Documentary, The Untold History of the United States Prologue B- 1920-1940 Franklin D.Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin
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# UntoldHistoryoftheUnitedStates
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02:07American soldiers like the ones that serviced their own fighting men with the idea that it would maintain health standards and morale.
02:15But U.S. officials adamantly refused.
02:17And back home, moral crusaders had exploited wartime anxieties to shut down red-light districts around the country, driving prostitutes underground and forcing them to seek protection from gangsters and pimps.
02:31In 1919, the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified, banning the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States, the reform backed by women's temperance groups, certain Protestant denominations, the reborn Ku Klux Klan and some progressives.
02:49But as with the war on drugs later in the century, alcohol remained readily available for all who wanted it.
02:58And the war on alcohol ended up producing fantastic profits for a new stratum of criminals dominated by Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrant gangs.
03:07Smedley Butler had seen some of the worst of the violence of World War I and the corruption that had ensued.
03:16But now on sabbatical from the military, he was assigned the streets of Philadelphia.
03:22Cleaning up Philadelphia was harder than any battle I was ever in.
03:29Butler closed 600 speakeasies, including two patronized by the city's elite who had him fired.
03:41Other repressive aspects of the new American life included immigration reform laws that imposed strict quotas on southern and eastern European countries.
03:51And entirely banned immigration from Japan, China and East Asia.
03:58Anti-Semitism infested post-war America.
04:01Some associated Jews with communism and radicalism.
04:04Others thought Jews exerted too much influence in Hollywood, business and academia.
04:10Top universities like Harvard slashed admission of freshman Jews from 28% in 1925 to 12% in 1933.
04:21Other measures were taken to eliminate undesirables.
04:25In 1911, as governor of New Jersey, eugenics enthusiast Woodrow Wilson had signed a law authorizing sterilization of convicts, epileptics and the feeble-minded.
04:35Over the following decades, some 60,000 Americans would be sterilized, more than a third of them in California.
04:45Sexually active women were particularly targeted.
04:48Future German leader Adolf Hitler followed U.S. developments closely and claimed to model some of his own master race strategies on U.S. programs that he lauded but criticized for only going half way.
05:03He would go further. Much further.
05:05Between 1920 and 25, three to six million Americans joined the racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan, which dominated politics in Indiana, Colorado, Oregon, Oklahoma and Alabama, and sent hundreds of delegates to the 1924 Democratic Convention.
05:28It is astonishing to think that in 1925, a quarter million people watched 35,000 Klansmen march and rally through Washington, D.C.
05:39Hatred stalked the heartland.
05:52Fourteen-year-old Henry Fonda, later a movie star, recalled watching a lynching in Omaha, Nebraska from his father's printing plant.
06:00Put them up!
06:01It was the most horrendous sight I'd ever seen. We locked the plant, went downstairs, and drove home in silence.
06:13Finish him.
06:15All I could think of was that young black man dangling at the end of a rope.
06:21Hundreds more African Americans would suffer a similar fate, often advertised widely in advance and memorialized on postcards
06:29and in sound recordings, lynchings became perverse rituals of desecration, replete with dismemberment and castration, and preserving body parts as souvenirs.
06:43Backwoods Bible colleges proliferated. Anti-intellectualism abounded.
06:48In 1925, a Tennessee school teacher named John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted, convicted, and fined for teaching Darwin's evolution theories in school.
06:58World War I marked the ascendancy of the U.S. and Japan, the war's two real victors.
07:09It had brought America an unprecedented collusion of bankers, businessmen, and government officials in an attempt to fix the economy and guarantee profits.
07:18By 1925, the U.S. was producing over 70% of the world's oil, which had powered the Allied wartime navies, airplanes, tanks, and other motorized vehicles.
07:30New York had replaced London as the center of the world economy, its size exceeding that of its next six rivals combined.
07:41Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
07:46Cynical and disillusioned from a brutal war, people were hungry to live at a level and experience life in a way they had never done before.
07:59A new materialism reigned based on credit.
08:05Radios, movie palaces, and a new golden age of advertising that perfected the capitalist art form of manipulating not only consumer hopes and fantasies, but also fears and insecurities.
08:20Henry Ford sold 15 million Model Ts before switching in 1927 to the more fashionable Model A.
08:26Jazz, with its roots in the African American South, became wildly popular.
08:33Flappers, petting, speakeasies, the Harlem Renaissance, sports.
08:43While new movies with and without sound flourished.
08:47Rebellious younger writers came on the scene, new expressionism in the works of E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot.
08:56Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, William Faulkner, Lawrence Stallings, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, and Dalton Trumbo.
09:08Many of them went to Europe. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1920,
09:12Here was a new generation, grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.
09:19Gertrude Stein, a lesbian writer living in Paris, famously commented,
09:25All of you young people who served in the war, you are a lost generation.
09:30As the 1920s progressed, prosperity came to rest increasingly on the shakiest of foundations, unprecedented borrowing, massive speculation, and German war reparations.
09:43Agriculture was depressed throughout the decade.
09:47Auto manufacturing and road building slowed, housing investment declined, and the gap between rich and poor grew sharply.
09:55Capital scrambled for profitable speculative outlets.
09:58To help pay Germany's war reparations, German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, a prominent Jewish industrialist, expanded economic, diplomatic, and even military ties with communist Russia.
10:13Forging a bridge between the two nations that had been left out of Versailles in order to rebuild their war-ravaged societies.
10:20This infuriated not only England and France, but members of Germany's thuggish right-wing Freikorps, who were already up in arms about Germany paying its reparations.
10:31They assassinated Rathenau in 1922.
10:35Germany's economy suffered an inflation unlike any ever experienced in history.
10:40Wheelbarrows full of worthless German marks were burned for firewood.
10:45By 1923, a bankrupt Germany could no longer pay reparations to France and Britain, who in turn asked for relief on the billions in war debts they owed the US government.
10:57Absolutely not, replied the Spartan new Republican President Calvin Coolidge.
11:02By 1924, Europe's economies teetered on the edge of collapse.
11:09Then, and again four years later, commissions of bankers and businessmen led by Morgan and his allies, drew up plans for German economic recovery that would guarantee continued, though more manageable, reparations payments.
11:23In essence, the US was loaning money to Germany so it could pay reparations to France and Britain, who then used the money to service their war debts to the US.
11:35The bankers got rich, the people stayed poor.
11:38By 1933, Germany, though paying enormous reparations, owed even more money to the Allies than it had in 1924.
11:47It was in this climate of economic crisis in the West and communist revolution in the East that a new monster was born.
12:00It was called Nazism.
12:04Separate and apart from Germany, in Italy in 1922,
12:08Benito Mussolini and his fascisti took power and decimated the communists in bloody street battles.
12:19And as 1925 came to an end, it was the Morgan Bank that loaned Mussolini's government 100 million dollars to repay its war debts to Britain and the US.
12:31Morgan was very pleased with Mussolini's repressive labor policies.
12:36Nazis stormed the city of Munich in 1923, led by World War I Corporal Adolf Hitler.
12:48His followers included war veterans unable to adjust to civilian life who clamored for the chance to put down communist uprisings and later formed the backbone of his stormtroopers.
12:59For his part in the failed coup, Hitler spent nine months in jail refining his views.
13:07His shrill assertion that the German military had won the war only to be stabbed in the back by politicians at home was gaining more and more adherence.
13:16Hitler's cause would be greatly advanced when in 1929, the central bankers walked head-on into an unforeseen disaster, the Great Depression.
13:26Montague Norman, who ruled the private bank of England from 1920 to 1944, and a paranoid anti-communist, anti-Semite who traveled incognito to avoid assassination, asked the governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank to raise interest rates to slow Wall Street's soaring stock speculation.
13:48Ironically, Norman had been instrumental in convincing the previous governor to lower the rates two years earlier, which fueled the orgy of speculation that now rattled the system.
13:58Morgan's senior partner, Thomas Lamont, considered Norman the wisest man he had ever met.
14:04But the U.S. stock market, as it would in 2008, had diverted its money and credit away from production into speculation, borrowing to the hilt in order to loot the economy for huge profit.
14:19When the English and American banks raised their rates, the credit of the world tightened quickly and too big to fail American banks went into a panic.
14:28Huge banks in Austria and Germany followed.
14:31The crash ended American loans to Germany, and Germany's industry collapsed entirely in the winter of 1931, too.
14:40Unemployment soared to over 30%, putting millions of angry young men in the streets.
14:45Capitalists and conservative politicians feared an imminent communist coup,
14:50and Hitler, Germany's most virulent anti-communist, was thus invited by the ruling classes into the government.
14:58Although still representing a radical minority party, in January 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
15:07In speeches like this, Hitler touched a deep chord with many Germans, promising them something they could barely remember. Pride.
15:26But disorder followed Hitler's rise to power when the Reichstag, the national parliament mysteriously burned down.
15:43Hitler readily blamed the communists, and many were thrown in concentration camps.
15:49He quickly began a massive program of rearmament, which he made public in 1935.
15:56And once Halmar Schacht became his Minister of Economics, he received vital bank credits from Montague Norman, who in 1934 told a Morgan partner,
16:07Hitler and Schacht are the bulwicks of civilization in Germany.
16:10Hitler and Schacht are the bulwicks of civilization in Germany.
16:11They are fighting the war of our system of society against communism.
16:16Many American bankers agreed, trusting their friend Schacht, and hoping that Hitler would repay at least some of the reparations,
16:24and also crush the German communists.
16:28America was in deep crisis as well.
16:38Republican Herbert Hoover struggled ineffectively to quell the Great Depression.
16:43More than 20,000, possibly as many as 40,000 angry American veterans known as the Bonus Army,
16:51descended on Washington, demanding war service bonuses not due to be paid until the year 1945.
16:58I came to Washington to get my bonus, and I'm going to wait until I have to wait until 1945.
17:03They set up a tent city on the Anacostia Flats in Washington.
17:07They brought their wives and children.
17:09They lived by military discipline, with daily parade and a strict no-drinking rule.
17:15General Smedley Butler arrived to lend moral support.
17:19I know who's made this country worth living in.
17:23It's just you, fellas.
17:25Look.
17:27Makes me so damn mad a whole lot of people speak of you as tramps.
17:32By God, they didn't speak of you as tramps in 1917 and 18.
17:36No.
17:39Take it from me.
17:41This is the greatest demonstration of Americanism we've ever had.
17:47Pure Americanism.
17:49He was mobbed by veterans wanting to speak to him.
17:53Until late that morning, he sat with them in their tents,
17:55listening to their tales of lost jobs and families in distress and old battle walls.
18:01After demonstrators clashed with district police,
18:05President Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to restore order.
18:09Convinced that the Bonus Army was the vanguard of a communist coup,
18:13MacArthur, not for the only time in his storied career,
18:17disobeyed presidential orders and rousted the veterans with tanks, bayonets and tear gas.
18:23MacArthur, whose aides included later generals Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton,
18:27pursued the fleeing veterans across the river and set their makeshift city aflame.
18:33But when the Bonus Army marched again the next year into Washington,
18:45there was a new president in the White House who sent his wife, Eleanor,
18:51to help serve the veterans three hot meals a day with coffee.
18:55One veteran remarked, Hoover sent the army, Roosevelt sent his wife.
19:01Several days later the Bonus Army voted to disband.
19:05The new president put many of the veterans to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps.
19:11It was in his famous inaugural address in March 1933
19:16that Franklin Delano Roosevelt rallied the nation with his declaration.
19:21That the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
19:27It was the signature line of his extraordinary life.
19:30In truth, he was facing a disaster.
19:33Unemployment stood at 25%.
19:35The gross national product had fallen 50%.
19:39Farmers lost 60% of their income.
19:43Industrial production dropped over 50%.
19:46Between 1930 and 32, 20% of U.S. banks had failed.
19:52Bread lines formed in every town to feed the starving.
19:55Homeless walked the streets and slept in vast shanty towns known as Hoovervilles.
20:01There was no safety net to assist the desperate.
20:04Misery was everywhere.
20:06Roosevelt united Americans around a message of inclusion, the opposite of Hitler's.
20:13The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.
20:22In this vein he called for strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments.
20:28And an end to speculation with other people's money.
20:32He proclaimed a new deal.
20:34And although he could have nationalized the banks with hardly a word of protest, he chose a much more conservative course of action.
20:41He declared a four day national bank holiday, conferred with the nation's top bankers on his first full day in office.
20:50And signed the Emergency Banking Act which was written largely by the bankers themselves.
20:56The banking system was essentially restored without radical change.
21:01And despite being accused of betraying his class, Roosevelt would ironically save capitalism from the capitalists themselves.
21:12Recognizing the failures of unfettered capitalism, Roosevelt unleashed the powers of the federal government.
21:18In his first hundred days in office he passed legislation that established the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to save farming.
21:27The Civilian Conservation Corps to put young men to work in the forests and parks.
21:33The Federal Emergency Relief Administration to provide federal assistance to the states.
21:38The Public Works Administration to coordinate large scale public works projects.
21:43The National Recovery Administration, NRA, to promote economic recovery.
21:49And he passed the Glass-Steagall Banking Act which separated investment and commercial banking and instituted federal insurance of bank deposits.
21:59He also repealed prohibition and stated, now would be a good time to have a beer.
22:08Roosevelt assembled a team of visionaries.
22:10Among them were Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's chief aide, National Youth Administrator Aubrey Williams, Rexford Tugwell, Adolph Burrell, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickis.
22:23There was also the formidable Frances Perkins, the U.S. Secretary of Labor and the first woman ever appointed to the cabinet.
22:31They became known as the New Dealers.
22:34Henry A. Wallace, the young Iowa geneticist, would become one of their leading lights.
22:44He was from a Republican farming clan that had worked the land since it was frontier.
22:49His father Harry had served Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge as Secretary of Agriculture.
22:56Roosevelt told Wallace to take whatever actions necessary to repair the nation's devastated rural sector.
23:07His solutions were controversial.
23:09To stop overproduction, he paid farmers to destroy 25% of the cotton crop that was in the ground.
23:16He also ordered the slaughter of six million baby pigs, although he made sure the Agriculture Department distributed much of the pork, lard, and soap to needy Americans.
23:29Condemned by critics, Wallace took to the radio to defend his program.
23:34He called it a Declaration of Interdependence.
23:38The ungoverned push of rugged individualism perhaps had an economic justification in the days when we had all the West to surge upon and conquer.
23:48But this country has filled up now and grown up.
23:52There are no more Indians to fight.
23:54We must blaze new trails in the direction of a controlled economy, common sense, and social decency.
24:02In the end, Wallace's plan worked brilliantly.
24:05Cotton prices doubled.
24:07Farm income jumped 65% from 1932 to 1936.
24:12Corn, wheat, pig prices stabilized.
24:15And the farmers became Wallace's staunchest supporters.
24:19For men who had spent years perfecting a strain of hybrid corn
24:23and who believed that abundant food supplies were essential for a peaceful world,
24:28Wallace was horrified by the unfortunate message.
24:31Such policies sent.
24:33The plowing under of ten million acres of cotton
24:36and the slaughter of six million little pigs in 1933
24:40were not acts of idealism in any sane society.
24:44They were emergency acts made necessary
24:47by the almost insane lack of world statesmanship during the period from 1920 to 1932.
24:54The public, which blamed business for causing the Depression,
25:00welcomed Roosevelt with great enthusiasm, hoping he could spark a recovery.
25:05But he was an enigma, campaigning at times as a big government liberal,
25:10spinning out one new government program after another,
25:13and at other times as a budget-balancing conservative.
25:17Some thought him a socialist in the Eugene Debs Norman Thomas tradition.
25:22Others a fascist or corporatist, supporting the merger of state and corporate power.
25:29His industrial recovery program, the NRA, regulated production, competition and minimum wage rates,
25:36some of which smacked of Italian fascism.
25:41In reality, Roosevelt was actually more pragmatic than ideological.
25:46Nonetheless, he was misunderstood by big business.
25:49Openly opposing Wall Street made for smart politics,
25:53but it won the everlasting enmity of conservative Republicans
25:57who attacked his inflationary policies as unconstitutional.
26:01Printing press money, they called it.
26:03And worse yet, FDR took the U.S. off the gold standard.
26:08He sacrificed foreign trade and its profits
26:11in order to stimulate domestic recovery.
26:14He also took steps to reduce the country's small 140,000-man army.
26:20The plan as outlined to me was to form an organization of veterans.
26:24In 1934, retired General Smedley Butler re-entered the picture,
26:29presenting shocking information to the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities.
26:35I was supposed to lead an organization of 500,000 men,
26:39which would be able to take over the functions of government.
26:42Butler charged the anti-Roosevelt oligarchs,
26:45including J.P. Morgan's son, Jack,
26:48and the wealthy DuPont business clan,
26:51with trying to recruit him to lead an uprising of desperate veterans
26:56to force Roosevelt from office.
27:00This is what I found.
27:02The key to Robert Forrest's fascist organization.
27:06Of course, they didn't call it fascism.
27:08They painted it red, white, and blue, and called it Americanism.
27:11In here are the funds to see it through.
27:13Fantastic amount, subscribed by a few private individuals
27:16to whom money didn't mean anything anymore,
27:18but who wanted political power.
27:19Knew they could never get it by democratic means.
27:22In there are the names and addresses of the men
27:25who were designated to be America's first storm troopers.
27:27The press dismissed it as the business plot,
27:31a paranoid conspiracy.
27:33Henry Luce's Time magazine led the charge,
27:36but after hearing the testimony,
27:38the House committee,
27:39chaired by future Speaker of the House,
27:41John McCormick of Massachusetts,
27:43reported that it had been able to verify
27:46all the pertinent statements made by General Butler,
27:49and concluded that attempts to establish
27:51a fascist organization in the United States
27:54were discussed, were planned,
27:56and might have been placed in execution
27:58when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.
28:03The committee strangely chose not to call
28:06many of those implicated to testify,
28:09including failed 1928 Catholic presidential candidate Al Smith,
28:15Thomas Lamont of Morgan,
28:17Army General Douglas MacArthur,
28:19various high-placed corporate executives,
28:22as well as the former American Legion commander
28:25and the head of the National Recovery Administration.
28:29The tumultuous, frightening prospect of a fascist coup
28:33was popularized in the best-selling novel
28:36by Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis,
28:39It Can't Happen Here,
28:41which depicted a similar series of events
28:43to those alleged by Butler.
28:45And later, a similar plot emerged
28:48in the very popular Frank Capra film,
28:51Meet John Doe.
28:52All right.
28:53Now, supposing a certain unmissionable worm
28:56whose initials are DB,
28:58was trying to use that to shove his way into the White House,
29:03so he could put the screws on.
29:06You sit there back at your big cigars
29:08and think of deliberately killing an idea
29:10that's made millions of people a little bit happier.
29:13An idea that's brought thousands of them here
29:15from all over the country,
29:16by bus and by freight and jalopies and on foot,
29:20so they could pass on to each other
29:21their own simple little experiences.
29:24Why, look, I'm just a mug and I know it,
29:27but I'm beginning to understand a lot of things.
29:30Why, your type's as old as history.
29:32If you can't lay your dirty fingers on a decent idea
29:34and twist it and squeeze it and stuff it into your own pocket,
29:37you slap it down.
29:38Like dogs, if you can't eat something, you bury it.
29:41Al Smith, who became a spokesman
29:44for the right-wing American Liberty League, scorched Roosevelt.
29:48There can be only one capital, Washington or Moscow.
29:52There can be only the clear, pure, fresh air of free America
29:58or the foul breath of communistic Russia.
30:02There can be only one flag, the stars and stripes
30:06bore the flag of the godless Union of the Soviets.
30:11Although the Smedley-Butler hearings could be soft-pedaled by the media,
30:15the House of Morgan and the four DuPont brothers
30:18were actually called to testify
30:20by one of the most remarkable congressional hearings in U.S. history.
30:24That of the Senate committee investigating the munitions industry
30:28under North Dakota's Gerald Nye, a progressive Republican.
30:33The target? War profiteering on an unimaginable scale
30:38and collusion with the German enemy in World War I.
30:41Nye, sensing another war was coming, supported nationalizing the arms industry
30:46and increasing taxes on incomes over $10,000 to 98% on the day a war began.
30:55The investigations reached their zenith in early 1936
30:59when the House of Morgan and other Wall Street firms were called in.
31:04Was it true that Morgan and other firms had pushed the U.S. to war
31:07in order to recoup the enormous sums they'd lent the Allies?
31:11Morgan Jr., along with Thomas Lamont and other partners,
31:14dismissed this as a fantastic theory,
31:17claiming there was no material advantage to having the U.S. enter the First World War
31:22because the U.S. businesses were already thriving from supplying the Allies.
31:26One skeptical senator asked the bankers,
31:29Do you think Great Britain would have paid her debts if she had lost the war?
31:33A banker replied,
31:34Yes, even if she'd lost the war, she would have paid.
31:38But we must ask, would a broken and bankrupt Britain really have repaid those debts?
31:45Although Nye and his committee failed to stop war profiteering,
31:49they did succeed in educating the public
31:51and also raised another disturbing issue that continues to rankle historians.
31:57What to say about U.S. businesses' contributions to German economic and military revitalization.
32:05World War II continues to be one of the most heroic periods in American history and myth.
32:12A modern media industry of books, television and movies have applauded America's contribution to the defeat of Hitler's Nazi regime.
32:24But they ignore, forget or overlook that many prominent American businessmen and citizens,
32:34driven by greed but sometimes by fascist sympathies, knowingly aided the Third Reich.
32:40IBM, headed by Thomas Watson, had purchased a controlling interest in the German firm Dehomag in the early 1920s,
32:49and held on once the Nazis seized power.
32:53On his 75th birthday in 1937, Watson accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle,
32:59given him for the assistance IBM's German subsidiary provided the government in tabulating its census with its punch card machines.
33:08This later proved very effective in, among other things, identifying Jews,
33:13and later still in helping make the trains to Auschwitz run on time.
33:18On an even larger scale, General Motors Alfred Sloan, through his German subsidiary Adam Opel,
33:24built cars and transport vehicles for the German army.
33:27Sloan, on the eve of Germany's invasion of Poland, said his company was too big to be affected by a petty international squabble.
33:36Henry Ford's German subsidiary manufactured an arsenal of military vehicles throughout the war,
33:42with the consent of the parent company in Michigan.
33:45Ford himself had earlier published a series of articles, later a book titled The International Jew, The World's Foremost Problem.
33:55Hitler hung a portrait of Ford in his Munich office and told the Detroit News in 1931,
34:03I regard Heinrich Ford as my inspiration.
34:07When the European war was declared in 1939, Ford and GM, despite subsequent disclaimers,
34:14refused to divest themselves with their German holdings,
34:17and even comply with German government orders to retool for war production,
34:22while resisting similar demands from the US government.
34:25Ford, GM, Standard Oil, Alcoa, ITT, General Electric, the munitions maker DuPont,
34:33Eastman Kodak, Westinghouse, Pratt & Whitney, Douglas Aircraft, United Fruit, Singer,
34:40and International Harvester continued to trade with Germany up to 1941.
34:46Although the United States declared many of these business activities illegal under the Trading with the Enemy Act,
34:52several corporations still received special licenses to continue operations in Germany.
34:58Profits piled up in blocked bank accounts as Americans were dying on the battlefield.
35:04German coal and steel magnate Fritz Tussen had been one of Hitler's early backers,
35:11and much of his wealth was protected overseas by the Brown Brothers Harriman Investment Firm
35:16through the holding company Union Banking Corporation in an account managed by Prescott Bush,
35:23father of future President George H.W. Bush and grandfather to W. Bush.
35:29In 1942, the US government seized Union Banking Corp,
35:33along with four other Tussen-linked accounts managed by Bush.
35:38Then after the war, the shares were returned to the American shareholders, including Bush.
35:44By 1943, half of the German workforce was slave labor,
35:49or as the Nazis called them, foreign workers.
35:52Despite having lost direct control, Ford profited from these people,
35:56earning millions in sequestered funds after the war.
36:00Ford also benefited from its alliance with IG Farben,
36:04a chemical cartel that built the Buna rubber plant at Auschwitz,
36:09which manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas that killed so many.
36:13Farben employed 83,000 forced laborers from Auschwitz and held a 15% share of the subsidiary Ford Verk.
36:21American authorities knew of the death camps by August of 1942,
36:27but until this could be clarified, said nothing to the public.
36:31Rabbi Stephen Wise finally broke the silence in late 1942.
36:36The story was carried on page 10 in the New York Times, and not much was made of it.
36:42IBM fought and succeeded in recovering all of their sequestered profits.
36:47And Ford and GM both reabsorbed their German subsidiaries,
36:51even having the audacity to sue and win reparations for those European factories
36:56that had been destroyed or damaged in Allied bombing raids,
37:00up to $33 million in the case of GM.
37:04And after the war, these corporations took steps to obscure their involvement.
37:09Documents were suddenly burned or went missing, especially in former Nazi-occupied areas.
37:15The subject of collaboration is highly taboo.
37:18To facilitate such dealings, of course, banks and law firms were needed.
37:24The corporate powerhouse law firm Sullivan & Cromwell,
37:27whose managing director was future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles,
37:32with his brother Alan Dulles as a partner,
37:35had as clients many of these powerful institutions,
37:39including the very important Bank for International Settlements,
37:44which was set up in Switzerland in 1930
37:47to channel World War I reparations between the U.S. and Germany.
37:53After the war was declared,
37:55the bank continued to offer financial services to the Third Reich,
37:59and the majority of gold looted during the Nazi conquests of Europe
38:04ended up in BIS vaults,
38:06which allowed the Nazis access to money
38:09that would have normally been trapped in blocked accounts.
38:12Several Nazis and supporters were involved at high levels,
38:16including Yalmar Schacht and Walter Funk,
38:20who both ended up in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials.
38:24The Schacht was acquitted.
38:26American lawyer and chairman of the bank, Thomas McKittrick,
38:31claiming neutrality in Switzerland, managed this process.
38:35Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau,
38:38unsuccessfully tried to close the bank down after the war,
38:42claiming it had acted as an agent of the Nazis.
38:45The Chase Bank continued to work with Vichy France,
38:48a client state and intermediary of the Third Reich.
38:51Its deposits doubled during the war years.
38:55In 1998, the bank was sued by Holocaust survivors
38:59claiming it held blocked accounts from this era.
39:02Morgan Bank, Chase Bank, Union Banking Corporation,
39:05and BIS were the four dominant banks
39:08who succeeded in obfuscating their collaborations with the Nazis.
39:12William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper baron
39:15who was proud to have provoked the Spanish-American War,
39:19was still alive and went to Germany to meet with Hitler, whom he admired.
39:25Throughout the 30s, his papers demonized the Soviet Union
39:28and ran stories depicting the Nazis in a friendly light.
39:33American hero Charles Lindbergh, one of the most celebrated Americans of the 1920s,
39:47alongside Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, and Charlie Chaplin,
39:52became the poster boy for the America First movement.
39:56The future of this nation, one of all American ideals.
40:01Although Hitler had just smashed France,
40:03Lindbergh feared Germany's ultimate defeat
40:06and implored the American public.
40:09Hitler's destruction would lay Europe open to the rape, loot,
40:13and barbarism of Soviet Russia's forces,
40:16causing possibly the fatal wounding of Western civilization.
40:21Lindbergh was enthralled with Hitler and almost moved to Germany.
40:27Roosevelt suspected a darker reality than simple pacifism
40:33and remarked in 1940.
40:36If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this.
40:39I'm absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.
40:43Many Americans abhorred fascism
40:45and repudiated Lindbergh's right-wing views,
40:48but they remembered the horrors of World War I
40:51and wanted the U.S. to keep out of Europe's wars.
40:55Even General Smedley Butler would join the ranks of the isolationists,
41:00although he would die in 1940 before the U.S. entered the war.
41:04Mr. Roosevelt will be re-elected unless he makes some false step,
41:09involves us in a foreign war which is surely coming.
41:14Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?
41:19Unofficially, of course.
41:20Make it official, if you like.
41:21What is your nationality?
41:23I'm a drunkard.
41:25And that makes Rick a citizen of the world.
41:28I was born in New York City, if that'll help you any.
41:31I understand that you came here from Paris at the time of the occupation.
41:34There seems to be no secret about that.
41:36Are you one of those people who cannot imagine the Germans and their beloved Paris?
41:40It's not particularly my beloved Paris.
41:43Can you imagine us in London?
41:46When you get there, ask me.
41:48Diplomatist.
41:49How about New York?
41:51Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major,
41:53that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.
41:55Uh-huh.
41:56Who do you think will win the war?
41:58I have the slightest idea.
41:59Rick is completely neutral about everything,
42:02and that takes in the field of women, too.
42:04From the American point of view, in the heart of the 1930s depression,
42:09in a time of great moral confusion, when the world was upside down,
42:14when even a maverick like General Smedley Butler would become isolationist,
42:19where American business was not to be trusted by the workers,
42:23there was a gigantic unseen global struggle going on.
42:27It was essentially between the left and the right,
42:30between communism at one extreme and fascism at the other.
42:34Between these poles, America was a baby giant,
42:38a nascent empire going through birthing pains,
42:41confused, anxious, scared.
42:44What would America become?
42:47It could be argued, in hindsight,
42:49that the non-intervention of the United States
42:51in the Spanish Civil War,
42:53which Roosevelt later characterized as a grave mistake,
42:57set the course for a numb neutrality
43:00between fascism and communism
43:02that would seriously confuse the stakes for the American public.
43:07We've described the lurch towards fascism
43:10that would end with World War II,
43:12but the wrestling match with communism
43:14continued to haunt the American imagination for decades to come.
43:19In 1931, as U.S. unemployment approached 25%,
43:23desperate Americans stampeded Soviet offices looking for jobs.
43:28In the eyes of the poor, there was this great hope
43:31that the world would be a better place.
43:34The combination of a left-leaning Congress,
43:36an energized progressive populace,
43:38and a responsive president in Roosevelt
43:41now made possible the greatest period
43:43of social experimentation in American history.
43:48It's there to be seen in the passionate works
43:50of Dos Passos and Clifford Odets,
43:53in the iconic photos of Dorothea Lange,
43:56in the riveting message of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,
43:59written by Sidney Buckman,
44:01who was a Communist Party member,
44:04in the lyrics of Over the Rainbow and This Land Is Your Land,
44:08and in one of the greatest novels of that era,
44:11The Grapes of Wrath by Nobel Prize-winning John Steinbeck,
44:15in which can be found the dark optimism of the ordinary American.
44:20You sure taken a beating.
44:23I know.
44:24That's what makes us tough.
44:26Rich fellas come up, and they die,
44:29and their kids ain't no good, and they die out.
44:32But we keep a coming.
44:34We're the people that live.
44:36They can't wipe us out, they can't lick us.
44:39We'll go on forever, Pa, because we're the people.
44:55Hundreds of thousands of people
44:57either joined the Communist Party itself
44:59or passed through the popular front groups
45:02during the period of 1935-39
45:05when the Party appealed to progressive Democrats,
45:09including Roosevelt,
45:10to unite with the Soviet Union
45:12against fascist aggression.
45:14Not only did the Communists lead the fight against fascism,
45:17they provided the foot soldiers to build
45:20the great industrial unions of the CIO,
45:23and they battled for African-American civil rights
45:26decades ahead of their time.
45:28To many, they seemed to represent
45:30the moral conscience of the nation.
45:33Communist sympathizers included
45:36some of the nation's greatest writers,
45:38such as Sherwood Anderson, James Farrell,
45:41Richard Wright, Odets, Hughes, Hemingway,
45:46Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Lewis.
45:50Renowned writer and critic Edmund Wilson
45:53visited Russia, saying he felt as if he were at
45:56the moral top of the universe,
45:59where the light never really goes out.
46:01He wrote in 1932,
46:03to the writers and artists of my generation
46:06who had grown up in the big business era
46:08and had always resented its barbarism.
46:10These years were not depressing, but stimulating.
46:13One couldn't help being exhilarated
46:15at the sudden and unexpected collapse
46:17of the stupid gigantic fraud.
46:19Gave us a new sense of freedom,
46:22to find ourselves still carrying on
46:24while the bankers for a change
46:26were taking a beating.
46:28Was communism the answer for America?
46:32The popular perception of Russia
46:34was still a forbidding one.
46:36I have heard of the arrogant male
46:38in capitalistic society.
46:40It is having a superior earning power
46:42that makes you that way.
46:43A Russian! I love Russians!
46:47Comrade, I've been fascinated by your five-year plan
46:50for the last 15 years.
46:51Your type will soon be extinct.
46:57Henry Wallace, a symbol of the New Deal's
47:01caring capitalism, professed himself
47:03an admirer of Soviet social programs
47:06that offered its citizens universal health care,
47:09free public education, and subsidized housing.
47:12Roosevelt's Republican opponents, however,
47:15were horrified.
47:16Things grew worse when Wallace hit the cover
47:19of Time Magazine in 1938
47:22as Roosevelt's logical successor.
47:24Wallace, like many Americans,
47:26was focusing more on the Soviet Union's achievements
47:30than on the ugly and still largely hidden brutality
47:34of Stalin's repression,
47:36which he would later discover and renounce.
47:39What they saw in the USSR was a thriving state-run
47:44full employment economy.
47:46It was based starting in 1928 on a five-year plan
47:50that was building big, highly visible projects,
47:53dams, steel mills, canals,
47:56by unleashing science and technology.
47:59Progressives had long favored this kind of intelligent planning
48:03over the dog-eat-dog ethic of capitalism
48:06in which individuals made decisions
48:08based on maximizing individual profit.
48:13What a charming idea for Moscow
48:15to surprise us with a lady, comrade.
48:16If he had known,
48:17he would have greeted you with flowers.
48:19Don't make an issue of my womanhood.
48:21We're here for work, all of us.
48:23Let's not waste any time.
48:24Shall we go?
48:25Potter. Here, please.
48:27What do you want?
48:29May I have your bags, madame?
48:30Why?
48:31He's a porter.
48:32He wants to carry them.
48:33Why?
48:34Why should you carry other people's bags?
48:36Well, that's my business, madame.
48:38That's no business.
48:39That's social injustice.
48:40That depends on the tip.
48:42Allow the commerce.
48:43No, no thank you.
48:44How are things in Moscow?
48:46Very good.
48:47The last mass trials were a great success.
48:50There are going to be fewer but better Russians.
48:53In the late 1920s,
48:56former Bolshevik enforcer,
48:58Joseph Stalin,
48:59had risen to prominence
49:01through a calculated course of murder and ruthlessness.
49:04Some called him the Red Tsar.
49:07In another century,
49:08Stalin would simply have declared himself divine,
49:11as a king would,
49:12and rule without protest.
49:14In fact,
49:15he often behaved more like a traditional Tsar,
49:19using communism as an authoritative weapon to rule.
49:24Now,
49:25in Moscow,
49:26now,
49:27now,
49:28in Moscow,
49:29the people of the Russian nation
49:31are entitled.
49:32There are free hands.
49:36And now,
49:40the right sword,
49:44against those who are from the outside,
49:48for the great nation of the Russian country.
49:55During the 1930s, controversial reports often disbelieved by American progressives filtered out of the USSR, telling of famines and starvation, political trials and repression, secret police, brutal prisons and ideological orthodoxy.
50:15More than 13 million lives were terminated under Stalin's despotic resolve.
50:23Kulaks were slaughtered or allowed to starve for resisting forced collectivization of agriculture.
50:31Organized religion was stifled. Scientists were arrested.
50:35Military leaders loyal to the Russian Revolution of 1917 were purged in huge phony showcase trials.
50:43It was a backward police state having nothing in common with Karl Marx's vision.
50:49Stalin believed that the West would ultimately combine to try to crush revolutionary Russia as they had in 1918.
50:58But although he defended Soviet interests abroad, he was primarily concerned with maintaining control at home.
51:06His war was not with the world, but with his own people.
51:11Unlike Hitler, who was devoted mystically to his Nazi ideology, the highly paranoid Stalin was in comparison a poor student of the communism preached by Marx and Lenin and that of his implacable enemy who he exiled in 1929, Leon Trotsky.
51:29Trotsky felt that the Soviet revolution surrounded by hostile powers with its vast peasantry and small industrial base was way too backward economically and could not stand on its own.
51:42He called for a worldwide permanent revolution to realize the Bolsheviks' visionary transformation.
51:52But Stalin's response was socialism in one country, by which he meant the USSR.
51:58And when Stalin finally had the outspoken idealistic Trotsky silenced once and for all with a pickaxe in his skull by agents in Mexico City in 1940, few in the West understood that this murder signified the end truly, not the beginning.
52:16The end of a revolutionary movement towards international communism.
52:22Stalin, unlike Trotsky or Lenin, was finally no more a true communist than Mao Zedong would ultimately become in China.
52:31In pursuit of his nationalistic goal, Stalin encircled by hostile capitalist nations and fearing this new war with Germany concluded the non-aggression pact with Hitler after desperately trying to forge an alliance to stop Hitler.
52:47In hindsight, it was Stalin who was right about Germany, not the United States.
52:52He had to get ready for the bloodiest war in human history.
52:56The West painted Stalin as not only a monster, which he was, but added the fundamentally tragic misperception that Russia itself and Stalin's victims, the almost 200 million Soviet people, were indeed an equally implacable monster bent upon global conquest.
53:19But the facts reveal that during the 1930s, it turned out that it was the anti-communist fascists who were spreading the world revolution we so feared.
53:33Not Stalin, who was turning backward Russia into an industrial giant.
53:38And out of this confusion and suspicion grew the basis of a severe and grievous future misunderstanding between the West, particularly the United States, and the USSR, which would result, once were War II ended, in the equally dangerous Cold War.
53:56In the cross-currents of the 1930s, the US stumbled between isolationism and engagement, between hatred and fear of communist Russia, followed by friendship and alliance with it.
54:16But then the curtain of hatred and fear descended once again.
54:21And with the great brutality and soon-to-be-discovered horrors of World War II, a new pessimism was about to enter the human consciousness.
54:30With his hopes ground once more to dust under the boot of fascism, war, and big business, the common man would have to find his own one-eyed way to survive in the kingdom of the blind.
54:44How am I going to know about you, Tommy? Why they could kill you, and I'd never know.
54:59I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere, wherever you can look.
55:07Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.
55:14Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there.
55:19I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad.
55:22I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready.
55:29And when the people are eating the stuff they raise and living in the houses they build, I'll be there, too.
55:41I'll be there.
56:11You
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