The Nazis also honored America’s leading euthanasia advocate, Foster Kennedy (a psychiatrist who was professor of neurology at Cornell Medical College and director of neurology at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital), as well as Henry Fairfield Osborn (the famed paleontologist and director of the American Museum of Natural History), among others. The famous Harvard legal scholar Roscoe Pound also received an honorary degree from the Nazis.
In turn, some American government officials lauded radical eugenics. In 1934 William W. Peter of the U.S. Public Health Service praised the German sterilization program in the pages of the American Journal of Public Health.35 A bill to legalize voluntary euthanasia (referred to as “the granting of peaceful death to incurable sufferers”) in New York was proposed by the treasurer of the American Euthanasia Society, State Assemblyman Charles F. Nixdorff, on January 26, 1939, shortly before Hitler enacted his own euthanasia measure. But the New York bill fell short of being introduced. A few weeks later, Foster Kennedy urged that “mercy killing” be expanded to include infants who were born “defective” and were doomed to remain so.36 (In May 1941, Kennedy addressed the American Psychiatric Association, saying, “We have too many feebleminded people among us….” He advocated the formation of a competent medical board that was legally authorized to “relieve the defective… of the agony of living.” In 1942 he set off a bigger controversy when his arguments were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.)37
A number of leading American bankers and industrialists continued to finance and applaud Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascist approaches. “As the Hitler régime took each step in its war against the Jews and all of Europe,” historian Edwin Black has written, “IBM custom-designed the punch cards and other data processing solutions to streamline those campaigns into what the company described as ‘blitzkrieg efficiency.’” At the company’s inauguration of its new Hollerith machine–manufacturing facility in Berlin, the manager of IBM’s German subsidiary proclaimed, amid swirling swastika flags and storm trooper guards, “Hail to our German people and der Führer!”38 Such backing and involvement by many American investors, corporations, and foundations continued even after Italy and Germany had begun to display their bellicose tendencies—and well after they had laid out their racial agendas.
The willingness of the fascist powers to use poison gas against populations they considered racially inferior was demonstrated in 1936, when Italy’s air force (propelled by German know-how) dropped German mustard gas bombs on soldiers and civilians in Ethiopia—and international protests by Emperor Haile Selassie fell on deaf ears.39 Such actions didn’t faze Germany’s American business partners. A few months after the bombings, Nazi propagandists at the Olympic Games in Berlin informed McCloy and other guests that German race policy was based on “internationally accepted science,” which they said had been developed in the United States and elsewhere.40 And McCloy continued to hobnob with Göring, Hess, and other leading Nazis.
Starting in 1937, however, as the Nazis began to put into effect their racial laws and as war with militaristic Germany loomed, American corporate support for the Third Reich began to become more problematic. One of the more intriguing developments involved the sudden apparent suicide of the world’s top organic chemist, Wallace Hume Carothers, the young genius who had briefly taught in Conant’s chemistry department at Harvard before going on to invent nylon and neoprene at DuPont. Shortly after returning from an extended trip to Germany, Carothers apparently committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill with lemon juice.41 Shortly after Carothers’s death amid a congressional investigation linking American Cyanamid to secret German interests, Lewis Douglas abruptly resigned from the firm and left the country to become president of McGill University in Canada.42 Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938 apparently convinced him that another global conflict was inevitable, and out of concern that Great Britain and the United States would ultimately become involved, he began to soften his stance on isolation and strongly supported U.S. military assistance for France and Britain. (Both Douglas and McCloy strongly supported the Lend-Lease bill.) Douglas would remain in Canada until late 1939, when he returned to New York as president of the Mutual of New York Life Insurance Company.
On September 1, 1939, the day that Hitler launched the blitzkrieg attack against Poland that started World War II, eleven corporations (including DuPont and Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation and its subsidiaries) that sold a large percentage of the nitrate products used in commercial fertilizer and explosives in the United States were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, charged with conspiracy to control the supply and prices of those products in violation of antitrust laws. The indictments weren’t announced until more than a year later, leaving the firms to repair their standing with the government.43
Starting in December 1940 German imports of potassium cyanide were no longer allowed in the United States. The Roessler & Hasslacher chemicals division of E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company subsequently announced that it would begin manufacturing the chemical, spurred by “current U.S. needs and the urgency of national self-sufficiency.”44
In April 1941, one hundred corporations (including American Cyanamid, DuPont, and Dow Chemical Company) were subpoenaed to provide records regarding the extent to which Germany’s IG Farben had gained control over vital sections of America’s drug and chemical trade.45 In May 1942 it was revealed that executives of DuPont, American Cyanamid, Allied Chemical, and twenty of their officers and directors had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Trenton, accused of a worldwide conspiracy with IG Farben to monopolize the manufacture of dyestuffs.46 It came out that DuPont had first sought its alliance with Farben in 1919, and in 1926 the corporations had contracted to divide the world market for military powder and cross-licensed patents and exchanged technical information. DuPont had also agreed to serve as the sales agent for the German companies so they could overcome the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty.47 Even after such disclosures, Justice Department officials continued to report that “German firms masquerading in this country as American” were still continuing to operate without interference, just as they had begun to do at the end of World War I.48
McCloy had been among those who believed that Germany had been unfairly penalized by Versailles; he had worked on behalf of several major financial institutions, helping to rebuild the German state into a formidable industrial and military power. He had never condemned the fascists. But the world was changing. In the 1940 American presidential election, Douglas supported Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate, but McCloy, who was a Republican, said he didn’t support either Willkie or FDR, adding, “People take for granted that such things must be the democratic process. If they are, I say a plague on it—let’s invent something different.”49
Roosevelt won the 1940 election, however, and with America’s entry into the conflict appearing much more imminent, McCloy left his Wall Street law firm in December 1940 to become special assistant to Secretary of War Harry L. Stimson in the Roosevelt administration. In September 1941 Douglas spoke up against Hitler, saying, “Anti-Semitism is one of the characteristics of Nazism wherever it has stuck up its ugly head.”50