Americanism, Inc.: I

When the House of Representatives set up a special committee to investigate subversive propaganda, in May of 1938, about the only complaint came from Fritz Kuhn, leader of the rambunctious German-American Bund. Kuhn charged that the man who mid-wived the new group, Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York, was engaged in unfair persecution of the Bund. Indeed, Dickstein had been attacking the Bund furiously. It was his idea that a small body of Representatives peering into "un-American activities" would scorch and harry Nazi and Fascist propagandists in the United States, and if Dickstein had been appointed chairman, the American public would doubtless have been displayed of one of the wildest, weirdest extravagant side shows since the Tennessee monkey-trial.

But it was Martin Dies--not Dickstein--who was picked to head the new committee. The gentleman from Texas, who coyly termed himself "president of the House Demagogues Club," assumed his responsibilities in no uncertain fashion. During the next seven years, he kept himself splattered over the front pages, got into ruckuses with everybody from Walter Winchell to Mrs. Roosevelt, and set a pattern of conduct followed faithfully by his successors.

In 1945, after Dies had "retired" from his public duties, John Rankin managed to have the committee put on a permanent basis--until then it had needed yearly renewals of power--and kept it going until the Republican sweep in 1946. Then J. Parnell Thomas took the sacred trust. Thomas had been Dics' right-hand man on the committee ever since its creation. As a Republican in the era of Roosevelt, Thomas had waited patiently for his day, and by the time of his accession he had learned so much from his chairman that he was actually able to out-Dies Dies.

But while the New Jersey Republican had picked up a liberal education in strategy and tactics from 1938 to 1947, his own ideas on what was "subversive" were pretty well fixed from the beginning. Just a couple of months after the new committee had gotten underway, Thomas bitterly assaulted the Federal Theater and Writers Projects. He claimed that they were "infested with radicals from top to bottom," as doubtless they were. What was more, Thomas said, the projects were links "in the vast and unparalleled New Deal propaganda machine."

Now exposures of radicalism and New Dcalism were hardly the sort of things Dickstein had had in mind. And when Dies took a merely routine wallop at the German-American Bund, and produced an American Federation of Labor man who testified that Communists were ensconced in both the CIO and the federal government, Dickstein gave vent to some heart-felt criticism.

It didn't do much good. Dies and Thomas were both-much more interested in activities to the left, and with one or two exceptions, so was the rest of the committee. In the fall and winter of the first year, they attacked Harry Bridges, Frances Perkins, Frank Murphy (then governor of Michigan), Harold Ickes, and other notables. Father Coughlin, Gerald L. K. Smith, and patriots of that kidney were somehow unnoticed. George Sylvester Viereck, who was chummier with Hitler than Lanny Budd, skipped away without any damage whatsoever.

That was only 1938. Dies had little trouble getting yearly extensions and plenty of money. Although the opposition was fairly weighty, when matters came to the voting stage, Representatives were leary about going on record against a body that was out-theoretically, at least--to expose sin. And the voting public, as Dr. Gallup faithfully reported, was decidedly pro-Dies. Three out of every four had even heard of him, which was over-whelming evidence of the instinct for publicity he was to develop even further in his next five years on the roost.