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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN: A NEWSLETTER ABOUT THE HISTORY BEHIND
TODAY’S POLITICS.  
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Heather Cox Richardson
October 26, 2024
Heather Cox Richardson substack
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_ Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of
pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War
II. March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM! _

Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet #64, US War Department

 

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets
for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II.
Titled _Army Talks_, the series was designed “to help [the
personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better
soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!” 

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at
a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very
lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called
fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is
not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor,
once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future
and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the
causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by
the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the
economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The
people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the
people.” 

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their
desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of
their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil
liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as
mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi
slogan for women,” the pamphlet said. 

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose….
They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with
propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by
skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of
security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and
‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.” 

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of
democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the
direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,”
it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political,
religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized
power while these groups struggled.”  

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not
come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed
Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And
indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism,
lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We
have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial
and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have
used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly
identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to
understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United
States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of
‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would
use three techniques: 

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against
one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to
divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’
against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation,
because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their
supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of
international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted
sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the
only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and
suspicion toward the people of all other nations.” 

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two
choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as
‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the
government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with
popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt
to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are
trying to destroy.” 

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the
document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively
cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of
the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism
“fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens
democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it
prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution
to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to
embrace its security.

 “Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned.
Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement
not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we
permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob _anyone_ of his
democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is
threatened.” 

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Notes:

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War Department, “Army Talk 64: FASCISM!” March 24, 1945,
at [link removed]

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RELATED: THIS 1943 ANTI-NAZI FILM KEEPS GOING VIRAL. IT MAY BE LESS
EFFECTIVE THAN IT SEEMS.
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by Alissa Wilkerson
Vox
Revised: June 29, 2018

_A study of the short film Don’t Be a Sucker suggests old
attitudes about fascism in America have never gone away._

In the hours following the Unite the Right
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supremacist rally in Charlottesville in August of 2017, a short
propaganda film called _Don’t Be a Sucker_, first produced in 1943
by the US Department of Defense and then re-released in 1947, went
viral on the internet
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And in the months since, it’s been repeatedly invoked on Twitter
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a prescient harbinger of our current reality, 75 years after its
creation.

Created as a warning against creeping fascism and racism in the United
States, the movie illustrates the divide-and-conquer method employed
by German Nazis. When the film was produced, the US had entered the
ongoing war in Europe only two years earlier. Originally 20 minutes
long, it was created by the Army Signal Corps to raise soldier morale,
but an edited version was produced after the war and shown widely for
educational purposes — including in cinemas.

_Don’t Be a Sucker _feels strangely timely today. But in 1951,
researchers Eunice Cooper and Helen Dinerman published a study in the
Public Opinion Quarterly analyzing the film’s effectiveness (it’s
now accessible on JSTOR
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— and their findings are just as timely and important as the film.
Beyond that, they’re chilling.

Back in the 1940s, _Don’t Be a Sucker_ drew links between Nazi
Germany and American prejudice

_Don’t Be a Sucker_ seems eerily prescient, depicting a man in a
square railing against Catholics, “Negroes,” foreigners, and
even Freemasons [[link removed]] who take
American jobs and threaten the American way of life. A good-looking
ordinary American man named Mike stands nearby, nodding along, until a
Hungarian-born man — a refugee from the Third Reich, given the
historical context — takes him aside and explains how this method
parallels the way Hitler and his followers divided the German
population and set them at odds against one another: Jews, Catholics,
Protestants, intellectuals, and native-born farmers whose egos were
flattered by the Nazis.

“I’ve heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear
it in America,” the man tells Mike.

Mike, now understanding that fascists gain power for themselves by
creating division among the common people, sees the error of his ways.
He learns that it is only by presenting a united front against greedy
authoritarian leaders that citizens can stand against tyranny.

Mike learns the error of his ways.

The film has been uploaded to YouTube many times — particularly
since 2016 — but following the violent protests in
Charlottesville, _Don’t Be a Sucker_ once more made its way around
social media.

Many contemporary viewers have pointed
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the film echoes the present. But _Don’t Be a Sucker_ was an object
of study in the past. And what the researchers uncovered may be an
even grimmer reflection of today’s America, and offer a key takeaway
that is good to remember when confronting the resurgence of white
nationalist and supremacist rhetoric in the public square.

In the late 1940s, two researchers set out to study the limits
of _Don’t Be a Sucker_

At the film’s more public rerelease in 1947 and 1948, Cooper and
Dinerman — working with the Department of Scientific Research of the
American Jewish Committee at the Institute of Social Research —
explored how viewers’ attitudes were affected by the film,
particularly those of high school students. They published their
findings in 1951.

Cooper and Dinerman divided a group of high school students into a
control group and an experimental group. Only the experimental group
saw _Don’t Be a Sucker_. Four weeks later, both groups were asked
to complete a questionnaire, which included some questions related to
the message of the film and some control questions. The researchers
divided up the answers by factors including the participants’
religious identity (though they only mention Jews, Catholics, and
Protestants).

A Protestant preacher in Nazi Germany, as portrayed by Don’t Be a
Sucker.

Each group responded strongly to the representation of their
particular religious group being isolated and persecuted by Nazis. The
film also appeared to have an effect on American-born Protestants who
were somewhat prejudiced against Catholics and Jews; after seeing the
film, they were about half as likely as the control group to agree
with the statement that “in times of depression, it is only right
that jobs should be given first to people born in America.”

Still, the numbers seem a bit surprising: After seeing the film, a
quarter of the American-born Protestants in the experimental group
agreed that people born in America deserved preferential treatment,
contrasted with fully _half_ the same segment of the control group.

_Don’t Be a Sucker _desensitized some viewers to the threat of
fascism in America

But the researchers also found a “boomerang” effect in their
subjects, which they define as the film having the opposite of its
intended effect. They identify four specific “boomerang effects”
that _Don’t Be a Sucker_ had on the viewers in their study, but
the most interesting for our time is this: Cooper and Dinerman
discovered that students who viewed the film were _more_ likely to
agree with the statement that “what happened in Germany under the
Nazis could never happen in America.”

This is actually the direct opposite of the film’s intended message.
The researchers attribute it to the fact that while _Don’t Be a
Sucker_ takes pains to show the extent of the Nazis’ cruelty, it
only shows one parallel to 1947 America: a man on a soapbox in a
square, ranting about foreigners and “negroes” to a skeptical
crowd. Many respondents saw the American as simply different from his
German counterpart — though the American was giving a similar
speech, only the German commanded the respect of a crowd.

One man seems half-convinced by the argument — Mike — but the
subjects of the study found him weak, gullible, and passive. Mike only
balks when the soapbox speaker rails against Masons (Mike himself is
one), but he is quickly talked down by the Hungarian refugee.

The implication, to many of the viewers, was that American fascists
are ineffectual and silly, quite different from their German
counterparts, no matter how similar their ideology might be.

_Don’t Be a_ _Sucker _made some viewers _more_ complacent

Cooper and Dinerman also found that the students saw the man on the
soapbox as a “lamebrain,” someone whom smart Americans knew to be
a fraud and not worth their time.

“Believing that Americans in general would not be taken in by such
talk,” they write, “these respondents regarded Americans who do
applaud the agitator as uneducated, low-class, or in some other way
inferior to themselves.”

They tested this statement with their questionnaire by including the
statement: “In America, hardly anyone would listen to a man trying
to spread race hate.” And to their surprise, they noticed a definite
boomerang effect _toward_ complacency among the students who
were _less_ prejudiced against people who were different from them:
29 percent of the students who had seen the film agreed with this
statement, compared to 19 percent of those in the control group, who
had not seen _Don’t Be a Sucker_, a result that Cooper and Dinerman
called “quite startling.”

Furthermore, they found that 44 percent of those who’d seen the film
agreed with the statement, “There are so many minorities in this
country that no single one would ever be persecuted” — a sentiment
that directly contradicts the film. Only 26 percent of those who
hadn’t seen the film agreed with this statement.

“The inescapable conclusion is that the messages about Germany in
this film, even when wholly understood, were not applied to America. A
plausible hypothesis is that not only the German theme but its link
with problems of discrimination seems to be ‘old hat’ to members
of the audience,” Cooper and Dinerman wrote.

In other words, the link between fascist, racist sentiments in Nazi
Germany and similar ideas as they surfaced in America (even just a few
years after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II)
were too worn and “old hat” to make an impression on the audience.
This bears out: Though the film shows a young black boy playing
baseball with white boys, in 1947 America was still deeply segregated,
with many white people not seeing a link between their attitude about
black people and Nazi racism. (The film itself, after introducing the
soapbox fascist as “anti-Negro,” focuses on Jews, Protestants, and
Catholics, not race.)

And of course, the study participants were high school students, whose
lives so far had been dominated by the looming threat of Nazis “over
there,” but who as teenagers had naturally been immature in their
understanding of the ideas that caused the heinous violence, and who
had driven the conflict. They’d become desensitized.

Americans haven’t stopped thinking they’re too good to be taken in
by fascist and racist ideas

Cooper and Dinerman’s paper goes on to evaluate the way _Don’t Be
a Sucker_ delivers its message, the limitations of its casting and
its audience reach, and how future films of that ilk might convey
their arguments more effectively. But two of their insights in
particular seem striking in the context of today’s resurgence of
white nationalist rhetoric: _Don’t Be a Sucker_’s viewers thought
Americans were too smart to be taken in by fascists, and they were
reluctant to draw parallels between Nazi rhetoric abroad and racist,
anti-immigration rhetoric at home.

Mike is learning his lesson.

You could hear echoes of this during the Charlottesville events in
2017, whether in expressions of shock over events that many people
had forecasted
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the #ThisIsNotUs
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trending on Twitter that insisted the white supremacists who gathered
in Charlottesville are not representative of most Americans, or the
president’s initial refusal
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specifically condemn the white supremacists who marched in his name
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Both well-meaning and more pernicious sentiments abounded: that
Americans are “better”
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this, that the so-called alt-right are poor and ignorant
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than well-off and educated, that the actions of the Confederacy during
the Civil War and of neo-Nazis today are anomalies, and the
perpetrators should “go home.”
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But others took a different view, pointing out that we can’t pretend
racially motivated violence and hate isn’t an integral part of
American history.

“The belief that America is somehow better than its
white-supremacist history is sometimes an excuse masquerading as
encouragement, and it’s part of the reason why the K.K.K. is back in
business,” Jia Tolentino wrote
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the New Yorker following the rally. “What happened in
Charlottesville is less an aberrant travesty in a progressive enclave
than it is a reminder of how much evil can be obscured by the
appearance of good.”

To be wooed by authoritarian, fascist, divide-and-conquer rhetoric is
to be a “sucker.” But thinking we’re too _smart_ to be fooled,
that it’s only crazies and lunatics who fall for this stuff —
that’s what makes suckers of us all.

_HEATHER COX RICHARDSON is an American historian. She is a professor
of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the
American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the
Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the
University of Massachusetts Amherst._

_Subscribe to Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson
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_ALISSA WILKINSON covers film and culture for Vox. Alissa is a member
of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film
Critics._

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