Serpents and Vipers

UNDER COVER--John Roy Carlson-Dutton ($3.50).

For four years pseudonymous Author John Roy Carlson, a youthful Armenian-born journalist, has sat in on the conclaves of some 30 U.S. fascist and near-fascist groups. What he saw and heard, and what he thinks about it, makes a bulky (544 pages), jumbled, fact-crammed book. * It is good reading and worth reading; it is a believable account of real viciousness, relieved by fragments of pure absurdity. Smart readers will make allowances for Investigator Carlson's enthusiasms, distinguish for themselves between stooges and stars.

The Line. Before Pearl Harbor U.S. fascism was blatant and aggressive. Federal agents and public hostility have driven it to cover. So today's techniques are largely confined to whispering campaigns in industrial centers, promotion of racial violence, draft dodging, food hoarding, agitation for "democratic" opposition to the Administration. The objective, says Carlson, is to sabotage "with every means at their command, a quick Allied victory ... to ,prolong the conflict in order to intensify . . . work of dissension. . . ."

"The America First spirit," said Senator Gerald Nye to Carlson, "is much stronger now. But . . . you can ruin a good thing by coming out with it at the wrong time." When the time comes, explained the " 'dean' of American intellectual fascism," suave Lawrence Dennis, "such slogans as 'America for the Americans,' 'White Supremacy,' . . . 'Europe for the Europeans' . . . will become popular. Reactionary feeling will become rampant, followed closely by antiSemitism. . . . Declare yourself for the war now [and] after you say this begin to explain that we're fighting for Communism."

This line, in more practical form, was explained, to Carlson by a self-styled Detroit labor organizer. "You begins your work," said he, "by talking against the Jews and the nigger. The Jew got us into the war. You tell 'em that. The Jew is keeping labor down by controlling the money. It's the Jew who hires niggers and gives them low wages. . . . You ties in the niggers with the Jew, den you call the Jews Communists. That gets 'em."

Crazy Shambles. Slowly, surely, Author Carlson learned every trick and subterfuge of American fascism. He adopted the name "George Pagnanelli," modeled his speech, clothes and gestures on those of a youthful Italian, became a trusted lieutenant of Yorkville's Joe McWilliams, and a salesman for Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck's Flanders' Hall Publishing Company. He was made a captain (Grand Central District) in the underground Army of Christ, alias the Iron Guard, alias the Midtown Sporting Club ("interested in shooting rabbits, see?"), alias the American Phalanx (PAX for short "In Latin it means peace").

"Our first goal," said Phalanx Chief James Banahan, "is to blow up the Communist headquarters right around the corner. We'll be making bombs soon. . . ."

Most fantastic of all to "George Pagnanelli" was the diversity of Hitler's pup pets, who willingly locked together in a crazy, contradictory shambles of anti-Semitism and Fuehrer-worship. Anti-Catholic Ku-Kluxers paraded the streets with Catholic members of the Army of Christ.

Czarist ex-officer Count Anastase Andreivitch Vonsiatskoy-Vonsiatsky, friend of Fritz Kuhn and former worker in the Baldwin Locomotive Works, was on the same side of the fence as Robert Jordan, Fuhrer of the Negro Ethiopian Pacific Movement, Inc. Mr. Jordan "proudly wired Hitler that the Negro people of the world were with him in his fight against injustice," greatly embarrassed the Japanese by claiming blood relationship.

Weeping Mothers. Carlson's is no all-male show. Nazi-admirer Dr. Maude S. DeLand also approved of the Japs because, she explained, "they always returned borrowed books." Mrs. Mary Tappendorf, of the Chicago Mothers, was rent with anguish over the WACS: "What do they want to do with girls in the front lines? I'll tell you-It's SEX-and that's Mrs. Eleanor's idea, too. . . . They tell [the boys] they'll go insane without it."

As "delegate" of the fascist Paul Revere Sentinels, "George Pagnanelli" went to Washington to sabotage passage of the Lend-Lease bill. Mothers' Movement Fuehrine Elizabeth Dilling and "a wild, milling mob of women" welcomed him. "My thundering herd," she screamed, "how do you like it? . . . Come on, mothers. Let's picket the Senate Building."

One woman began to weep. "Her name is Miss Rooney," said a friend. "She always cries." And whenever she cried a woman from South Bend, Ind., invariably followed. Soon scores of weepers had been touched off, were brusquely ordered to restrain themselves until a more critical moment. Once, at dinner, "Mrs. Dilling suddenly started to sing a mildly ribald song about a young lady and her fiance. Later she stuck her thumb into the air, 'snatched' at [it] with her left hand and made it 'disappear.' She laughed hysterically while she pinched her left arm'. . . ."

Also prominent among the women was Mrs. Lois de Lafayette Washburn, who always signed her letters "T.N.T." More shocking to "Pagnanelli" than her leaving the shade up while undressing was her insistence that Pearl Harbor had been secretly arranged by the New Deal. "George Pagnanelli" was given the eagle emblem of Mrs. Washburn's Yankee Minuteman. "I'd better run back to the hotel and pack up," she shrieked. "The serpents and vipers are after us." *

Stinkweeds, Slingshots, Secretaries. To win the devotion of his fascist friends, "George Pagnanelli" published an anti-Semitic sheet called the Christian Defender. One of its slogans: "Free America from Stinkweeds." Father Coughlin asked for two copies every week.

Through the Defender's good name, Editor "Pagnanelli" met fascist James True, who had taken out a patent for his "kike-killer"--a truncheon that came in two sizes, one for use by ladies.

> He met American Patriots Inc.--"bitter old dowagers" who gave fat rolls of greenbacks to support a corps of "ushers" for "patriotic" rallies; who "sucked in their breath with horror" at the thought of "13,000,000 Communist niggers turned loose" to rape their daughters.

> He worked for Russell Roberts, who explained his plan for firing rocks from slingshots into the windows of Detroit's Negro section-with disastrous effects on production and racial compatibility.

> George Hornby of Idaho, ex-State Executive Committeeman' of the Disabled American Veterans, taught him a secret code: "I have inside information that the Jewish officers [in the U.S. Army] will kill all the Gentile ones and put Communists in their place. I want you to write me when the plot begins to take shape."

> From Edward James Smythe, Klan and Bund go-between, he learned Smythe's candidates for the "nationalist cabinet" of tomorrow: Secretary of the Treasury, Father Coughlin; Secretary of the Navy, Jacob Thorkelson; Secretary of State, Senator Burton K. Wheeler; Secretary of Public Health & Morals, Representative Clare Hoffman.

> "Pagnanelli" made secret photographs of a passionate lett r written to a friend by Salt Lake City's J. H. McKnight, a Mormon who always wore long flannel underwear in hot weather and had trouble with his spelling: "Oh, how I would love to strike hands with such nobelmen as Father Coughlin, Jearald Winrod, William Dudley Pelley .. . not to say Wheeler, Lindbergh the incomparable, Senator Nye and Walsh, and others too numerous to mention here. Oh, what I would give to be numbered with them, what an honor, what a rare prevelidge. . . ."

Good Fellows, No Brains. In his last interviews with Lawrence Dennis ("my most sensational . . . during my . . . years as investigator"), "Pagnanelli" got the frankest of statements on American fascism's tactics for the future--a statement that he urges the reader to consider well. Said Dennis: "Our only hope from now on is Congress. I've been needling them . .. and I intend to keep on." But it would not, he indicated, be plain sailing, since in his opinion not even the "best" Congressmen and their friends were entirely capable of introducing the New Order. He was specific about it:

1) "Fish has no brains"; 2) Reynolds has "no brains"; 3) Gerald L. K. Smith "is a good fellow, he listens to me"; 4) Nye is "the best of them all in Washington"; 5) "Wheeler is a good fellow, but he can't stand up to Nye"; 6) "Taft is coming along, but he is still old-fashioned"; 7) "Surrounded by a circle of advisers of the nationalist type, Lindbergh would make an excellent nominal leader"; 8) Colonel McCormick-"Dumb. No brains."

* Mrs. Washburn subsequently subsided into a letter-writing state. "On the upper right-hand corner of her last letter was her new . . . address': Cell 217, Women's Division, 200 igth Street, S.E., Washington, D.C. Jail."

* The material for the book was given to FBI and some of it has gone into a LIFE article (Voices of Defeat, April 13, 1942).

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