Washington, D.C.), July 8, 1923, 2, accessed Archive.org; George C. Shull, “Pelley, Man Who Died for Seven Minutes, Says Pyramid Predicts Career End in ’45,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.

[5] William Dudley Pelley, “Seven Minutes in Eternity—the Amazing Experience that Made Me Over,” The American Magazine (March 1929): 7, accessed Archive.org.

[6] Daley, “The Screenwriting Mystic Who Wanted to Be the American Fuhrer.”

[7] Jon Elliston, “Asheville’s Fascist: William Dudley Pelley’s Obscure But Infamous Silver Shirt Movement Lives on in His Paper Trail,” WNC Magazine (January/February 2018), accessed wncmagazine.com.

[8] Elliston, “Asheville’s Fascist.”

[9] “Charge Breaking of Blue Sky Law,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), August 22, 1934, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.

[10] Silver Shirt Enrollment Application, 1930s, William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Legion of America Collection, S1050, Rare Books & Manuscripts Division, Indiana State Library.

[11] “Pelley, Summerville Convicted by Court,” News and Record (Greensboro, NC), January 23, 1935, 4, accessed Newspapers.com; “W. D. Pelley is Declared Guilty,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), January 23, 1935, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; “Silver Shirt Duo Sentenced Today,” Salisbury Post (North Carolina), February 18, 1935, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[12] “Pelley for President: Silver Shirt Man to Run,” The Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC), September 10, 1935, 11, accessed Newspapers.com; “Pelley Sees ‘Theocratic State’ in U.S.,” Asheville Times (North Carolina), January 25, 1936, 10, accessed Newspapers.com; Elliston, “Asheville’s Fascist.”

[13] “Anti-Semitic Silver Shirt Handbook Flays New Deal, Urges Axis, U.S. Unity,” Indianapolis Star, December 29, 1940, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.

[14] George C. Shull, “Pelley, Man Who Died for Seven Minutes, Says Pyramid Predicts Career End in ’45,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; Quote from “Jury Hears of Pelley ‘Oracle,'” Indianapolis News, July 29, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[15] Daley, “The Screenwriting Mystic Who Wanted to Be the American Fuhrer.”

[16] “Guard Captain Testifies Before Dies Committee,” Star Press (Muncie, IN), April 5, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Hoosier Tells of Silver Shirt Plot,” Indianapolis News, April 5, 1940, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.

[17] “Guard Captain Testifies Before Dies Committee,” Star Press (Muncie, IN), April 5, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[18] “UnAmerican Troublemakers,” Bremen Enquirer (Indiana), March 7, 1940, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.

[19] “Roosevelt’s Address on the ‘Fifth Column,'” May 26, 1940, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the National Archives & Records Administration.

[20] “Head of Silver Shirts Misused Assets of Publishing Firm, Dies Probers Told,” Reading News (Pennsylvania), August 29, 1939, 16, accessed Newspapers.com.

[21] “Pelley is Accused of Disseminating Nazi Propaganda,” Nashville Banner (Tennessee), October 3, 1939, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.

[22] “Committee Tries to Subpoena Head of Silver Shirts,” Evening Courier (Camden, NJ), August 24, 1939, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; “Pelly [sic] is Cited to State Court,” Rocky Mount Telegram (North Carolina), October 19, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[23] “Pelly [sic] is Cited to State Court,” Rocky Mount Telegram (North Carolina), October 19, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[24] “Pelly [sic] is Cited to State Court,” Rocky Mount Telegram (North Carolina), October 19, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Tax Collector Receives Check for Pelley Taxes,” Asheville Citizen Times, November 4, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Behind the Scenes in Washington,” Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Ohio), December 8, 1939, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.

[25] “Winchell Says W.D. Pelley is in N. Y. Town,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 5, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; Walter Winchell, “Broadway,” Evansville Courier, February 14, 1940, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.

[26] “Pelley Surrenders to Dies Body; Ask He Be Held for Court Here,” Asheville Times, February 6, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[27] Richard L. Turner, “Pelley Angers Dies Probers; Tells Income,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), February 8, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[28] “Silver Shirts Get $240,000 from Friends,” The Times (Munster, IN), February 9, 1940, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.

[29] “Pelley Nabbed for Violation of Probation,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), February 11, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Silver Shirt Leader Gains Jail Release,” Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN), February 12, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[30] “Silver Shirt Linked with Army Group,” Vidette-Messenger of Porter County (Valparaiso, IN), April 2, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[31] “Furniture En Route,” Indianapolis News, December 20, 1940, 25, accessed Newspapers.com; “Rumors that Stephenson to Get Pardon,” Noblesville Ledger, December 20, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[32] “Rumors that Stephenson to Get Pardon,” Noblesville Ledger, December 20, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[33] “Indiana Doesn’t Want Him,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), January 5, 1941, 16, accessed Newspapers.com.

[34] “Silver Shirts Leader Mentioned in Noblesville Magazine Mystery,” Indianapolis Star, December 20, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[35] “Pelley Denis Any ‘Mystery,'” Indianapolis News, December 25, 1940, 18, accessed Newspapers.com.

[36] “Noblesville Firm to Publish Books,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), December 27, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Dies Committee Watches Pelley,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; “Committee Sends Man to Open Inquiry,” Noblesville Ledger, December 31, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[37] “Pelley Denies Contact with Stephenson,” Indianapolis News, December 27, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[38] Donovan A. Turk, “Losey, Pelley Await Dies Quiz; Hold ‘Christian Crusade’ is Object,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[39] Edward L. Throm, “Says Indiana Has No Place for Disloyal,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[40] Daniel M. Kidney, “Dies Aide Says Pelley Tried to Buy Hoosier Newspaper,” Evansville Press, December 31, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[41] “Legion Watches Publishing Firm,” Indianapolis Star, December 30, 1940, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.

[42] “Some Americans . . .,” Bedford Daily Times, January 2, 1941, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.

[43] “Indiana Doesn’t Want Him,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), January 5, 1941, 16, accessed Newspapers.com.

[44] “Fountains of Fascism,” Call-Leader (Elwood, IN), January 9, 1941, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.

[45] Daniel M. Kidney, “Dies Aide Says Pelley Tried to Buy Hoosier Newspaper,” Evansville Press, December 31, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[46] “Losey Magazine Press Time in Air,” Indianapolis Star, January 11, 1941, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.

[47] Ibid.

[48] “Anti-Semitic Cartoons in New Magazine Found Similar to Silver Shirt Program,” Indianapolis Star, January 14, 1941, 13, accessed Newspapers.com.

[49] “Pelley Offers New Publication,” Indianapolis Star, January 21, 1941, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.

[50] “Pelley Succeeds Losey as New Magazine Agent,” Indianapolis News, March 11, 1941, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.

[51] “Pelley Asks Silver Shirt Aid in Fight Against Extradition,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), April 17, 1941, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[52] “Suspension of the Roll-Call is Announced,” Noblesville Ledger, December 15, 1941, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[53] “Pelley Faces Trial Here after His Seizure as Enemy of U. S.,” Indianapolis News, April 4, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[54] Ibid.

[55] “Pelley Now in Jail for Lack $15,000 Bond,” Noblesville Ledger, April 6, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[56] Ibid.

[57] “Pelley Released on $15,000 Bond,” Indianapolis News, April 11, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[58] “Pelley Faces Trial Here After His Seizure as Enemy of U. S.,” Indianapolis News, April 4, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[59] “Pelley Sedition Trial is Begun,” Indianapolis News, July 28, 1942, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.

[60] “U. S. Marshal Visits Office of W. D. Pelley,” Noblesville Ledger, June 10, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.

[61] “Pelley Sedition Trial is Begun,” Indianapolis News, July 28, 1942, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.

“America First:” The Ku Klux Klan Influence on Immigration Policy in the 1920s

This article was originally published, in revised form, on June 20, 2019 at the Hoosier State Chronicles blog.

United States immigration laws reflect a long history of debate over who should be included and excluded in differing visions of American identity. In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act or the Immigration Act of 1924, “a measure which was a legislative expression of the xenophobia, particularly towards eastern and southern European immigrants, that swept America in the decade of the 1920s.”[1] This legislation drastically limited immigration to the United States through a quota system that targeted specific groups for exclusion. While the annual quota for German immigrants was set at over 51,000 people, the quota for Syrian immigrants, for example, was 100 people.[2] Thus, U.S. policy officially distinguished between races and backgrounds of people included or excluded as future Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was crucial to the passage of this legislation, which had dire consequences for those seeking asylum in the U.S. over the following decades in which the quota system remained in place.

Fiery Cross, April 25, 1924, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.

In the 1920s, the Klan spread across the United States and especially thrived in Indiana. Historian James Madison explains that the Klan was especially successful at recruiting Hoosiers. As many as one in four white Protestant men born in the state were Klan members by one estimate. And some of these men were in positions of political power. In considering past debates over immigration, it’s worth re-examining the Klan’s stance on the subject. Why? Because the Klan of the 1920s was an influential mainstream movement. And those Hoosiers who put on robes and lit up the night with their fiery crosses were representative of the feelings of much of the population of the state.[3]

The first Klan, which emerged after the Civil War was a Southern terrorist organization led by former Confederate soldiers aimed at suppressing African Americans with intimidation and violence. The Klan that reemerged in the 1920s purposefully evoked the imagery of the Reconstruction Era Klan to instill fear in its “enemies,” but was much different. It was not a band of rogue vigilantes, but a nationwide organization composed of average white, Protestant Americans. It included farmers, bankers, railroad workers, suffragists, ministers, mayors, and governors. The second Klan also largely abandoned violence for civic action. They dressed their anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, antisemitic message in patriotism and Christian righteousness. Wearing their white robes and masks, they held picnics and parades, attended church and funerals. For many white Protestant Americans, the Ku Klux Klan was a respectable pastime for the whole family. [4]

Fiery Cross, December 21, 1923, Hoosier State Chronicles.

Because the Klan published their newspaper, the Fiery Cross, for several years in Indianapolis, we know a lot about who joined, what exactly they believed and feared about immigration and race, and what they did to prevent people from certain countries from becoming Americans. The Fiery Cross served both as an official mouthpiece of the national organization and as a source for local Klan news. The Indiana State Library also has a large collection of Klan documents. In conversation, these sources paint a clear picture of Klan beliefs and influence on both Indiana and national policy.

Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Kloran, 1916, United Klans of America Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, Indiana State Library. Also accessible digitally at Archive.org.

In an early KKK handbook, called the Kloran, the national organization suggested ten questions that must be answered satisfactorily before “naturalizing” a new member. Most of them asked about the potential member’s allegiance to the U.S. government and Christian principles with questions such as:

Do you esteem the United States of America and its institutions above any other government, civil, political or ecclesiastical, in the whole world?

The “ecclesiastical” reference in this question is to the Roman Catholic Church. The Klan claimed that Catholic immigrants to the U.S. served the Pope who headed a conspiracy to undermine American values. Thus they were not loyal American citizens. This anti-Catholic sentiment and rhetoric was especially strong in the Midwestern Klan, as seen in the pages of the Fiery Cross. However, not all of the membership questions veiled their hateful message. One question asked potential members bluntly:

Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy?

In their minds, the white supremacy the Klan valued so dearly was presently under attack. Like the earlier Reconstruction Klan, the 1920s Klan viewed African Americans as members of an inferior race. In Indiana, members worried about the mixing of white and black races, especially as young Hoosiers gained access to cars, jazz clubs, and Hollywood movies. [5] In 1922, the Fiery Cross blamed jazz for “inflaming the animal passions of romance-seeking youth.” And in 1924, the newspaper declared, “At this time the whole civilized structure is being threatened by the mixing of the white and black races.” It continued:

It is God’s purpose that the white man should preserve purity of blood and white supremacy in this country. Those who would have it otherwise or show leniency toward the mixing of white and colored races do not deserve the respect of anyone, much less of those who are trying to preserve American institutions, ideals and principles. A mongrel race and a mongrel civilization mean decay and ruin.

Fiery Cross, May 16, 1923, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles.

Thus, throughout Klan literature, any reference to Christian virtue or Protestant values, should be understood as being imbued with white supremacy. The Klan believed that God valued people of Anglo-Saxon, German, and Scandinavian decent more than people of other backgrounds. And they believed that it was their sacred duty to protect white domination of the U.S. For the Midwestern Klan, the main obstacle to this goal was not African Americans. Many Indiana towns had small numbers of Black residents, and there were plenty of institutionalized practices and laws in place by the 1920s to suppress African Americans. The Klan helped to keep these as standard practice. However, they saw immigrants, mainly Catholics but also Jews, as the main threat to a white, Protestant America. [6]

Fiery Cross, September 21, 1923, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.

D. C. Stephenson, the recently appointed Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan, clearly laid out the organization’s stance on immigration in a September 1923 speech to Hoosier coal miners. The Fiery Cross printed Stephenson’s address in its entirety under the headline “Immigration is Periling America.” First, he distinguished between “old” and “new” immigrants. The old immigrants were the Anglo-Saxon, German, and Scandinavian “progenitors of the Republic of America” who brought their strong work ethic and “social, moral, and civic ideals” to the new land. Omitting any mention of native peoples or the contributions of the many other immigrant groups who helped found the United States, Stephenson continued to provide the history of an imagined past created solely by and for white people.

William Arthur Swift, “Ku Klux Klan Gathering of Muncie Klan No. 4,” photograph, 1922, W. A. Swift Photographs Collection, Ball State University Libraries, https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/swift/id/700

Second, Stephenson plainly identified the enemy of white Protestant America as the “new” immigrants who were arriving in “greater in numbers” than the “old” immigrants. These “new” immigrants were “from the races of southern and eastern Europe.”

Third, he cited the various ways that the “new immigrant has been shown to be much inferior to the older type and to the native American stock.” By “native American,” Stephenson meant white European people who immigrated in previous generations, not the native Indian peoples who originally called North America home. Using examples based in the (later discredited) pseudo-science of eugenics, Stephenson furthered his argument about the inherent inferiority of the “new” immigrants.[7] Eugenicists assumed that some traits like mental illness or poverty could be prevented by limiting reproduction of people demonstrating such traits in order to breed a better race of humans.[8]

For Klan leaders, however, the language of eugenics gave them “scientific facts” to present as evidence for the need for blocking immigration. In his speech, Stephenson presented reports from eugenicists claiming that the “new” immigrants were less intelligent and more prone to mental disorders and criminal tendencies. Stephenson cited a report by influential eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, who was essential in shaping both eugenics legislation and immigration restriction. [9] Stephenson used Laughlin’s “elaborate statistics” throughout his speech, claiming:

In reference to feeblemindedness, insanity, crime, epilepsy, tuberculosis and deformity, the older immigrant stocks are vastly sounder than the recent.

and

The countries which ran lowest in crime are those which have contributed most to the elementary foundation of the population of the United States – such as Great Britain, Scandinavia, Ireland, Germany and the Netherlands . . . Those immigrant groups that run high in crime are from the countries of southern and eastern Europe’

The conclusion he intended his listeners to draw from such reports was that these people must be excluded from the country. Stephenson stated:

My friends, the significance of authoritative statements like these can hardly be overestimated. Unrestricted immigration would appear to result in a gradual contraction of our native American stock.

Fourth, Stephenson claimed that English, German, and Scandinavian “old immigrants” spread out across the country, establishing farming communities. On the other hand, the “new” immigrants settled only in already congested cities and refused to assimilate. And finally, Stephenson claimed, in these cities, the immigrant was to blame for a decreased standard of living and reduction in wages. He continued:

There is no assimilation to American standards and ideals, in the case of the great majority of the newer immigrants. Masses of human beings of inferior races, ignorant of all the ideals which Americans hold dear, are poured into our factories as so much raw material – and they are not ‘digested.’ The new immigrant comes here as a foreigner and he remains a foreigner – a citizen of a lower class, who, just as the negro, is a constant menace to the standards of civilization which Americans hold dear.

The solution was clear. The powerful Klan, with its millions of members, demanded in 1923 that “the next Congress must adopt a permanent immigration law.” Stephenson concluded his speech to the Indiana coal miners:

So the unchecked importation now of hordes of southern Europeans will bring its inevitable harvest in fearfully deteriorating the character of the American nation of the future. The immigration policy which we adopt today will not produce its vital effects at once; these will come a generation or two later, and the American citizenship, American standards of living and American qualities of manhood and womanhood of that time will be largely dependent upon the character of the racial stock that today we permit to become the percentage of the nation.

William Arthur Swift, “Ku Klux Klan Women’s Auxiliary Rally in New Castle, Indiana,” photograph, 1923, W. A. Swift Photographs Collection, Ball State University Archives and Special Collections, https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/swift/id/622.

Hoosier Klan members were on board with this message, despite the fact that Indiana’s own immigration history proved the racist claims false at every turn. For example, Jews like John Jacob Hays, an Indiana agent for the U.S. government, were among the first of European descent to settle in the Northwest Territory. Jewish Hoosier Samuel Judah settled in Vincennes in 1818 began the first of his five terms in the state legislature in 1827.[10] Black Hoosiers were also among the first to clear and farm Indiana land in communities across the state, building thriving communities like Roberts Settlement by the 1830s.[11] Catholic immigrants to Indiana like Saint Theodora Guerin in 1840 braved the wilderness and prejudice to establish schools and orphanages.[12] And at the same time the Fiery Cross claimed that immigrants were responsible for draining the economy, Terre Haute newspapers praised the Syrian immigrants to their community on the Wabash River for stimulating the local economy.[13] The examples of immigrant contributions to the Hoosier state are endless. But despite the local lessons to be learned, many Hoosiers held on to their prejudices. And the Indiana Klan gave them an outlet.

William Arthur Swift, “Ku Klux Klan Initiation and Cross Burning,” photograph, 1922, W. A. Swift Photographic Collection, Ball State University and Special Collections, https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/swift/id/724

How do we know that the average Hoosier who joined the Klan, actually supported this message of white supremacy? One way Indiana Klan members made their support public and highly visible was through large and elaborate parades. In September 1923, the Fiery Cross reported that between 1,200 and 1,500 Klansmen marched in a “huge parade” through the main streets of Terre Haute. They were led by the Terre Haute No. 7 Klan band. Signs on floats read “Uphold the Constitution” and “America First.” Local police helped handle traffic and a traction company provided “special cars” to transport Klansmen and women to “the Klan grounds, north of the city.” Here there were speakers and new member initiation ceremonies for “several hundred candidates.” While these new Hoosier Klan members took their oaths of allegiance, “a fiery cross was lighted.”

Fiery Cross, May 23, 1924, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.

In July 1923, the Fiery Cross reported on a huge Ku Klux Klan gathering in Kokomo. The city hosted “a throng in excess of any ever before entertained by an Indiana city, not excepting Indianapolis on Speedway day,” with Klan members coming from surrounding states as well. At this meeting Klan leaders announced “the establishment of a stated organization for the Hoosiers” and “charters granted to each and ever county in Indiana” for local Klan “klaverns.” The Fiery Cross continued:

Americanism has engulfed the Hoosier state and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana has been as a tidal wave.

In October 1923, the Fiery Cross claimed 10,000 people turned out for a Klan parade in Bloomington organized by the Monroe County Klan and the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. In November, Klan members held a similar event in Fort Wayne. And the Fiery Cross estimated that 100,000 would attend the night parade of Klansmen in May 1924 in Indianapolis, marching from the State Fairgrounds, to Monument Circle, led by Klan bands and drum corp.

Fiery Cross, June 27, 1924, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles.

The Klan grew their membership in other ways too. Donning robes and masks, they marched into churches and made donations to grateful ministers. They held picnics and social events. They showed Klan propaganda movies.[14] Klan bands recorded album s and Indianapolis even had a KKK record store, the American Record Shop. Members advocated for prohibition of alcohol and supported prayer in school, issues that especially interested women. Thus, the number of women’s Klan groups increased across the state as well.

Fiery Cross, September 21, 1923, 2, Hoosier State Chronicles.

Not all Klan members hid behind costumes. Many felt comfortable taking off their hoods in pictures or running an ad for their business in the Fiery Cross. While some business owners advertised in order to avoid boycott, others proudly proclaimed that their business was “100 per cent American” or incorporated the letters “KKK” into the ad.

Fiery Cross, December 21, 1923, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles

Fiery Cross, February 23, 1923, 5, Hoosier State Chronicles.

Some mainstream newspapers, such as the Indianapolis Times, were harsh critics of the Klan. But others ran ads for Klan gatherings or speakers on “the principles of 100 per cent Americanism.” Some mainstream newspapers may have even ran more subtle versions of the “100 Per Cent” ads for businesses sympathetic to the Klan that ran regularly in the Fiery Cross.

Greencastle Herald, September 21 [left] and November 17, 1923 [right], Hoosier State Chronicles.

These efforts to build membership, influence, and solidarity were successful in Indiana and across much of the country. By 1924, the Klan was a powerful force. They gave white Protestants an organization dedicated to defending the perceived threat to their political and cultural dominance. The more enthusiastic Klansmen used intimidation techniques such as burning crosses on front lawns or stopping cars to search for illegal alcohol.[15] However, they mainly focused their intimidation into written and verbal attacks on immigrants using stereotyping, dehumanizing language, and eugenic pseudo-science. Cloaking their hateful message in patriotism and virtue made it palatable to many.

Cartoon from Denver Post reprinted in Fiery Cross, May 9, 1924, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.

The Klan’s championing of white supremacist principles had real world consequences. To many Indiana politicians, the people had spoken. The Indiana Republican Party was the most sympathetic, but there were Democratic supporters as well. Most politicians were complicit in their failure to denounce the Klan for fear of losing votes, as opposed to any direct participation in the organization. But the Klan did influence Indiana elections. Stephenson openly revealed that the Klan would distribute sample ballots to members with candidates who were favorable to the organization clearly marked.[16] Several candidates won seats directly because the Klan proclaimed their support. Others sympathetic to the Klan won offices perhaps because the Klan had disseminated so much propaganda that voters did not know what to believe. As the Klan accused opposing candidates of various indiscretions, voters may have become confused and apathetic.[17] Regardless of how it was gained, directly or indirectly, their influence prevailed for some time. In fact, Stephenson released the names of several politicians who were Klansmen themselves, including John L. Duvall, the Mayor of Indianapolis, and Ed Jackson, the Governor of the State of Indiana.

Indiana’s congressmen who neither joined nor denounced the Klan still furthered the organization’s “America first” agenda. For example, as governor, Samuel Ralston proved to be a fairly progressive-minded democrat, advocating for women’s suffrage, child labor laws, and workman’s compensation. When he was elected to the U. S. Senate in 1922, he tried to avoid talking about the Klan altogether. Like most moderate Hoosier politicians Ralston was not a Klan member, but he also he never publicly denounced the organization.[18] However, when the Senate voted on the Immigration Act of 1924, Ralston voted in favor of restriction as did his counterpart James Watson.[19] All of Indiana’s representatives had also voted in favor of the bill.[20] President Calvin Coolidge signed the bill into law May 24, 1924. The President told Congress, “America must be kept American.”[21]

The Immigration Act of 1924 and its quota system remained in effect until 1952. The legislation had dire consequences in the 1930s for the hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution who applied to the United States for immigration visas. Jews were specifically targeted in the legislation as undesirable candidates for refuge and only a handful were admitted. As newspapers reported on the escalating violence and injustices perpetrated by the Nazis, some Americans called for a loosening of the restrictions. However, while the Klan may have disappeared by the 1930s, the nativist and xenophobic attitude of many Americans remained the same as it had been when they wore masks and robes. Fortune magazine took a large poll in 1938 and found that only 5% of Americans wanted to allow “political refugees to come into the United States.”[22] Even a bill requesting a temporary easing of the quotas to rescue child refugees of Nazi terror failed in the Senate. The persecuted Jews of Europe would not find refuge in the United States. Many of those denied entry were murdered in the Holocaust.[23]

With each new shift in demographics throughout American history, certain groups have feared losses of power or wealth. However, those groups who rally around nativism and hate, as powerful as they might grow for a time, lose out to the more powerful vision of America as a leader in justice and democracy. Eventually, eugenics was discounted and its practice outlawed, the quota system overturned, and the Klan was made a laughing stock. Even so, the Klan’s vision of white supremacy and exclusion still simmers beneath the surface of American politics. Vigilant Hoosiers are needed to make sure that never again will we “fear difference and demand a conformity that contradict[s] . . . the state’s best traditions.”[24] According to UCLA’s Re-Imagining Migration project, we live in an age of mass migration and immigration. When we understand that migration is “a shared condition of our past, present, and future” we can “develop the knowledge, empathy and mindsets that sustain inclusive and welcoming communities.”

Update: The Midwest History Association keynote by James Madison cited below is now available to watch: https://www.c-span.org/video/?460982-1/ku-klux-klan-1920s-midwest

Notes

[1] United States House of Representatives, “Historical Highlights: The Immigration Act of 1924,” History, Art & Archives, https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Immigration-Act-of-1924/.
[2] American Social History Project at City University of New York and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University “Who Was Shut Out? Immigration Quotas, 1925-1927,” History Matters, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/expansion.html.
[3] James Madison, “Flappers and Klansmen Challenge Traditions: The 1920s,” in Hoosiers (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press and Indiana Historical Society Press, 2014), 234-253; James Madison, “Who’s an American? The Rise and Fall of the Klan in the Midwest,” Plenary Address, Fifth Annual Midwestern History Conference, Grand Valley State University, May 31, 2019. In his 2019 address, Madison clearly stated that the 1920s Klan was a mainstream movement at the center, not margins, of the nation’s history.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7]PBS, “Eugenics Movement Reaches Its Height,” A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh23eu.html.
[8] Indiana Historical Bureau, “1907 Indiana Eugenics Law,” State Historical Marker Text and Notes, https://www.in.gov/history/markers/524.htm. The pseudo-science of eugenics led to mass sterilization in Indiana and elsewhere before it was determined to be a violation of human rights by state and federal courts [
[9] University of Missouri, “Harry Laughlin: Workhorse of the American Eugenics Movement,” Controlling Heredity: The American Eugenics Crusade: 1870-1940, University of Missouri Special Collections and Rare Books, https://library.missouri.edu/exhibits/eugenics/laughlin.htm; Andrea Den Hoed, “The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement,” New Yorker, April 27, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement.
Laughlin’s influence was lasting. He later praised Hitler for understanding that the “central mission of all politics is race hygiene.” The Reichstag modeled their eugenics laws after Laughlin’s model and the American eugenicist continued to give support for the Third Reich throughout his life.
[10] American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, “Indiana Jewish History,” Jewish Virtual Library, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/indiana-jewish-history.
[11] Stephen A. Vincent, “History,” Roberts Settlement, http://www.robertssettlement.org/history.html.
[12] Indiana Historical Bureau, “Saint Theodora Guerin,” Indiana State Historical Marker Text and Notes, https://www.in.gov/history/markers/4330.htm.
[13] Indiana Historical Bureau, “Little Syria on the Wabash,” Indiana State Historical Marker Text and Notes, https://www.in.gov/history/markers/4404.htm.
[14] Madison, Plenary Address, 2019.
[15] Madison, Hoosiers, 247.
[16] Jill Weiss Simins, “Complicity in Neutrality? Samuel Ralston Denies Klan Affiliation, Hoosier State Chronicles Blog, July 17, 2018, https://blog.history.in.gov/samuel-ralston-denies-klan-affiliation/
[16] Jill Weiss Simins, “History Unfolded Part 7: Child Refugees, Hoosier Resistance,” Hoosier State Chronicles Blog, January 25, 2019, https://blog.newspapers.library.in.gov/tag/immigration-quotas/.
[17] Madison, Hoosiers, 253.
[18] Simins, “Complicity in Neutrality? 2018.
[19] Senate Vote #126 in 1924 (68th Congress) “To Agree to Report of Conference Committee on H.R. 7995 . . . A Bill to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/68-1/s126.
[20] House Vote #90 in 1924 (68th Congress) “To Agree to the Report of Conference Committee on H.R. 7995, to Limit the Immigration of Aliens into the United States,” https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/68-1/h90.
[21] University of Virginia, “Harding, Coolidge, and Immigration,” July 6, 2016, Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/issues-policy/us-domestic-policy/harding-coolidge-and-immigration.
[22] Jill Weiss Simins, “History Unfolded Part 7: Child Refugees, Hoosier Resistance,” Hoosier State Chronicles Blog, January 25, 2019, https://blog.newspapers.library.in.gov/tag/we-remember/.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Madison, Hoosiers, 238.

Ku Klux U: How the Klan Almost Bought a University

Hagerstown Exponent, October 4, 1923. Newspapers.com.

When the Hagerstown Exponent published this headline in October 1923, the editor had slightly exaggerated. The Ku Klux Klan’s powerful “Indiana Realm” had not literally bought itself a venerable institution of higher learning that summer– but it had come close. For a few weeks, Valparaiso University — sixty miles from downtown Chicago and formerly one of the largest private schools in the U.S. — teetered on the brink of becoming a “Ku Klux Kollege.” Once praised as the “Poor Man’s Harvard,” in 1923, many feared the university was about to become a “hooded Harvard.”

“Valpo” is a thriving university today, with some of the best programs in Indiana — and has no connections whatsoever to the KKK. Yet, a century ago, after its rapid rise to national fame, the highly-respected school experienced hard times that took many alumni and faculty by surprise.

Founded by Methodists in 1859, the original school — Valparaiso Male and Female College — took in students of all levels, from elementary to college age. The pioneer school was also one of the few co-educational institutions in America before the Civil War. That war wreaked havoc on enrollment, leading the college to close its doors in 1871. Two years later, it reopened as a teacher’s college. Until 1900, the school went by the name Northern Indiana Normal School and Business Institute.

Renowned for its economical tuition and low cost of living — as well as for admitting women and students from overseas — by 1905 “Old Valpo” enjoyed one of the highest enrollments of any private university in the U.S. With over 5,000 students that year, the school ranked just behind Harvard. Its affordability to working-class Americans led many to praise it as the aforementioned “Poor Man’s Harvard.”

Valparaiso University circa 1915 — Valparaiso University, circa 1915. Flickr.com.

Students from all over the U.S. and the world trained to be public school teachers there. Some were later busy teaching English to immigrants employed at Gary’s new steel mills. Valpo’s programs in law, engineering, medicine, and dentistry were well-regarded. Its College of Medicine and Surgery had been brought over from Northwestern University in Chicago. When the college moved back to the Windy City in 1926, it formed the nucleus of Loyola’s medical program.

Harvard and Yale might have been too good to take out ads in Chicago newspapers. But this ad from 1905 appeared next to one for another great school on the rise, the University of Notre Dame.

The Inter Ocean, August 1, 1905 — The Inter Ocean, Chicago, August 1, 1905. Newspapers.com.

Yet, once enrollment peaked in 1907, venerable Valpo plunged into an unexpected, two-decade-long decline. After accreditation of American colleges and universities began at the turn of the century — partly driven by a desire to standardize high-school education and thereby “unify” the country — Valparaiso failed to win accreditation. Suddenly unable to transfer their credits, current and prospective students found the school a harder sell, especially as affordable new state universities, teachers’ colleges, and urban night schools entered the competition. Valpo’s lack of a football team and Greek life were another stumbling block, though it hurriedly scraped together a football program in the early 1920s and even played Harvard. (It lost 22-0 in its first game.)

Postcard from Valparaiso University, 1911. Flickr.com.

World War I issued another blow. The famously affordable university had always attracted international students. (One of the more unusual of them was future Soviet Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin, “Stalin’s Man in China,” who would die in a Siberian gulag in 1951.) But after 1914, many of these students left to fight for their European homelands in WWI. When America entered the war against Germany in 1917, student military enlistment left Valpo’s academic and residence halls almost empty. Also, with plenty of war-related jobs now available to women, female students also tended to skip out on college for the duration of the war.

Journal Gazette (Mattoon, IL), July 17, 1923 — Journal Gazette, Mattoon, IL, July 17, 1923. Newspapers.com.

In 1919, Indiana passed a new law requiring private colleges to maintain a half-million dollar endowment. Cash-strapped Valparaiso University, burdened with a $350,000 debt (almost $5 million in today’s money) faced the real prospect of bankruptcy. The school’s trustees even tried to sell it to the state that year for use as a public teacher’s college, but the Indiana legislature declined the offer.

Holding on by a thread — and led by controversial president Daniel Russell Hodgdon, who turned out to hold fake medical degrees — desperate trustees and the equally-desperate citizens of Valparaiso sought new owners. That list of potential “saviors” grew to include the Presbyterian Church, the International Order of the Moose, and the owner of Cook Laboratories in Chicago, who wanted to turn the campus into a syringe factory and provide 1,000 jobs to townsfolk.

Daily Republican (Rushville, IN), August 16, 1923 — Daily Republican, Rushville, Indiana, August 16, 1923. Newspapers.com.

Then, in August 1923, a new bidder expressed interest. For some residents of Valparaiso — which hosted a parade of at least 6,000 Klansmen in May 1923 that attracted 50,000 visitors from around the Midwest — the offer from the Ku Klux Klan to take over the struggling school seemed like a God-send. Academics, alumni, and students thought differently, especially Catholics and Jews, and many were ready to pack up and leave. Yet, as far as the trustees were concerned, the question of selling Valparaiso University to the Ku Klux Klan mostly came down to whether that organization itself had the resources to made good on its own offer.

The efforts of the revived Klan proved more durable than that which had died out in the 1870s. Klan rallies and parades occurred all over the North and West, from Chicago and L.A. to Oregon and Maine. KKK membership in those years peaked in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, “ground zero” for some of the biggest Klan activity. D.C. Stephenson, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in 23 states, operated mostly out of his headquarters in Indianapolis, a city that was almost taken over by Klansmen and Klanswomen; It was also a city that fought a valiant battle in the press, courts, and churches to discredit the “Invisible Empire.”

KKK Members, Valparaiso, 1923 — Klansmen on Franklin Street, Valparaiso, Indiana, 1923. Smithsonian Magazine (via Ancestry.com).

The Fiery Cross, May 11, 1923 — Fiery Cross, May 11, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

The “second wave” of the Klan defined itself as a hyper-patriotic organization of white Protestant Americans and was more mainstream than at any other point in its history. Instead of waving the Confederate flag at rallies and parades as had previous iterations of the Klan, they flew the red, white, and blue. During the 1920s, the Klan was less concerned with suppressing African Americans than with stemming the tide of new immigration coming from Southern and Eastern Europe — including to heavily-industrial towns like Gary, just thirty miles from Valparaiso. The Klan sought to cripple an imaginary conspiracy contending that Catholics wanted to destroy American public schools and hand the U.S. government over to the Pope. It also warned of the activities of “Jewish Communists” and anarchists in the wake of the Russian Revolution and the 1919 Red Scare. Prohibition of alcohol, another cause taken up by the KKK, was a barely concealed way to crack down on immigrant culture.

Ku Klux Klan Rally in Washington, D.C. on September 13, 1926. Library of Congress.

These views were shared by thousands of Americans who didn’t belong to the Klan. The “Invisible Empire” even found strange bedfellows in the Progressive movement, including women’s suffrage advocates, who espoused some of the same “reform” ideals promoted by the Klan, albeit with different objectives. They also got involved in public health. In 1925, the organization helped fund a hospital in Logansport that catered only to Protestants. Alongside these initiatives, acquiring a university would have helped the Klan project a more legitimate image. Since Valparaiso was a teacher’s college, the Klan could also propagandize American children from within schools.

The Fiery Cross, August 24, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Fiery Cross, August 24, 1923 (4) — The Fiery Cross, August 24, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

By July of 1923, the trustees of Valparaiso University and the Klan were talking. Representing the Klan was Milt Elrod, whom Stephenson had recently made editor of the Fiery Cross, the major KKK newspaper, printed at the Century Building on South Pennsylvania Street in downtown Indianapolis.

When encountering obvious concern from much of the faculty and student body, Elrod assured the press that a Ku Klux takeover of the school would change nothing except the trustee board, which was to be filled with Klan appointees. The school would remain open to women and would be non-sectarian, Elrod insisted — though Catholic students were already beginning to drop out and enroll elsewhere. Ludicrously, Elrod initially claimed that the Klan would admit any applicant who met the proper educational requirements, including African Americans, though he later admitted that the school would not have adequate facilities for them. (The sad irony is that Valparaiso University did not admit African Americans even before the Klan tried to buy it.)

Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August 16, 1923 (2) — Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August 16, 1923. Newspapers.com.

Few people (trustees excepted, it seems) took Elrod at his word when he said that nothing else would change at the university, except skyrocketing enrollment and the return of its once prestigious reputation. Yet Elrod’s enemies had already come out. In the Fiery Cross on August 24, 1923, he was busy singling out “un-American” and “alien forces” as his opponents. Elrod may have been quick to pick up on campus rumors that Catholic priests from Notre Dame had visited town, spurring the Klan to act soon and not be outbid by the “agents of Rome.”

Fiery Cross, August 24, 1923 (3) — The Fiery Cross, August 24, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Heavy opposition came from the press. Even in Indiana, major urban newspapers tended to be anti-Klan, including the Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis News and most famously the Indianapolis Times, which won a Pulitzer for its battle against the group. Some of the sharpest criticism, however, came from George R. Dale, the wildly colorful and energetic editor of the Muncie Post Democrat. Dale, who endured death threats and assaults on his life and that of his family, ran a paper that was virtually one long, rambunctious op-ed piece, employing a folksy humor to give sucker-punches to the powerful “Indiana Realm.” Dale went on to become mayor of Muncie in 1930.

Muncie Post Democrat, August 3, 1923. Hoosier State Chronicles.

Editors and cartoonists nationwide– including E.H. Pomeroy, an illustrator for the Valparaiso Vidette — tore into Elrod’s proposal once it came out that he might, in fact, get hold of the $350,000 in cash needed to bail the school out of debt. (Elrod also promised that the Klan would set it up on a million-dollar endowment, twice the amount required by Indiana law.) As the story spread across the U.S., an illustrator in the New York Call went straight for the jugular, publishing a parody of Dante’s Inferno — “Abandon All Brains Ye Who Enter Here.” The cartoon depicts book-burning, classes in whipping and tar-and-feathering, a “Klinik” to teach “100% Americanism,” and a commencement day ceremony where students sport an unconventional new style of cap and gown.

Abandon All Brains, Ye Who Enter Here. Republished in Literary Digest, September 15, 1923. UNZ.org.

Another critical broadside came from Helena, Montana. The writer in Helena’s Independent Record thought that a bout of education for those in the Klan might at least have a few “salutary” side-effects.

The Independent Record (Helena, Montana), August 28, 1923 (2) — The Independent Record, Helena, Montana, August 28, 1923. Newspapers.com.

One editorial, “Ku Klux and Kolleges”, appeared in Robert W. Bingham’s Louisville Courier-Journal. It asks if there is no provision in the Indiana school’s original charter to prevent the sale to the Klan. The Courier-Journal also pointed out that many teachers in Kentucky had been trained at Valparaiso in its better days, and that Kentuckians should be concerned about its ultimate fate.

Louisville Courier-Journal, July 27, 1923 (3) — Louisville Courier-Journal, July 27, 1923. Newspapers.com.

Though excitement among some Valparaiso citizens allegedly ran high, Milt Elrod was probably too quick to make blustery promises about the Klan’s own financial strength. His proposal to buy the school wasn’t completely baseless, but Elrod was a notorious booster and propagandist.

Through the sale of thousands of robes, newspaper subscriptions, and membership fees, the leadership of the Klan had amassed huge fortunes for itself. D.C. Stephenson had gone from being a poor coal dealer in Evansville to a wealthy man by age 33, but he squandered Klan money on liquor, women, cars, and a yacht. Even the $350,000 needed to buy the Valparaiso campus — not to mention the $1,000,000 offered as an endowment — was apparently beyond the ability of the Klan to come up with (or hang onto).

The American press and higher education breathed a sigh of relief when, after just a few weeks, Elrod feebly announced that the Klan had changed its mind due to “legal technicalities.” Some papers reported that — true to the Louisville Courier-Journal’s suggestion — a clause in the school’s original charter had been discovered, preventing control by any “fraternal, benevolent or charitable order” (an inaccurate description of the Klan, at any rate).

Fort Wayne Daily News, September 5, 1923. Newspapers.com.

“Legal technicalities” caused by the school’s charter might have been a myth, a clever way for both the university and the Klan to save face after the embarrassing episode. Most newspapers ran with it, but there seems to be little evidence that university trustees would have called off the sale if enough cash had been put down in front of them.

Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, September 11, 1923. Newspapers.com.

Fortunately, Valparaiso University never fell into KKK hands. With the corrupt Klan itself in disarray by 1925, and with Stephenson headed to the nearby state prison at Michigan City for rape and murder, any future Klan bids were out of the question.

In the summer of 1925, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod rescued the run-down, almost abandoned school. Lutherans at that time had several colleges and seminaries around the U.S., but no university. They announced vague plans to use it as a theology school or teachers’ college. Securing the deal was assisted by Reverend John C. Baur, a Lutheran minister and noted opponent of the Ku Klux Klan in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The Republic (Columbus, IN), May 18, 1925 — The Republic, Columbus, Indiana, May 18, 1925. Newspapers.com.

Under Lutheran guidance, Valparaiso University’s fortunes gradually turned around, though it barely survived the Great Depression. By the 1950s, “Old Valpo” once again ranked among Indiana’s and the nation’s best colleges, a reputation it still holds today.

Hoosier State Chronicles provides searchable access to several years of The Fiery Cross.

Other materials from the Indiana State Library on the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana can be found here.

Contact: staylor336 [AT] gmail.com

History Unfolded Part 7: Child Refugees, Hoosier Resistance

(Indianapolis) Jewish Post, December 2, 1938, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

Children under eighteen years of age make up more than half of the approximately 22 million people seeking refuge today. [1] We read statistics like this often, and sometimes our empathy for such human devastation of can get lost in the numbers. The problems can feel remote, foreign, and unrelated to our own daily struggles. And that is precisely how many Americans felt just before the outbreak of WWII, as the number of people applying for refuge in the United States multiplied. In 1938, 125,000 asylum seekers applied for the 27,000 visas under the restrictive U.S. quota system. By 1939, that number increased to over 300,000. [2] A Fortune magazine poll from the summer of 1938, showed that 67% of Americans thought “we should try to keep them out.” Only 5% thought the U.S. government should raise the quotas to allow more people asylum. [3]

Fortune, July 1938, reprinted in Ishaan Thardoor, “What Americans Though of Jewish Refugees on the Eve of World War II,” *Washington Post*, November 17, 2015, accessed Washington Post.

Again, the staggering statistics can be numbing. But even at our most ambivalent, the stories of children fleeing persecution seem to break through our indifference and stir us to act. For example, in 1938, British citizens lobbied their government to act on behalf on children fleeing Austria and Germany after the Anschluss and Kristallnacht. They agreed to fund the transportation, care, and education of these children and infants. These rescue missions, known as Kindertransport, saved ten thousand children from annihilation.

“Kindertransport,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM.

Despite the prevailing attitudes towards immigrants in the United States, some hoped their fellow Americans would make an exception for child refugees. Hope came in 1939, in the form of the Wagner-Rogers Bill that aimed to bring 20,000 children escaping Nazi Germany to the United States. Hoosiers both supported and opposed refugee immigration and the bill. Looking through Indiana newspapers for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s History Unfolded project, we can see what Hoosiers knew about the issue, how they aided, and how they failed these small asylum seekers. (Find out how you can participate in the History Unfolded Project which helps the USHMM determine what Americans knew about the Holocaust.)

USHMM caption: Jewish refugee children, part of a Children’s Transport (Kindertransport) from Germany, upon arrival in Harwich. Great Britain, December 12, 1938, Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library Limited, accessed Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM.

The Wagner-Rogers Bill

(Richmond) Palladium-Item, May 22, 1958, 11, accessed Newspapers.com

Clarence Pickett, an Earlham College professor and leader of Quaker relief organization American Friends Service Committee, led the drafting of the bill in December 1938. Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) and Representative Edith Nourse Rogers (R-MA) introduced this legislation in both the House and Senate on February 9, 1939. The bill would allow 20,000 children under the age of fourteen to immigrate to the United States (10,000 in 1939 and that same amount in 1940) outside of the established quota. While the bill did not specify that these were Jewish children, “the realities of the refugee crisis in Europe made this an obvious and understood fact. [4] The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) quoted Senator Wagner:

The admission of a handful of unfortunate people means little in the economic life of 120 million people, but it means a great deal for us and the world as a symbol of the strength of democratic convictions and our common faith.

(Indianapolis) Jewish Post, June 2, 1939, 6, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

Support for the bill came from unlikely places. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) both supported the legislation, specifying that the children were not a threat to American jobs, an oft-cited fear for those with anti-immigration sentiments. In fact, Pickett argued, they would become consumers, helping the economy. The U.S. Department of Labor agreed, and offered to place the children via their Children’s Bureau. Leaders from all of these organizations testified before the House Immigration Committee in support of the bill. The (Indianapolis) Jewish Post reported via the JTA that John Brophy, National Director of the CIO “told the committee that organized labor had no fears of an undue influx of refugees resulting from the Wagner-Rogers Bill.” Eleanor Roosevelt also spoke in favor of the bill, allowing herself to be quoted on a heated political issue for the first time in her six years as first lady, according to the USHMM. She told UP reporters:

I hope very much it will pass. It seems to be a wise way to do a humanitarian thing.

“The Conscience of the American People”

At the same time in Indiana, several notable Hoosiers were at work on grassroots campaigns to rescue German-Jewish children. Prominent Jewish civic leader Sarah Wolf Goodman and the leadership of the (Indianapolis) Jewish Post, among others, raised money to bring refugees to the United States. We examined these efforts thoroughly in post 5 of this series “Jewish Refugees, Hoosier Rescue.” But these were small-scale operations. The sweeping action needed had to come from the federal government.

History Unfolded Post 5: “Jewish Refugees, Hoosier Rescue,” Hoosier State Chronicles Blog.

(Indianapolis) Jewish Post, July 28, 1939, 8, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

On December 16, 1938 Jewish Post Editor Gabriel M. Cohen made a passionate argument for congressional action. Cohen stated that protests against the Nazi perpetrators and prayers for the victims were not enough. It was time for “immediate relief.” Cohen noted that President Roosevelt was not seeking to extend the quota system, but that maybe it was not up to the president to lead the way on this issue. Cohen continued:

USHMM caption: A Jewish refugee girl from Vienna, Austria, upon arrival in Harwich after her arrival in England on a Kindertransport. United Kingdom, December 12, 1938, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, accessed Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM.

Possibly such a demand cannot at this time come from the President. It can and should come, however, from the conscience of the American people.

He noted especially the responsibility of communities and leaders of faith. He expressed his confidence in American Jews to take a leading role in the care of these children

We are certain that there are thousands of Jewish families in the United States, who, in the face of the present crisis, will gladly take refugee children into their homes and provide them with food and shelter as long as necessary.

Cohen’s prediction was correct. The JTA reported that at an April 1939 joint committee hearing for the bill, attorney Wilbur Large presented 1,400 letters from citizens around the country offering to adopt a refugee child. In fact, the AP reported that Paul Belsser, head of the Child Welfare League of America testified that there were more than enough homes for the children with twelve applications coming in for every child adopted in America.

Marcus Blechman,, Photograph of Helen Hayes, 1945, Henrietta Alice Metcalf Performing Arts Photographic Collection, Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky, https://exploreuk.uky.edu/catalog/xt7gxd0qsz74_205_1/

Hollywood actress Helen Hayes offered to adopt a refugee child herself. Hayes told the committee that her grandmother, who had nine children, lived by the motto, “There is always room for one more.” Then, joking aside, Hayes addressed the lawmakers:

There is room in my family for one more. I beg you to let them in.

One senator “heckled” her, according to the Logansport Pharos-Tribune, asking sarcastically, “Do you mean to say you’d adopt a child unseen?” Hayes replied sharply, “I never saw my own child until it was delivered!”

“A Stand Against A Haven”

In his plea for congressional action, Cohen also anticipated and refuted opposing arguments. Echoing Pickett, the Jewish Post editor wrote:

Whatever economic objections and fears of increased unemployment Congress may have with regard to enlarging the existing immigration quota, there can be no such objections to the admission of children.

Also like Pickett, Cohen argued that the children would first be consumers before they would be job seekers. He continued, “Their presence in the community would stimulate business.”

USHMM caption: Children aboard the President Harding look at the Statue of Liberty as they pull into New York harbor. They were brought to the United States by Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus. New York, United States, June 1939, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Steve Pressman, accessed Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM.

Again, Cohen’s predictions were correct. The bill’s opposition focused on the “economic dangers” of increasing immigration just as the country was climbing out of the Great Depression. Senator Robert R. Reynolds (D-NC) argued that the children would grow up and “undoubtedly keep our own children from jobs and work that they are rightfully entitled to.” Reynolds pledged to “filibuster the plan to death,” according to the Associated Press (AP).

Meanwhile, in Indiana, members of the American Legion‘s Subcommittee on Immigration gathered in Indianapolis to begin a series of meetings on the bill and establish the official position of the national organization. According to a May 3 AP article via the Kokomo Tribune :

Some members of the immigration committee were reported to be favoring the admission of the children for humanitarian purposes while others were opposing it on the grounds American children would suffer by the influx of additional foreigners.

By May 5, 1939, the American Legion made its decision to oppose the bill and adopted a report of their official position. Announcing their decision from their Indianapolis headquarters, American Legion Chairman Jeremiah Cross called the bill “class legislation” because it “would benefit persecuted minorities in only one country.” According to the International News Service via the Hammond Times, Cross claimed that accepting the children would “break up homes and thus be contrary to the American tradition of preserving home life.” National Commander Stephen Chadwick stated that there were too many children at home that needed assistance. Chadwick continued:

We should solve this problem at home before extending a helping hand to foreign nations.

The local Franklin, Indiana, American Legion chapter encouraged the legionnaires gathered at Indianapolis to go further in denying asylum. The Edinburg Daily Courier and Franklin Evening Star reported that the district recommended “a ten-year curtailment of all immigration into the United States” on top of opposing the bill. At the final session of their meetings on immigration, American Legion director Homer L. Chaillaux announced that the powerful organization would indeed back a policy of “curtailed immigration for 10 years to solve the unemployment problem” and “halt the flow of undesirable aliens into this country.” The Evening Star reported that the Legion also reiterated that they were taking “a stand against a haven for thousands of German refugee children seeking admittance to this country, on the grounds that entrance of the children would clear the way for a increased number of parents and close relatives.”

USHMM caption: Soon after liberation, surviving children of the Auschwitz camp walk out of the children’s barracks. Poland, after January 27, 1945, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lydia Chagoll, accessed Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM.

The anti-immigration position of the American Legion and other organizations (such as the Daughters of the American Revolution) was translated into policy. The Senate Committee on Immigration proposed admitting the children but counting them against the quota. Senator Reynolds proposed the children be admitted in exchange for an end to all quota immigration for five years. This is exactly what leaders of organizations dedicated to rescue feared. James G. McDonald, chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee (and a former Indiana University professor who has been covered in detail in our History Unfolded series post 4 and post 5) predicted this response and the death of the bill. Assistant Secretary of State George S. Messersmith recommended to McDonald that his advisory committee not attempt to intervene, as any effort to expand the quota would result in a cutting of the quotas instead. Congress was eager for the chance to respond to American anti-immigration sentiment. McDonald worked behind the scenes to put pressure on President Roosevelt to intervene, but the president declined to act or comment on the issue. McDonald wrote despairingly in a private letter that the settlement of refugees was “dependent upon the attitude of governments which are little influenced by humanitarian factors.” [5]

USHMM caption: A child wears the compulsory Jewish badge. The “Z” stands for the word “Jew” (Zidov) in Croatian. Yugoslavia, ca. 1941, accessed Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM.

The amendments added by the legislation’s opponents, nullified its intent, and Senator Wagner withdrew his bill on July 1, 1939. The Jewish Post reported that antisemitic groups and publications praised Senator Reynolds. The newspaper also reported on Reynold’s founding of the Vindicators Association, which was “an ultra-nationalist, isolationist, nativist, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist” group, according to the North Carolina History Project. The Post reported via correspondent:

Speaking of refugees, Senator Bob Reynolds, of North Carolina, who sees the overthrow of the republic if 20,000 refugee children are allowed to enter this country in the space of two years, has just opened a new headquarters for his organization, The Vindicators, here in Washington. It’s right behind the Supreme Court Building, and cost $20,000.

The New York Times and other national publications also condemned Reynold’s extreme anti-immigration stance and linked him to antisemitic groups. But the senator continued to advocate for isolationism. The Congressional Record reported his 1941 address to the Senate:

I wish to say — and I say it without the slightest hesitation — that if I had my way about it at this hour, I would today build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of this earth could possibly scale or ascend it.

USHMM caption: This photograph taken soon after liberation shows young camp survivors from Buchenwald’s “Children’s Block 66″—a special barracks for children. Germany, after April 11, 1945, Federation Nationale des Deportes et Internes Resistants et Patriots, accessed Holocaust Encyclopedia, USHMM.

Private citizens and charitable organizations continued their rescue efforts (and this series will continue to share the stories of such notable Hoosiers.) However, the immigration quotas remained in effect, denying asylum to those fleeing Nazi persecution. As we reflect this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, remember the 1.5 million children who were killed by Germans and collaborators — not as “unwanted aliens” and not as statistics — but as boys, girls, and even infants who deserved a future. And we can’t help but regret that Cohen’s appeal in the Jewish Post to “Save the Children” went unanswered. In it, he concluded:

Tens of thousands of innocent children are now exposed to a life of torture or to a slow painful death . . . America must do its share. Let us open our gates to their outstretched hands.

Learn more about the History Unfolded project and about issues facing Refugees Today through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Notes

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Refugees Today,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/refugees-today.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Refugees” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/refugees.
Poll: , Fortune, July 1938, reprinted in Ishaan Thardoor, “What Americans Though of Jewish Refugees on the Eve of World War II,” Washington Post, November 17, 2015, accessed https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/11/17/what-americans-thought-of-jewish-refugees-on-the-eve-of-world-war-ii/?utm_term=.2a6a6f677323.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” Wagner-Rogers Bill,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/wagner-rogers-bill.
Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, eds., Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945 (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., 2009), 160-161.

History Unfolded Project Part 4: The Nuremberg Laws and a Hoosier “Advocate for the Doomed”

In this continuing project, we are examining world events through the eyes of the Hoosier newspaper reader. Because many of these articles were reported through the Associated Press and United Press news services, what we are really seeing is not just what Hoosiers knew, but what the average American knew, about the events leading up to the Holocaust.

www.ushmm.org

Over the next several months, we will be contributing newspaper articles to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s project titled History Unfolded: US Newspapers and the Holocaust. Using digitized newspapers mainly accessible via Hoosier State Chronicles, we are looking at key events suggested for research by the museum to see what Hoosiers knew when. The overall goal of the project is to contribute to the scholarship on how American media reported and under-reported Nazi atrocities. Anyone can submit their research; find out how at History Unfolded.

In past posts, we asked when Hoosiers knew about the opening of the Dachau concentration camp; the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses and the removal of Jewish leaders from government posts; and the 1933 book burnings. For this post, Part 4, we will find out what Hoosiers in 1935 knew about the Nuremberg Race Laws. We will also introduce James G. McDonald, a brave and tireless Hoosier who worked to help the growing number of refugees from Germany and who tried to warn the world about imminent Nazi plans to annihilate the Jews.

Indianapolis Jewish Post, August 9, 1935, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

In retrospect, it’s hard to understand how the world could possibly not know that the Nazis were planning a horrific “Final Solution” to their “Jewish problem.” The signs were everywhere and the Nazis were not quiet about their intentions, but most people could not have imagined the unprecedented mass murder that would become known as the Holocaust. However, the average Hoosier, like Americans everywhere, had access to more than enough clues in their daily newspaper. On August 9, 1935, the (Indianapolis) Jewish Post quoted this foreboding statement from Joseph Goebbels, director of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry: “No foreign protest will prevent Germany from annihilating the Jew – the enemy of the German state. The next few weeks will show what we will do to the Jews.” The Post also reported that “Reichministers [Bernhard] Rust and [Karl Hermann] Frank added fuel to the flames with addresses at Essen and Cologne promising that the government will not compromise on its present racial policy and that no let-up can be expected until the Jew is completely eliminated from German life.”

Still from video of Joseph Goebbels speaking at the September 1935 rally in Nuremberg. View the historical footage through the USHMM.

While they did not hide their goal of eliminating the German Jews, Nazi leaders bristled at criticism from the Allied powers who they blamed for many of their problems after WWI. In the same speech in which he spoke of “annihilating the Jew,” Goebbels complained about the treatment of Germany in foreign press. Goebbels stated: “Whenever someone looks cross-eyed at a Jew on the Kurfuerstendamm [a popular street in Berlin], there is a hullabaloo from London to Peiping. But why does the foreign press insist on converging on Germany? Let it cease about the world and it will readily find topics of greater urgency.”

Indianapolis Recorder, September 14, 1935, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

This theme of encouraging the world to mind its own business was often an effective one. Before the horrors of the concentration camps came to light, some African American newspapers even agreed. After all, black Americans had reason to fear persecution and even lynching by their neighbors and couldn’t trust their own government to protect them. Prominent African American newspapers asked: how could the U.S. throw stones, when it systematically denied rights and opportunities to its citizens based on race?

Indianapolis Recorder, September 14, 1935, 10, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

On September 14, 1935, the Indianapolis Recorder printed a brief but telling article on this point. The Recorder quoted Julius Streicher, the publisher of an anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda newspaper, reporting that Streicher “took occasion to advise the Southern States of the American Union to mend their own vicious ways before attempting to point a finger of scorn at the misdeeds of others.” The paper quoted Streicher regarding lynching in the South: “We do not kill Jews in Germany . . . we have other ways of punishing them.” The Recorder then responded to his comments saying that while the “ugly plight of Jews in Germany” should not be discounted, Streicher’s words “should be solid food for thought” for Americans. The Recorder concluded, “Yes, Americans should set about putting their own house in order before telling Germany what to do about her own affairs.” Despite Streicher’s claims, the Nazi party was already moving towards the systematic killing of Jews and the Nuremberg Laws would soon provide them the legal framework needed to intensify persecution by codifying racial antisemitism.

Antisemitism before the rise of the Third Reich can be generally described as discrimination against Jewish people for their religious views. Nazi ideology, however, refocused antisemitism by creating racial theories that defined Jewish people as a race separate from Aryan people. According to this ideology, Jews were now identified not as people subscribing to a particular religion, but as members of a race who could be identified through blood and genealogy.

“An instructional chart used to aid German citizens in the determination of racial status,” accessed USHMM.

Nazis had to use genealogy (that is determining whether a person had Jewish ancestors) to define a person as a Jew because there is no science behind identifying Jews racially. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), “the Nazis had long sought a legal definition that identified Jews not by religious affiliation but according to racial antisemitism” because “Jews in Germany were not easy to identify by sight.” While some Jewish Germans continued traditional religious practices and wore distinctive clothing, most Jews in the 1930s looked the same as any other modern German man or woman. However, if they could codify this racial antisemitism by passing it into law, Nazis would have “the legal framework for the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany.”

“Massed crowds at the Nazi party rally in Nuremberg. Nuremberg, Germany, 1935,” accessed USHMM.

This was Hitler’s goal in September 1935 when he called the Reichstag, or Nazi Parliament, to convene in Nuremberg in the midst of a Nazi party rally. Newspapers across Indiana announced the convening of the Reichstag, albeit without the illuminating quotes published by the Jewish Post. However, an AP article that ran September 13, 1935 in the (Columbus) Republic noted that the Reichstag’s meeting during the Nazi party rally meant that “the party and the state are identical.”

(Columbus) Republic, September 18, 1935, 2, accessed Newspapers.com

Hammond Times, September 13, 1935, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.

In other words, the Nazi party was now the German government. In a move that symbolized this solidification of party and government, Hitler prepared to declare the “nazi swastika flag . . . the one and only flag of the Third Reich” at the Reichstag meeting, according to an International News Service (INS) article published by the (Hammond) Times. The article continued to report that Hitler wished to demonstrate “the complete unity of the German state and the nazi party.” Thus, by the fall of 1935, there were no longer any government officials with the power to defend the rights of the Jewish people of Germany.

“Die Nurnberger Gesetze” (Nuremberg Race Laws), *US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Hillel at Kent State,* accessed USHMM.

On September 15, 1935, Hitler announced the two laws, which together are known as the Nuremberg Race Laws: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. According to the USHMM, the Reich Citizenship Law declared that only people of “German or kindred blood” were German citizens. The law also declared that “Jews were a race defined by birth and by blood,” not religion. Anyone, even Christians, with Jewish grandparents or parents was considered Jewish. The law declared that they were no longer German citizens and had no rights, but were instead “subjects of the state.” The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor outlawed marriage and sexual relationships between “Aryan” Germans and Jewish Germans. Violating this law was condemned as “race defilement” and punishable with imprisonment or deportation to concentration camps. (Read the complete text of the laws through the USHMM here).

Kokomo Tribune, October 1, 1935, 6, accessed Newspaper.com.

“Poster advertising a special issue of a Nazi newspaper about “race defilement” and the Nuremberg Laws,” US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Deutsches Historisches Museum GmbH, accessed USHMM.

Indiana newspapers printed wire service articles on the announcement of the laws, but many missed their significance. For example, the Daily Clintonian (from Clinton, Indiana) ran a United Press (UP) article that focused on the promises of peace made by Hitler in his speech before the Reichstag. The article stated: “From the world standpoint his reference to peace was of paramount importance. It appeared to say plainly that Germany would not encourage Benito Mussolini’s ambitions and would adopt an attitude of neutrality similar to the United States.” However, in the same speech where he promised peace, Hitler threatened Lithuania. The article also naively interpreted the exclusion of Jews from German society as an opportunity for them, stating that “Germany’s new, drastic restrictive laws against the Jews will make it possible for them to have their own community life in Germany.” However, even this misguided article clearly printed the new laws, noting that Jews were no longer German citizens with rights but instead “state subjects.”

(Seymour) Tribune, September 16, 1935, 1, accessed Newspapers.com

On the same day, the (Seymour) Tribune printed an Associated Press (AP) article that more accurately conveyed the significance of the Nuremburg Laws under the headline “Jews Placed in Medieval Status.” The newspaper reported on the specifics of the laws and that “Aryan citizens . . . will be separated sharply from ‘belongers to the state.’” Perhaps most foreboding, the article mentioned that Nazis hoped the rest of their ideology would become law in a similar manner. The article stated: “These acts inspired Der Fuhrer’s followers with the hope that the rest of the Nazi tenets would be translated into practical politics, step by step, just as fast as political expedience permitted.” To that end, the Reichstag gave Hermann Goring (the highest ranking Nazi official after Hitler) the power “to summon it into session at will” to create new laws. According to an AP article ran by the Kokomo Tribune also on September 16, Hitler concluded his speech by threatening “to enact even more stringent laws if today’s legislation fails to solve the Jewish problem.”

(Indianapolis) Jewish Post, September 20, 1935, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.

For the most part, Indiana newspapers were quiet in the days following the announcement of the Nuremburg Laws. The Indianapolis Jewish post was not. On September 20, 1935, in an article for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, writer and editor Boris Smolar criticized other newspapers for putting a positive spin on Hitler’s address to the Reichstag and for focusing on Hitler’s orders to Nazi officials prohibiting “individual acts of terrorism against Jews” as opposed to the real message of the address: Jews had lost even basic rights. Smolar’s criticism could be directly applied to the aforementioned UP article in the Daily Clintonian which posited that Jews would be able to have their own community now that they were officially separated from the rest of Germany. However, while Hitler was promising protection for Jews, the Nazis were in reality relentlessly persecuting them. Smolar wrote:

[Later photo of Boris Smolar], Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, June 6, 1952 p. 8, accessed Newspapers.com

The press generally hails the new laws relegating the Jews back to the medieval ghetto and warns the Jews not to make the necessary revision threatened by Hitler in his address to the Reichstag. Newspapers point out that these laws give the Jews official protection . . . Meanwhile, reports indicate that the campaign to deprive the Jews of food is going ahead apace . . . In other fields too, the campaign to segregate the Jews goes on relentlessly.

Smolar’s greatest fear however was that “the Jews will be held as hostages” if foreign countries including the United States continued their economic boycott.

“Nuremberg Laws Proclaimed,” [Still from historical video footage of declaration of the Nureumberg Laws], accessed USHMM

In the same issue, the Jewish Post reprinted an editorial from the Indianapolis News bluntly stating that Hitler’s address to the Reichstag cleared up many misconceptions that might remain about separation between Germany and the Nazi party or any thoughts that Hitler would tone down the anti-Semitism or become more moderate once his power was established. The News stated:

Such doubt as recently existed as to whether the Nazi swastika was to be regarded as the German national emblem has been removed by the Reichstag’s declaration Sunday that the Nazi swastika is to be the flag of the Reich and nation. Whatever doubt existed as to whether Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitism was as great as in the earlier days of his rise to power was also removed. . . The speech of Hitler to the Reichstag, however, and the measures promptly adopted at his urgence, give little support to those who had hoped for moderation. By these new enactments citizenship is denied the Jews. . . These enactments and the fanatical declarations so often made by Hitler and repeated by him Sunday, attributing virtually all of Germany’s troubles to the machinations of a race singled out for opprobrium can hardly tend to create confidence in the prospective sanity of a government completely under his control.

Eugenics poster entitled “The Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and German Honor,” accessed USHMM.

Other Indiana newspapers seemed slow to grasp the significance of the Nuremberg laws or even report on the announcement. For example, the Hammond Times did not report on the laws until November 15, two months after their enactment. However, Indiana newspapers did continue to report on the growing threat of Hitler’s Reich and on the debate over whether the United States should participate in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. What very few Hoosiers or Indiana newspapers were talking about, however, was how to help the people seeking refuge from the oppressive Nazi regime.

(Connellsville, PA) Daily COurier, October 30, 1933, 4, accessed Newspapers.com

Not everyone remained silent, however. Hoosier James G. McDonald worked for most of his life to awaken the world’s conscience to the plight of German Jews seeking aid and refuge. In meetings and in letters to foreign leaders, the League of Nations, high-ranking diplomats, leading businessmen, newspaper editors, and President Franklin Roosevelt, McDonald expressed his fears for how the Nazis were planning to solve the “Jewish problem” and pleaded the case of German refugees. Fortunately his letters and journals from this period (published by Indiana University and the USHMM as Advocate for the Doomed and Refugees and Rescue) can be combined with newspaper articles to help us understand the work of one brave Hoosier at this time of crisis.

“James and Ruth (Stafford) McDonald pose outside the Stafford family home in Albany, Indiana, on their wedding day,” [photograph], August 25 1915, accessed USHMM

James Grover McDonald grew up in Albany, Indiana, attended Indiana University and Harvard, and returned to IU to teach from 1914-1918. In 1919, he became chairman of the League of Free Nations Association which worked to encourage the United States to join the League of Nations. The League of Free Nations Association soon evolved into the Foreign Policy Association and McDonald remained at its head until October 1933 when he accepted the position of High Commissioner for Refugees for the League of Nations. He was given the almost impossible task or finding homes for refugees from Germany.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 31, 1933, 9, accessed Newspapers.com

During regular trips to Germany and meetings with high ranking Nazi officials, McDonald gleaned enough to suspect that the Nazis might be planning a tragic solution to the “Jewish problem,” though he could not have predicted the extent of the coming horrors. In a trip to Berlin in 1933, McDonald had a surprising amount of access to leading Nazi officials and policy information through Hitler’s press secretary at the time, Ernst Hanfstaengl. On April 3, 1933, McDonald wrote in a letter to the Foreign Policy Administration (published in Advocate for the Doomed) about a disturbing conversation with Hanfstaengl on the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses in retaliation for a foreign boycott of Nazi goods. McDonald wrote:

Eventually we reached the subject of the Jews, especially the decree just announced for Monday’s boycott. He defended it unqualifiedly, saying: “When I told Hitler of the agitation and boycott abroad, Hitler beat his fists and exclaimed, ‘Now we shall show them that we are not afraid of international Jewry. The Jews must be crushed. Their fellows abroad have played into our hands.’”

McDonald wrote that he tried to explain to Hanfstaengl that there was no international Jewish conspiracy, but that the Nazi then “launched into a terrifying account of Nazi plans.” McDonald’s letter continued to quote Hanfstaengl:

The boycott is only a beginning. It can be made to strangle all Jewish business. Slowly, implacable it can be extended with ruthless and unshakable discipline. Our plans go much further. During the [first world] war we had 1,500,000 prisoners. 60,000 Jews would be simple. Each Jew has his SA [storm trooper]. In a single night it could be finished.

Here McDonald added his own thoughts in response to Hanfstaengl’s diatribe. He wrote: “He did not explain, but I assume he meant nothing more than wholesale arrests and imprisonments.” At this point, anything more was unimaginable. Still, he was kept awake that night with an impending sense of doom. He concluded his letter by describing a late-night walk through the beautiful but troubled city:

I reached my hotel before midnight. But there could be no thought of going to bed. So I walked alone to the Unter den Lindedn (a boulevard) and the Tiergarten (a park) – a beautiful night, spring-like, bright stars, many lovers in the park, a world seemingly at peace and yet these ghastly hatreds breeding such shocking plans for heartless oppression of a whole section of the people.

Any illusion that the Nazi’s were planning anything other than the literal destruction of the Jewish people would soon disappear. Only a month later McDonald responded to a reporter-friend’s question on what he thought would happen “if there were a Franco-Polish occupation of Germany” with the answer: “Of course, I don’t know, but my guess is that the first thing would be a wholesale slaughter of the Jews” (May 16, 1933 diary entry in Advocate for the Doomed). What had happened over the previous month to change McDonald’s outlook? On April 7, 1933 he wrote in his journal:

I was at the Chancellery at 12:30 to keep my appointment with Hitler.

“Nuremberg Race Laws 1935,” {video still} September 10-28, 1935, Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives & Records Administration, accessed USHMM.

McDonald asked Hitler directly about the Nazi party’s policies towards the German Jewish people and recorded Hitler’s response in his journal entry for that date. Hitler responded defensively, stating that they weren’t only attacking Jews, but also communists and socialists. Hitler said that unlike the United States, Germany had previously accepted such people and therefore “cannot be blamed if we now take measures against them.” Hitler continued, “Besides, as to the Jew, why should there be such a fuss when they are thrown out of places, when hundreds of thousands of Aryan Germans are on the streets? No, the world has no just ground for complaint.”

Later, when he returned to the United States, McDonald gave more details of this meeting to the prominent Rabbi Stephen Wise. McDonald told Wise of a chilling threat from Hitler. Hitler had stated: “I will do the thing that the rest of the world would like to do. It doesn’t know how to get rid of the Jews. I will show them” (Advocate for the Doomed, 48, fn 73).

Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, November 9, 1924, 1, accessed Newspapers.com

Over the next several years, in his role as High Commissioner for Refugees, McDonald worked hard to alert the world of the impending catastrophe and find people willing to help the refugees. However, while the Commission was organized by the League of Nations and affiliated with it, the League provided no financial backing. He pleaded with international government leaders, religious and charitable institutions, and individuals for aid and funding. For example, On May 11, 1934, after visiting ten European and Eastern European countries and meeting with leaders encouraging them to accept refugees, McDonald told the London Jewish Chronicle:

“James G. McDonald poses on the deck of the SS Paris on his way to Geneva to take over his new duties as League of Nations High Commissioner for German Refugees from Germany.” [photograph], circa 1933, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of James McDonald, accessed USHMM.
I think we have made a beginning. There is a clearer recognition of the difficulties involved, and, at the same time, of the acute urgency of finding a solution promptly . . . If only the governments could be made to realize that the refugees would constitute advantages to the material, moral and spiritual wealth of their new homes, the task of securing the necessary permission for the refugees to stay in the older countries or to enter into the newer countries would be immeasurably easier.

McDonald’s public statements were more positive and encouraging than his private reflections and letters. By 1935, he was completely overwhelmed by the need to help the growing number of refugees, by the inadequate response by the United States and her allies, and by the worsening crisis in Germany as epitomized by the Nuremberg Laws. Since the laws went into effect in September, he had been disheartened by increasingly bleak accounts of what faced the German Jews. Speaking with prospective British financial investors in October about a possible reorganizing of the Committee and plans to secure more funding, he saw little hope. He wrote in his diary:

He [a British banker] confirmed stories I had heard from other directions about food and medical shortages, the probability of radical action in implementing the Nuremberg Laws, and the waiving of all favors on behalf of the front-line soldiers or their children. In short, he sees the situation as hopeless . . .

He was equally disheartened that private organizations, especially Jewish ones were not responding adequately in contributing to refugee aid campaigns. In a letter to New York Governor Herbert Lehman which the governor forwarded to President Roosevelt, McDonald wrote:

The Jewish communities, particularly in Great Britain and in the United States, must at last realize the truth, bitter and terrible though it is, which you and I and some of the rest of us have tried to drive home to them for more than two years – there can be no future for Jews in Germany.

Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, eds., Advocate for the Doomed: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-1935 (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., 2007), photographs between pages 564 and 565.

The Nuremberg Laws were the last straw for McDonald. As a protest against the failure of the world to act on behalf of Jewish refugees, McDonald resigned his post as High Commissioner in a letter to the Secretary General of the League of Nations dated December 27, 1935. His lengthy letter of resignation ran in the New York Times on December 30, 1935 and was widely reprinted and commented on in the international press. (Read the entire letter.) In future posts here and at the Indiana Historical Bureau’s blog, Blogging Hoosier History, we will look closer at the important work McDonald dedicated himself to, but here we will end with an excerpt from his resignation letter in order to convey the significant turning point that was the Nuremberg Laws.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 30, 1935, 15, accessed Newspapers.com

McDonald explained that since the laws had reclassified Jews as a separate race, along with the increasing intensity of their persecution, the critical problem was no longer placing Jewish refugees (as important as this still was to him) but instead intervening politically with the German state to stop the persecution. This was beyond the capabilities of an unfunded committee tenuously aligned with the League of Nations. It was time for the League and its member countries to confront Germany, peaceably but sternly “in the name of humanity and of the principles of the public law of Europe.” McDonald concluded his resignation letter thusly:

(Wilmington, Delaware) Morning News, December 30, 1935, 1, accessed Newspapers.com

. . . I gave in my former office frequent and tangible proof of my concern that justice be done to the German people. But convinced as I am that desperate suffering in the countries adjacent to Germany, and an even more terrible human calamity with the German frontiers, are inevitable unless present tendencies in the Reich are checked or reversed, I cannot remain silent . . . When domestic policies threaten the demoralization and exile of hundreds of thousands of human beings, considerations of diplomatic correctness must yield to those of common humanity. I should be recreant if I did not call attention to the actual situation and plead that world opinion, acting through the League and its member States and other countries, move to avert the existing and impending tragedies.

Photo clipping from the New York Times, Photogravure Picture Section, October 21, 1934, depicting James G. McDonald, League of Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, attending a groundbreaking ceremony on October 3, for a new village, Werkdorp Wieningemeer, on the Zuyder Zee in the Netherlands.United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of James McDonald, accessed USHMM.

James Grover McDonald continued to speak out on behalf of those persecuted by the Nazis, eventually serving as Chairman of the President’s Advisory Commission on Political Refugees under FDR. Check back here and at Blogging Hoosier History for more on McDonald’s life’s work. Please visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s summary of the Nuremberg Laws for more information, photographs, and the personal stories of Holocaust survivors. Don’t forget that you can also participate in the History Unfolded project. Hoosiers can also learn more about the Holocaust and its survivors through CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana.

References:

Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, eds., Advocate for the Doomed: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1932-1935 (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., 2007).

Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart, and Severin Hochberg, eds., Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945 (Indianapolis and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C., 2009).

“Nuremberg Laws,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed USHMM.

History Unfolded Project Part 3: Book Burnings

We are continuing to examine world events through the eyes of the Hoosier newspaper reader. Because many of these articles were reported through the Associated Press and United Press news services, what we are really seeing is not just what Hoosiers knew, but what the average American knew, about the events leading up to the Holocaust.

USHMM caption: At Berlin’s Opernplatz, the burning of books and other printed materials considered “un-German” by members of the SA and students from universities and colleges in Berlin, Germany, May 10, 1933, National Archives and Records Administration, accessed ushmm.org

For this post, Part 3 of our History Unfolded project, we examine Indiana newspapers to find out when and what Hoosiers learned about the book burnings staged by German students and Nazi officials. In our previous post, we looked at articles reporting the removal of Jewish leaders from government and institutional positions by the Nazi Party in March and April of 1933. By this time, Nazi authorities were also working to remove Jews from cultural organizations and to “synchronize” the goals of these organizations with that of the Nazi Party. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM):

USHMM caption: Joseph Goebbels, German propaganda minister, speaks on the night of book burning. Berlin, Germany, May 10, 1933, National Archives and Records Administration, accessed ushmm.org

In 1933, Nazi German authorities aimed to synchronize professional and cultural organizations with Nazi ideology and policy (Gleichschaltung). Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, began an effort to bring German arts and culture in line with Nazi goals. The government purged cultural organizations of Jewish and other officials alleged to be politically suspect or who performed or created art works which Nazi ideologues labeled “degenerate.”

(Greencastle) Daily Banner, January 17, 1933, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.

By 1933, Goebbels had coordinated with the influential National Socialist German Student’s Association to “synchronize” German literature. According to the USHMM, “German university students were among the vanguard of the early Nazi movement.” This younger generation was resentful of what they saw as the humiliation of Germany through disarmament and sanctions imposed at the end of World War One. They saw National Socialism as an outlet for their anger and feelings of nationalism and antisemitism. An article published in the (Greencastle) Daily Banner on January 17, 1933, gives some insight into the students’ hostility. In this article, United Press Staff Correspondent Richard D. McMillan reported the sentiments of one German student:

We did not make the last war. Even if it is accepted that Germany was guilty for plunging the world into the greatest carnage of all time — and we dispute this question of war guilt — we, the younger generation, were not responsible. Why, then, should we suffer the humiliation and indignity of our present situation.

This generation, however, would be responsible for much greater carnage. On April 6, 1933, the student association’s propaganda office declared a nation-wide purge of “un-German” literature. Local chapters of the Nazi German Student Association published articles and lists of blacklisted works, created press releases and radio announcements, and organized book burning events with Nazi speakers.

Theodore Dreiser, photograph, 1931, New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002735853/

Black listed authors included socialists, communists, and “corrupting foreign influences.” They condemned several American writers including Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and Indiana author Theodore Dreiser. A Terre Haute native, Dreiser was targeted because of his socialist convictions and because of his role in defending political radicals, many of whom were union leaders that he believed were denied social justice. Interestingly, Dreiser’s books were also ordered to be burned for their socialist content in 1935 by the library trustees of Warsaw, Indiana, where he went to high school.

Considering the action of burning books runs counter to American ideas about freedom of the press and speech, we expected to see strong denunciations of the purge in Indiana newspapers. In actuality, we found little. Unfortunately, the (Indianapolis) Jewish Post is not available for most of the year 1933 in Hoosier State Chronicles. On the other hand, most Indiana residents would not have had access to that newspaper. So what did the average Hoosier newspaper reader know about the Nazi-orchestrated book burnings?

“Nazi Troops Active,” (Greencastle) Daily Banner, May 2, 1933, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.

By searching the (Greencastle) Daily Banner we can see that Indiana readers had at least some knowledge of Nazi attempts to align their values with that of various institutions. (See Part 2 for information of removal of Jews from various positions of leadership as well as from universities.) On May 2, 1933, the Daily Banner ran a United Press (UP) article reporting that Nazi storm troops had seized all German trade unions. The article stated that Nazis “arrested the upper officials of each union and assumed charge” and “announced labor was being ‘harmonized’ with the Nazi regime.”

(Columbus) Republic, May 10, 1933, 2, accessed Newspapers.com

On May 10, the day of the scheduled event, several Indiana newspapers picked up the story via the Associated Press (AP). The (Columbus) Republic, the (Richmond) Palladium-Item, and the Muncie Evening Press were among the newspapers that ran the same article announcing the burning of books for the sake of saving “kultur,” a Nazi term referring to native, superior German culture. The AP article reported:

USHMM caption: Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (at podium) praises students and members of the SA for their efforts to destroy books deemed “un-German” during the book burning at Berlin’s Opernplatz. Germany, May 10, 1933, National Archives and Records Administration, accessed ushmm.org

Blacklisted books from private as well as public libraries were piled high today on ‘Kultur’s altars’ throughout Germany for public burning tonight. Schoolboys enthusiastically rushed final preparations for the huge bonfires. Nazi student committees of action have been working at top speed more than a week arranging for the great purging of the libraries of ‘un-German influences.’ Government recognition is to be lent to the occasion in a rallying speech shortly before midnight by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of public enlightenment.

(You can watch footage courtesy of the National Archives of Goebbels speaking to students at Openplatz in Berlin as books burn in front of the Nazi flag.)

USHMM caption: German students gather around books they regard as “un-German.” The books were publicly burned at Berlin’s Opernplatz. Berlin, Germany, May 10, 1933, National Archives and Records Administration, accessed ushmm.org

The AP article reported that 20,000 books had been piled up in Berlin to be lit on fire at 11:00 that night. The article stated that “All books of a socialistic, Jewish or pacifist trend are especially marked for destruction.” In place of the blacklisted books the students would reportedly be reading Alfred Rosenburg, a Nazi ideologue who penned some of the central dogma of the party, and the Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Some works, however, were mandatory. The article continued: “Among books compulsorily introduced is Chancellor Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ . . . There must be two to ten copies in each library.”

(Muncie) Star Press, May 11, 1933, 2, accessed Newspapers.com

On May 11, descriptions of the book burning appeared in several Indiana newspapers. The (Muncie) Star Press ran an AP article reporting from Berlin:

University young men and women, pronouncing judgment on world literature considered as contravening German spirit, started huge bonfires of the volumes shortly before midnight. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, pronounced the government’s blessing and declared that “the period of Jewish intellectualism now has ended.”

The AP article continued to describe the scene:

The weird glow illuminated Opera Square opposite Berlin University as the students, garbed in the picturesque costumes of their fraternities, the Nazi brown or the steel helmet gray, threw a thousand torches on the pyre, then seized the books from trucks and hurled them onto the blaze amid cheers.

The (Greencastle) Daily Banner ran a similar article from the United Press, describing the event in Berlin. The UP reported:

Ten thousand singing and shouting students marched around a blazing bonfire in Opera square until the early hours of today, jubilant at destroying books representing ideas and doctrines considered hostile to Nazi Germany.

The UP reported that in addition to books by the authors previously mentioned, the students destroyed All Quiet On The Western Front, a work describing the horrors of the First World War, from which the students were distancing themselves.

“Nazi Students in Celebration,” (Greencastle) Daily Banner, May 11, 1933, 1, Hoosier State Chronicles.

In the days following the purge, we expected to find editorials condemning the book burning and exalting the American principles of free speech and press. As previously mentioned, our search suffers from lack of access the (Indianapolis) Jewish Post for these dates. However, we were hoping to find a strong statement such as the editorial by the African American newspaper the Indianapolis Recorder condemning the boycott covered in our previous post in this series. However, we found little local response to the event.

Indianapolis Star, May 17, 1933, 8, accessed Newspapers.com

On May 17, the Indianapolis Star ran an editorial originally published by the Baltimore Sun titled, “Book Burning an Evidence of German Nazi Stupidity.” The writer asserted that this event was part of a long history of book burnings by “underlings” of authoritarian governments who have been convinced to hate what they cannot understand. The editorial stated: “German education . . . must subordinate scholarship to a mass of ill-digested preconceptions about Nordics, ‘blond men’ and ‘heroic steely romance.'” By eradicating all writings that challenge party doctrine and erasing historical context, governments have been able to manipulate and influence their followers. In Nazi Germany, this had devastating consequences. The editorial ended by predicting that someday volumes of works would be written about the “Influences of the Blond Nordic Myth on the Revolt of the Illiterate.”

On May 22, the (Greencastle) Daily Banner ran a group of photographs and a caption almost certainly from a wire service (though none is credited) showing images from the book burning. The headline, “Scene at Nazis’ Literary Holocaust,” seems chillingly prescient of the genocide to come.

“Scene at Nazis’ Literary Holocaust,” (Greencastle) Daily Banner, May 22, 1933, 3, Hoosier State Chronicles.

The caption reads:

Made in Berlin during the recent Nazi drive on what they considered anti-German literature, these pictures show the destruction of more than 20,000 books and pamphlets adjudged inimical to culture as interpreted by Chancellor Adolf Hitler and his followers. Upper photo shows cheering Nazis hailing Hitler as the books went up in smoke, while in lower panel are young Nazis feeding the literary Holocaust.

While the articles stopped appearing in Indiana newspapers, the book burnings continued. Nazis burned books in thirty-four university towns across Germany. There were more burnings over the following days and another wave on June 21. The Berlin event was broadcasted throughout the country. According to William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels had “put German culture into a Nazi straight jacket” (page 241). The night of May 10, 1933, Goebbels stated, “These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they light up the new.”

USHMM caption: Crowds gather at Berlin’s Opernplatz for the burning of books deemed “un-German.” Berlin, Germany, May 10, 1933, Wide World Photo, accessed ushmm.org

Despite Goebbel’s assertions, the “new” era only grew darker. As German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote in an 1821 play which was among the works burned that night, ” Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” According to the USHMM, the oppression of culture was just one of many ways in which the Nazis worked to “purify” Germany. The annihilation of the Jewish people would be next.

Please visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s summary of the book burnings for more information, photographs, and the personal stories of Holocaust survivors. Don’t forget that you can also participate in the History Unfolded project. Hoosiers can also learn more about the Holocaust and its survivors through CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Check back over the next few weeks as we share our research into Indiana newspaper coverage of the Nuremberg Race Laws, the annexation of Austria, and the struggle of Jewish refugees.

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