[ In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of
detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar
America. Their books — along with Sinatra’s song and film; Richard
Wright’s memoir, coincided with a surge of activism.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE WRITERS WHO WENT UNDERCOVER TO SHOW AMERICA ITS UGLY SIDE  
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Samuel G. Freedman
July 10, 2023
The Atlantic
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_ In the 1940s, a series of books tried to use the conventions of
detective fiction to expose the degree of prejudice in postwar
America. Their books — along with Sinatra’s song and film; Richard
Wright’s memoir, coincided with a surge of activism. _

The stairs leading to the segregated section of a cinema in Belzoni,
Mississippi, in 1939, MPI // The Atlantic

 

In the years during and after World War II, the battle against
fascism spread to an unanticipated front line: the national conscience
of the United States. The warriors in this fight, many of them Black
and Jewish veterans of combat abroad, insisted that America confront
and rectify its homegrown racial hierarchy and religious intolerance.
“Double V” was the slogan coined by the African American
newspaper _The Pittsburgh Courier_,_ _meaning victory over Hitler
abroad and over Jim Crow at home.

The seeds of what would eventually become the civil-rights movement
included not only mass protest and political mobilization but a wide
array of cultural and artistic expressions. Some of them—Frank
Sinatra’s song and short film _The House I Live In_;
a _Superman_ radio serial pitting the Man of Steel against a thinly
veiled version of the Ku Klux Klan—sought nothing less than a
redefinition of American identity that would embrace racial and
religious minorities. In his 1945 film
[[link removed]], Sinatra came to the
defense of a Jewish boy menaced by a gentile mob. On the radio serial
a year later, Superman protected a Chinese American teenager from the
lethal assault of the “Clan of the Fiery Cross.” The lyrics
of _The House I Live In_ captured the new ethos: “The faces that I
see / All races and religions / That’s America to me.”

Alongside these sunnier affirmations of inclusion, there appeared a
withering critique of American bigotry in the form of a very specific
subset of books. All of them, whether fictional or factual, employed
the identical device of a writer going undercover to discover and
expose the bigoted netherworld of white Christian America. Within the
finite period of six years beginning in 1943, these books became both
commercial phenomena and effective goads to the national soul. They
explicitly sought a mass audience by employing devices borrowed from
detective novels, espionage fiction, and muckraking journalism: the
secret search, the near-escape from being found out, the shocking
revelation of the rot hiding just below the surface of normal life.
Whatever these books may have lacked in sentence-to-sentence literary
elegance, they made up for with page-turning drama.

Unfortunately, for the most part, they have since been forgotten, or
simply overwhelmed by the volume of World War II self-congratulation,
however well deserved. But in their own time period, when these books
were reaching millions of readers, a victorious America was by no
means presumed to be an innocent America. Within a year of V-J Day,
the investigative journalist John Roy Carlson released his exposé of
domestic right-wing extremism, _The Plotters_, and laid out the
stakes starkly:

We’ve won the military war abroad but we’ve got to win the
democratic peace at home. Hitlerism is dead, but incipient Hitlerism
in America has taken on a completely new star-spangled face. It
follows a ‘Made in America’ pattern which is infinitely subtler
and more difficult to guard against than the crude product of the
[pro-fascist German American] Bundists. It is found everywhere at work
in our nation. It’s as if the living embers had flown over the ocean
and started new hate fires here while the old ones were dying in
Europe.

Carlson did not need Nazi Germany to alert him to the perils of mass
bigotry. His real name was Avedis Derounian, and as a boy, he had fled
the Turkish genocide against Armenians. Having mastered English as a
high-school student on Long Island and an undergraduate at New York
University, Derounian found his way during the late 1930s into Friends
of Democracy, an anti-fascist organization led by a Unitarian
minister. With the title of chief investigator and a salary of $50 a
week
[[link removed]],
Derounian developed a cover as the publisher of a pro-fascist
newspaper, the _Christian Defender_,_ _and soon found situations
where he could immerse himself in the purpose of exposing the
purveyors of hate: a pro-Nazi summer camp on Long Island, the
“Christian Mobilizers” militia formed by the right-wing radio
priest Charles Coughlin, and also a Bund rally in Madison Square
Garden that flanked a portrait of George Washington with a pair of
swastikas.

Derounian inhabited his doppelgänger so deftly that sometimes he even
joined in the shouting. His _Christian Defender _newspaper looked so
genuine that the U.S. State Department launched an investigation of it
and Derounian hurriedly stopped publishing. All this derring-do led to
some trenchant and disturbing conclusions. “My experience convinced
me,” Derounian wrote, “that under the slogans of ‘patriotism’
they were inoculating innocent Americans with the virus of hate,
undermining confidence in our leaders, promoting hate and
suspicion.”

When his book _Under Cover_ landed—all 521 pages, not counting
index, illustrated with dozens of reproduced extremist documents—it
was impossible to ignore. According to a compilation by Daniel
Immerwahr [[link removed]], a
historian of ideas, _Under Cover _was the best-selling nonfiction
book in America in 1943
[[link removed]], ultimately going
through 20 printings
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The Army Air Forces had Derounian speak to enlisted men on the theme
“The Enemy Within.”

At the book’s end, Derounian promised readers (and himself), “I am
going back to the world I left behind … to live in the sunshine
again.” He did no such thing. Instead, he cloaked himself in the
character of Robert Thompson, a disgruntled war veteran, and extended
his stealthy inquiry from America’s wartime traitors to its
peacetime demagogues. Most prominent among them was Gerald L. K.
Smith, the minister who founded the America First political party (the
name an homage to the isolationist movement that featured the aviation
hero Charles Lindbergh) as the electoral vehicle for his virulent
racism and anti-Semitism. But Derounian also found extremism in
women’s groups with such anodyne names as “United Mothers.”

“The conclusion is inescapable,” Derounian wrote, “that while we
have won a war of democracy over fascist evil abroad, we have allowed
hate and prejudice to gain a firm foothold at home.” A page later,
he continued, “The grim fact is that they have infiltrated into the
warp and woof of American life.”

Given the massive attention that Derounian’s books received, it
seems entirely possible, even probable, that the novelist Laura Z.
Hobson took note of his methodology. Though her married surname
obscured the fact, Hobson was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants of
socialist leanings, and the _Z_ stood for her family patronymic of
Zametkin. Her novel _Gentleman’s Agreement_
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in _Cosmopolitan _magazine in late 1946 and published in early
1947—inverted Derounian’s tactic of pretending to be an extremist
by having a gentile journalist, Philip Green, purport to be Jewish in
order to write a magazine exposé about anti-Semitism. And whereas
Derounian had revealed the bellicose, violent style of Jew-hating
embodied by Silver Shirts, the German American Bund, and their ilk,
Hobson used the fictive Green to unveil the polite, socially
acceptable anti-Semitism of the country club and exclusive hotels and
neighborhoods. Eventually Green’s own fiancée shows herself to be
one of those refined bigots, or at least an apologist for them, and
the revelation ruptures the couple’s engagement.

“It’s just that I’ve come to see that lots of nice people who
aren’t [anti-Semites] _are_ their unknowing helpers and
connivers,” Green lectures his fiancée. “People who’d never
beat up a Jew or yell kike at a child. They think antisemitism is
something way off there, in a dark crackpot place with low-class
morons. That’s the biggest thing I’ve discovered about this whole
business.”

Hobson’s message clearly struck a chord. _Gentleman’s
Agreement _went through three printings
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its official publication date and ultimately sold 1.6 million copies
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As a manual of moral instruction, _Gentleman’s Agreement _was
released in a special Armed Services Edition
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the American military. Magnifying the novel’s impact, a film
adaptation written by Moss Hart, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring
Gregory Peck as Philip Green received eight Oscar nominations in 1948
and won three, including for Best Picture and Best Director. A
straight line can easily be drawn from Peck playing one version of the
ethical role model in _Gentleman’s Agreement _and another 15 years
later as Atticus Finch in _To Kill a Mockingbird._

In the same year when the fictive Philip Green loomed so large in
American popular culture, an award-winning journalist was undertaking
a real-life version of passing. Ray Sprigle of the _Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette_ had already won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. For
another investigative scoop, Sprigle had disguised himself as a
psychiatric patient in order to expose an abusive state hospital. But
to similarly report on racism in the South, Sprigle, who was white,
needed to fake his way across the color line. He failed in several
attempts to chemically dye his skin, because the substances could
cause illness or even death if he kept using them, before settling on
shaving his scalp to leave no telltale straight hairs and then tanning
for three weeks in Florida. His success at the deception depended on
the “one-drop rule” of racial identity, in which any American with
the slightest fraction of African ancestry, regardless of pigment, was
categorized as Black. In a way, Sprigle was reversing the passing
formula deployed by Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP,
who used his fair skin and hair to pretend to be white while
courageously researching racist attacks
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many of them against Black war veterans returning to the South.

With the pseudonym of James R. Crawford and a backstory about being
“a light-skinned Negro from Pittsburgh,” Sprigle crossed the
Mason-Dixon line—the “Smith and Wesson line to us black
folk”—in one of the all-Black railroad carriages known as a “Jim
Crow car.” During four “fear-filled weeks,” Sprigle embedded
himself in the very heart of the former Confederacy: Georgia, Alabama,
and Mississippi. He bore witness to the financial exploitation of the
sharecropping system, the miserly funding for Black schools, the
refusal of white hospitals to admit a Black woman needing an emergency
Cesarean section, who ultimately died untreated. Sprigle also paid
sympathetic attention to the echelon of Black
professionals—dentists, professors, doctors, lawyers, NAACP
activists, real-estate developers—who nonetheless found their social
status to be relegated below the poorest, least-educated white person.

“These whites … were a people entirely alien to me, a people set
far apart from me and my world,” Sprigle wrote in his Black persona.
“The law of this new land I had entered decreed that I had to eat
apart from these pale-skinned men and women—behind that symbolic
curtain.” At the same time, he added perceptively, “Not that I
wanted to ride with these whites or eat with them. What I resented was
their impudent assumption that I wanted to mingle with them, their
arrogant and conceited pretense that no matter how depraved and
degenerate some of them might be, they [were] … of a superior
breed.”

Sprigle produced a 21-part series for the _Post-Gazette_, “I Was a
Negro in the South for 30 Days,” which began running in August 1948.
Newspapers as wide-ranging as the _Pittsburgh Courier_, _The Seattle
Times_, and the _New York Herald Tribune _reprinted the series,
providing national exposure. Then, in 1949, Simon & Schuster collected
the articles in book form under the title _In the Land of Jim Crow._

The effect that derounian, Hobson, and Sprigle had on American public
opinion and policy cannot be quantified. But it also seems more than
accidental that their books—along with Sinatra’s song and film;
the _Superman _radio series; and such works as Richard Wright’s
memoir, _Black Boy
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and Gunnar Myrdal’s sociological tome, _An American Dilemma
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with a surge of activism against racism and anti-Semitism during the
1940s. One need not employ the term _woke _to suggest that these
books, movies, songs, and comics roused many Americans from a
complacent moral slumber.

The Democratic Party embraced civil rights for the first time in its
platform at the 1948 convention, driving the bloc of southern
segregationists to form their Dixiecrat third party. Within weeks of
the convention, President Harry Truman issued executive orders
desegregating the military and the federal workforce. Also in 1948,
the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in _Shelley v. Kraemer _that
restrictive covenants, the sort routinely used to keep Black people,
Jews, and other minority groups out of certain neighborhoods, were
unconstitutional. These efforts amounted to a kind of
proto–civil-rights movement, anticipating what we know as the
civil-rights movement that launched in the mid-1950s with the Supreme
Court’s decision outlawing school segregation in _Brown v. Board of
Education_ and the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King
Jr.

Yet Ray Sprigle’s book about his time being Black in the South sold
only modestly
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that disappointing outcome may well have reflected more than the
endemic capriciousness of the publishing industry. The historical
moment during and immediately after the war years, when America
belatedly began to redress its own deep-seated prejudices, ended as
abruptly as one could say the words _Cold War_. By 1949, the
anti-fascist alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union
had mutated into global ideological and military rivalry. As Derounian
had presciently foreseen in _The Plotters_,_ _the specter (and
partial but exaggerated reality) of communism in the United States had
supplanted the actually existing presence of American right-wing
extremists as public enemy No. 1. To express the belief that America
was imperfect, indeed hypocritical, in its claims of equality, was to
risk being branded disloyal and caught up in the Red Scare.

None of Hobson’s subsequent novels nearly equaled the sales
of _Gentleman’s Agreement_._ _Derounian wrote only one more book
in the remaining decades of his life, dying in 1991
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the age of 82._ _Sprigle died in a car accident
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1957. Four years later, the white writer John Howard Griffin basically
adopted Sprigle’s idea and method of traversing the Jim Crow South
as a Black man. (Unlike Sprigle, Griffin was able to dye his skin dark
without medical risks.) With the civil-rights movement compelling
America to once again regard itself in the moral mirror, Griffin’s
book _Black Like Me_
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more than 1 million copies
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was adapted for a film. More recently, one of Sprigle’s successors
at the _Pittsburgh Post-Gazette_,_ _Bill Steigerwald, recounted the
race series in a 2017 book, _30 Days a Black Man_
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Rachel Maddow’s 2022 podcast, _Ultra_
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on the pro-Nazi movement in 1940s America, made reference to
Derounian’s work in _Under Cover_.

Among these authors of the 1940s, Hobson has fared best. But the
lingering impact of _Gentleman’s Agreement _surely owes more to
the film adaptation, which neatly pruned away some of the novel’s
formulaic subplots, than the book itself. The works of Derounian and
Sprigle, so daring in their time, fit very awkwardly within current
norms. ABC News lost a federal court case (though the verdict was
reversed on appeal) for planting reporters with false résumés
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workers in Food Lion supermarkets to expose unsafe practices.
The _Chicago Sun-Times _was denied a Pulitzer Prize
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for a series about corrupt city inspectors
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creating a phony bar, wryly called the Mirage, that was staffed by
journalists and equipped with hidden cameras. As for a journalist or
nonfiction author pretending to be a Black person, even for the sake
of chronicling discrimination, the gambit would assuredly be reviled
as cultural appropriation at best and its own form of liberal racism
at worst.

And in Trumpian America, the excretions of racism, anti-Semitism,
homophobia, and on down the list hardly feel the need to hide. Yet,
for that very reason, there is immense value in cracking open the
books of Derounian and his fellow truth detectives from nearly 80
years ago. They provide a piercing reminder of the deep roots, indeed
the nearly identical vocabulary and populist demagoguery, of the
hatred on such lurid display today.

_[SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
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professor at Columbia University, is the author, most recently,
of Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for
Civil Rights
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* Fascism
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