• U.S.

National Affairs: The Enemy on U.S. Nerves

3 minute read
TIME

WAR & PEACE

Edmond Taylor, author of The Strategy of Terror (describing the national nervous breakdown with which Hitler undermined France before destroying her) last week undertook to describe how Hitler is trying to do the same thing in America.

Head of the Paris bureau of the Chicago Tribune when the war broke out, he returned to the U.S. soon after Dunkirk, after twelve years in Europe. Since then he has made a series of U.S. lecture tours, To his stranger’s eyes the U.S. had many symptoms of the political disease which he had seen destroy France.

Everywhere groups seemed to be splitting apart; invective and insinuation were replacing arguments over policy; thousands of healthv U.S. citizens were innocently carrying out Nazi strategy or contributing to the effect that Hitler wanted to achieve—a paralysis of the U.S. will.

But the parallel with France, he decided, was not perfect. The U.S. was healthier, he believed—in a state of mind more like that of England before Churchill came in—the same disbelief in the emergency, the same confusion of objectives in the national leadership. He also decided that U.S. isolationism was exaggerated, especially in Washington, which fails to distinguish between intransigent, Nazi or Communist-inspired opposition to aiding Britain, and old-style isolationism that Americans have felt for generations and which, coming from a disbelief that America is genuinely menaced, ends the moment the danger to the U.S. becomes clear. In FORTUNE’S May issue, Taylor describes the political weapons which he believes the Nazis use in the U.S.:

> Actual blackmail for political ends by gathering discreditable information about the public and private lives of notables. “It is perfectly true that the Nazi political services comb the gossip columns . . . and a sterling anti-Nazi gossiper like Walter Winchell would probably be horrified if he knew the strategic uses to which some of his little scoops might be put.”

> “The [Nazi] strategy is to enlarge all the fissures in American unity, aggravate all the conflicts, political, social, economic and racial, that tend to divide us. . . .”

> “Part of the pact by which Stalin has assured his safety—for the time being—is that the Communist Party in America shall be used to foment strikes and trouble when Hitler gives the word. … A few armed Nazi agents slipped into a crew of strikebreakers and a few Red agitators among the strikers . . . could produce an incident that might have grave national importance.”

Arguing that the best defense is an attack, Edmond Taylor proposed launching “a political super-Blitzkrieg against Hitler.” Suggested:

> Setting up a foreign-propaganda service under Government direction that would: 1) build new short-wave stations and coordinate the volunteer work now being done by commercial radio companies in the foreign field; 2) direct the production of genuine (noncommercial) U.S. propaganda films for use abroad; 3) send volunteer morale ambassadors to England and other friendly countries.

> Use some of the gold of Fort Knox—not to bribe foreign politicians and generals, but to encourage those who “believe in the democratic ideals of the U.S. by providing them with the sinews of war.”

> Use food as a political weapon. Example: in France, stamp a phrase from Lincoln on each individual package of U.S. food delivered, make feeding France politically offensive to Hitler, until Hitler is forced to let in U.S. propaganda with food or face the hatred of France for keeping it out.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com