It turned out that McCloy was the ranking person on duty in the War Department on December 7, 1941, when word was received that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. One of his early actions working with Stimson was to push for the roundup and internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans (but not German Americans) in concentration camps based on their ancestry—an action that one historian later called “the greatest deprivation of civil liberties by government in this country since slavery.”51 Overnight, McCloy became one of the lead officials charged with prosecuting the war against Germany, Italy, and Japan—a war against enemies he had helped to arm and equip.
CHAPTER 7
THE RISING STORM
In 1940 and ’41 Americans remained mired in the Great Depression and deeply worried about their future. The country was about to become entangled in another world war, this one waged on an even broader scale and under more desperate conditions than the last. Freedom, democracy, and prosperity were very much in peril. In addition to fearing they might become dominated by foreign powers, many Americans wondered if some sinister inner forces would engulf their society and change their way of life, as had happened abroad. The Lindberghs were not alone in regarding fascism as the wave of the future. It already had swept Italy, Germany, Spain and other parts of the globe, and many of the seeds required for fascism to flower in the United States, some warned, were already planted. From the other end of the political spectrum, capitalist defenders warned that Communism was threatening to impose another sort of dictatorship, against which only the harshest measures could prevail.
European social scientists had followed the Nazis’ rise to power with awe. At least one close observer took from it fresh insights about the fascists’ focus on punishment. In his study Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology (1938), the distinguished Danish sociologist Svend Ranulf explored some of the dynamics that shape the attitudes of different social classes toward transgressors, offering a classic discussion of social structure in punitive moralizing—what Nietzsche called ressentiment. Ranulf pointed out that the urge to assist in the punishment of criminals, as awful and primal as it might be, was nevertheless a “disinterested disposition,” since “no direct personal advantage is achieved by the act of punishing another person who has injured a third party.” He noted that it was furthermore a disposition “not equally strong in all human societies and indeed seems to be entirely lacking in some.” He suggested, consistent with the writings of Max Weber, the American V. F. Calverton, and others, that “the disinterested tendency to inflict punishment is a distinctive characteristic of the lower middle class, that is, of the class living under conditions which force its members to an extraordinary degree of self-restraint, and subject them to much frustration of natural desires.” “Moral indignation (which is the emotion behind the disinterested tendency to inflict punishment),” Ranulf explained, was “a kind of disguised envy, if ‘envy’ is understood not in a pejorative but in an ethically neutral sense, such as it is used by Herodotus.”1
According to Ranulf’s reasoning, Americans, with their Calvinist roots, were especially susceptible to showing their strong desire to see other people punished for their immorality. The colonial legacy of slavery, indentured servitude, and convict transportation, as well as the subjugation of the Native Americans, had established a strong foundation for penal severity. There was also a long tradition of lynching and vigilantism. More recently, the eugenics movement had enhanced some of this eliminationist tendency by injecting into American discourse a “scientifically based” desire to create a master race. This eugenic fervor was couched in seemingly noble but practical visions of weeding out the unfit to better the cause of humanity, reduce taxes, and improve the gene pool. It appealed to nativist and nationalistic sentiments that sought to curb immigration and advance white Anglo-Saxon supremacy, and it softened its surgical thrusts with plenty of anesthesia—sedative for body and conscience alike—to make killing as quick and painless as possible in order to minimize suffering for everyone concerned. The economic hardships caused by the Great Depression had further threatened the lower middle class, feeding their sense of persecution, their feelings of economic and social insecurity, their disillusionment with democratic institutions, and their need to find scapegoats. As events in Germany had demonstrated, this could make for a particularly dangerous situation, possibly making them susceptible to demagogic manipulation by a “strongman” leader who would use his position to target one minority or another for the most severe kind of punishment.
It was true that as the United States prepared to enter the war, Americans had good reason to be worried about their future. Yet there was also reason for encouragement. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs had saved the lower middle class and others from total economic destruction and staved off mob rule. American society was also surprisingly peaceful given all of the pressures it was under. Despite the FBI’s highly publicized gun battles with public enemies such as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, the newspapers’ obsessions with crime waves, and politicians’ urgent calls about the “war on crime,” homicide in the United States actually had dropped by nearly 50 percent from 1933 to the early 1940s, and other reported serious crime (rape, robbery, assault, and burglary) had declined by one-third.2 As most Americans saw it, J. Edgar Hoover’s crackerjack G-men commanded respect throughout the world as a professional law enforcement agency that had virtually invented crime control, and the federal government had established one of the world’s toughest prisons, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, in San Francisco Bay, matching several states in “strict but fair” prison discipline.
As well, lynching—which one black writer characterized as “much more of an expression of Southern fear of Negro progress than of Negro crime”—had finally gone into steep decline.3 In terms of the most severe punishment, the United States hadn’t joined the distinct international trend away from the death penalty that criminologists said had been increasing during the course of the last century—and the number of executions had increased during the Depression. But American executions hadn’t skyrocketed. (The national tally of persons put to death by the state had gone from 140 in 1932 to 194 in 1936.) Six states (all in the North) didn’t have capital punishment on their statute books at all, and other states had reduced the number of crimes considered capital crimes.
Many Americans figured they had “modernized” the death penalty by having the state take over executions, moving them inside prisons instead of making them such a mob spectacle, and changing the method of execution from grisly hangings to mechanical, clinical, and scientific procedures. Citizens prided themselves on the fact that their government went to considerable lengths to reduce the pain and suffering of those it put to death. By 1940, twenty-one of the forty-two states that had the death penalty used electrocution and eight employed lethal gas; the rest still clung to the noose or the firing squad. “In any case,” America’s leading criminologist, Edwin H. Sutherland, commented, whatever the method, “the principal distress is due to the anticipation of death rather than to the actual execution of the penalty.”4