An interesting exercise today 2024 would be to ask "Who goes Woke/Collectivist-Authoritarian?"
Who goes Nazi – Dorothy Thompson circa 1941
It is an interesting
and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s
acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I
know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and
in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom
democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also
know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would
become Nazis.
It is preposterous
to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be
more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred
out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and
many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are
Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary
Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically
entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and
nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an
immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation which was either
young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen,
Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called
“lost generation.”
Sometimes I think
there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and
physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an
imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that
are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to
forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is
vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.
At any rate, let us
look round the room.
The gentleman
standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside
him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American
families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of
his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a
classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting,
and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and
wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but
voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not
particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the
company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he
will never remarry.
He has never
attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand
in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly
dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him. . . .
Why not?
Beside him stands
Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and
university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president
of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and
extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up,
and early. Why? . . . Why the one and not the other?
Mr. A has a life
that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although
he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always
assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a
free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want
to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his
standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.
Mr. B has risen
beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good
mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His
code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits
easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of
value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a
movement likely to attain power, it would.
The saturnine man
over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C (Avery
Brundage) is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash
Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the
scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant
gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent
law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has
always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery.
His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom
invited him—or his wife—to dinner.
He is a snob,
loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for
instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless
work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is
inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he
has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his
mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything
that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly
anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own
psychological insecurity.
Pity he has utterly
erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter
and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again
humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of
puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his
language—though they have never met him.
There he sits: he
talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and
cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he
would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in
a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But
Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically
preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a
sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to
see heads roll.
I think young D over
there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son
of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time
at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for
speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives
and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and
theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very
good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would
certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord
it over others.
Mrs. E would go Nazi
as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet,
so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who
never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration
than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him
very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is
something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike
devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently
devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects
her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her
ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the
first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.
On the other hand,
Mrs. F would never go Nazi. She is the most popular woman in the room, handsome,
gay, witty, and full of the warmest emotion. She was a popular actress ten
years ago; married very happily; promptly had four children in a row; has a
charming house, is not rich but has no money cares, has never cut herself off
from her own happy-go-lucky profession, and is full of sound health and sound
common sense. All men try to make love to her; she laughs at them all, and her
husband is amused. She has stood on her own feet since she was a child, she has
enormously helped her husband’s career (he is a lawyer), she would ornament any
drawing-room in any capital, and she is as American as ice cream and cake.
II
How about the butler
who is passing the drinks? I look at James with amused eyes. James is safe.
James has been butler to the ‘ighest aristocracy, considers all Nazis parvenus
and communists, and has a very good sense for “people of quality.” He serves the
quiet editor with that friendly air of equality which good servants always show
toward those they consider good enough to serve, and he serves the horsy gent
stiffly and coldly.
Bill, the grandson
of the chauffeur, is helping serve to-night. He is a product of a Bronx public
school and high school, and works at night like this to help himself through
City College, where he is studying engineering. He is a “proletarian,”
though you’d never guess it if you saw him without that white coat. He plays a
crack game of tennis—has been a tennis tutor in summer resorts—swims superbly,
gets straight A’s in his classes, and thinks America is okay and don’t let
anybody say it isn’t. He had a brief period of Youth Congress communism, but it
was like the measles. He was not taken in the draft because his eyes are not
good enough, but he wants to design airplanes, “like Sikorsky.” He thinks
Lindbergh is “just another pilot with a build-up and a rich wife” and that he
is “always talking down America, like how we couldn’t lick Hitler if we wanted
to.” At this point Bill snorts.
Mr. G is a very
intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with
general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can
scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in
that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit,
technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything
else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be
anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He
will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if
it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with
communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest
improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too
bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with
purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.
H is an historian
and biographer. He is American of Dutch ancestry born and reared in the Middle
West. He has been in love with America all his life. He can recite whole
chapters of Thoreau and volumes of American poetry, from Emerson to Steve
Benet. He knows Jefferson’s letters, Hamilton’s papers, Lincoln’s speeches. He
is a collector of early American furniture, lives in New England, runs a farm
for a hobby and doesn’t lose much money on it, and loathes parties like this
one. He has a ribald and manly sense of humor, is unconventional and lost a
college professorship because of a love affair. Afterward he married the lady
and has lived happily ever afterward as the wages of sin.
H has never doubted
his own authentic Americanism for one instant. This is his country, and he
knows it from Acadia to Zenith. His ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War
and in all the wars since. He is certainly an intellectual, but an intellectual
smelling slightly of cow barns and damp tweeds. He is the most good-natured and
genial man alive, but if anyone ever tries to make this country over into an
imitation of Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, or Petain’s systems H will grab a gun and
fight. Though H’s liberalism will not permit him to say it, it is his secret
conviction that nobody whose ancestors have not been in this country since
before the Civil War really understands America or would really fight for it
against Nazism or any other foreign ism in a showdown.
But H is wrong.
There is one other person in the room who would fight alongside H and he is not
even an American citizen. He is a young German emigre, whom I brought along to
the party. The people in the room look at him rather askance because he is so Germanic,
so very blond-haired, so very blue-eyed, so tanned that somehow you expect him
to be wearing shorts. He looks like the model of a Nazi. His English is
flawed—he learned it only five years ago. He comes from an old East Prussian
family; he was a member of the post-war Youth Movement and afterward of the
Republican “Reichsbanner.” All his German friends went Nazi—without exception.
He hiked to Switzerland penniless, there pursued his studies in New Testament
Greek, sat under the great Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, came to America
through the assistance of an American friend whom he had met in a university,
got a job teaching the classics in a fashionable private school; quit, and is
working now in an airplane factory—working on the night shift to make planes to
send to Britain to defeat Germany. He has devoured volumes of American history,
knows Whitman by heart, wonders why so few Americans have ever really read the
Federalist papers, believes in the United States of Europe, the Union of the
English-speaking world, and the coming democratic revolution all over the
earth. He believes that America is the country of Creative Evolution once it
shakes off its middle-class complacency, its bureaucratized industry, its
tentacle-like and spreading government, and sets itself innerly free.
The people in the
room think he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of
them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of the pioneers.
He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty
and power. He talks about the workmen in the factory where he is employed. . .
. He took the job “in order to understand the real America.” He thinks the men
are wonderful. “Why don’t you American intellectuals ever get to them; talk
to them?”
I grin bitterly to
myself, thinking that if we ever got into war with the Nazis he would probably
be interned, while Mr. B and Mr. G and Mrs. E would be spreading defeatism at
all such parties as this one. “Of course I don’t like Hitler but . . .”
Mr. J over there is
a Jew. Mr. J is a very important man. He is immensely rich—he has made a
fortune through a dozen directorates in various companies, through a fabulous
marriage, through a speculative flair, and through a native gift for money and
a native love of power. He is intelligent and arrogant. He seldom associates
with Jews. He deplores any mention of the “Jewish question.” He believes that
Hitler “should not be judged from the standpoint of anti-Semitism.” He thinks
that “the Jews should be reserved on all political questions.” He considers
Roosevelt “an enemy of business.” He thinks “It was a serious blow to the Jews
that Frankfurter should have been appointed to the Supreme Court.”
The saturnine Mr.
C—the real Nazi in the room—engages him in a flatteringly attentive
conversation. Mr. J agrees with Mr. C wholly. Mr. J is definitely attracted by
Mr. C. He goes out of his way to ask his name—they have never met before. “A
very intelligent man.”
Mr. K contemplates
the scene with a sad humor in his expressive eyes. Mr. K is also a Jew. Mr. K
is a Jew from the South. He speaks with a Southern drawl. He tells inimitable
stories. Ten years ago he owned a very successful business that he had built up
from scratch. He sold it for a handsome price, settled his indigent relatives
in business, and now enjoys an income for himself of about fifty dollars a
week. At forty he began to write articles about odd and out-of-the-way places
in American life. A bachelor, and a sad man who makes everybody laugh, he
travels continually, knows America from a thousand different facets, and loves
it in a quiet, deep, unostentatious way. He is a great friend of H, the
biographer. Like H, his ancestors have been in this country since long before
the Civil War. He is attracted to the young German. By and by they are together
in the drawing-room. The impeccable gentleman of New England, the
country-man—intellectual of the Middle West, the happy woman whom the gods
love, the young German, the quiet, poised Jew from the South. And over on the
other side are the others.
Mr. L has just come
in. Mr. L is a lion these days. My hostess was all of a dither when she told me
on the telephone, “ . . . and L is coming. You know it’s dreadfully
hard to get him.” L is a very powerful labor leader. “My dear, he is a
man of the people, but really fascinating.“ L is a man of the people and
just exactly as fascinating as my horsy, bank vice-president, on-the-make
acquaintance over there, and for the same reasons and in the same way. L makes
speeches about the “third of the nation,” and L has made a darned good thing
for himself out of championing the oppressed. He has the best car of anyone in
this room; salary means nothing to him because he lives on an expense account.
He agrees with the very largest and most powerful industrialists in the country
that it is the business of the strong to boss the weak, and he has made
collective bargaining into a legal compulsion to appoint him or his henchmen as
“labor’s” agents, with the power to tax pay envelopes and do what they please
with the money. L is the strongest natural-born Nazi in this room. Mr. B
regards him with contempt tempered by hatred. Mr. B will use him. L is already
parroting B’s speeches. He has the brains of Neanderthal man, but he has an
infallible instinct for power. In private conversation he denounces the Jews as
“parasites.” No one has ever asked him what are the creative functions of a
highly paid agent, who takes a percentage off the labor of millions of men, and
distributes it where and as it may add to his own political power.
III
It’s fun—a macabre
sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies
things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.
Kind, good, happy,
gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher
whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy
gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the
frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the
spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling
out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice
people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the
criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to
tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or
happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go
Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
