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The American Christian Press and Pre-War Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939

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The American Christian Press and Pre-War Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 THE AMERICAN CHRISTIAN PRESS AND PRE-WAR HITLER'S GERMANY, 1933-1939 By FREDERICK IRA MURPHY A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FXORIDA 1970 UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA lllilllllllii 3 1262 08552 5631 Copyright by Frederick I. Murphy 1970 / ACKNOWLEDG^:ENTS In the preparation of this dissertation, a number of people and institutions have been helpful. I would like first to express my appreciation to the members of my committee. My first chairman, Arthur Thompson, gave me important advice in setting up the initial structure of my study, and my current chairman, David M. Chalmers, provided invaluable suggestions for tightening up the organization of the dissertation and refining its style. Thanks also are due to John K. Mahon, who read the complete draft of the paper and to Max Kele, who graciously read the second part dealing with the struggle of the German churches and offered helpful criticism. The library staffs at both the University of Florida and at Western Kentucky University have been most helpful and co-operative in securing the necessary inter-library loans of the periodicals which this dissertation used as basic source material. Particularly I would like to thank Miss Imogene Foster, reference librarian at Western Kentucky University, for the many hours that she spent during the research phase of the dissertation in tracking down and securing the copies of the journals that I needed. Finally, I express my deep appreciation and gratitude to my wife, Pat, for helping in the proof-reading of the final draft and most of all for her never-failing encouragement when at times the task of research seemed both overv/helming and endless. ill FORE'/ORD In the year 1933, there was a great uneasiness in the VJestern world. Its nations v^ere in the grip of economic depression. The shattering of their economies had shaken their confidence in polit- ical democracy and capitalism. Perhaps this v^as hardly surprising in the infant VJeimar Republic, but it seemed true also in the strong- hold and bastion of capitalism, the United States itself. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. has sketched in unforgettable words something of the feeling which gripped the nation as Inauguration Day approached: The fog of despair hung over the land. One out of every four American vrarkers lacked a job. Factories that had once darkened skies with smoke stood ghostly and silent, like extinct volcanoes. Families slept in tar-paper shacks and tin-lined caves and scavenged like dogs for food in the city dump. In October the New Yoi^k City Health Department had reported that over one-fifth of the pupdls in public schools were suffering from malnutrition. Thousands of vagabond children were roaming the land, wild, boys of the road. Hunger marchers, pinched and bitter, V'fere parading cold streets in New York and Chicago. In the countryside urjrest had already flared into violence. Farmers stopped milk trucks along Iowa roads and poured the milk into the ditch. Mobs halted mortgage sales, ran the men from the banks and insurance companies- out of to^m, intimidated courts and judges, demanded a moratorium on debts. When a sales company in Nebraska invaded a farm and seized tvjo trucks, the farmers in the Nevmian Grove district organized a posse, called it the "Red Army" and took the trucks back. In West Virginia, mining families, turned out of their homes, lived in tents along the road on pinto beans and black coffee. Elmer Davis reported that the leading citizens of one indus- trial city - it was Dayton, Ohio - had organized a com.mittee to plan how the city and the country around could function as an economic unit if the power lines were cut and the railroads stopped running. Over champagne and cigars, at the Everglades in Palm Beach, a banlcer declared the country on the verge of revolution; another guest, breaking the startled silence, advised the company to "step without the territorial boundaries of the United States of America with as much cash as you can carry just as soon as it is feasible for you " to get av.-ay." "There'll be a revolution curet" a Los Angeles banker said on a transcontinental train. "The farmers will rise up. So will labor. The Reds will run the country - or maybe the Fascists. Unless, of course, Roosevelt does something. If there v;as a failure of confidence in the United States which had emerged from the war relatively unscathed and victorious, such a crisis was even more expectable in Germany which not only had suffered heavily during the v/ar but also labored under the psycho- logical burden of being saddled with war guilt. In both nations leaders v/ere about to emerge v;ho would lead their people out of despair to'vard something resembling hope. Both had great oratorical pov;er. In the case of the American, this power was most evident in the national inti-macy of the fireside chat. In the case of the German, rhetorical genius was most apparent in an ability to stir mass assemblies of people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt v/as frankly pragmatic. As Eric Gold- man expresses it in Rendezvou s with Destiny , "Franklin Roosevelt was the most complete devotee of pla^dLng by ear the VJhite House had 2 ever knovmc" In a speech at Ogelthorpe University when he v.'as a front-running candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, Roosevelt had said, ''The country needs, and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands, bold, persistent experi- mentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails admit it frankly and try another. But above all try some- thing.""^ Adolf Hitler, on the other hand, seemed committed to an ideology, willing to follow v;herever it might lead, even to Gotterdammprung; . His words in I-lein Karnof set forth his goal: "Germany must inevitably win her rightful place on this earth if she is led and organized according to the . principles [of the value of race and person- ality ]."'• Both leaders were men around whom intense controversies raged. They led their nations dora very different paths, and ultimately those nations collided in the bloody arbitrament of vjar. If there v;as any one pojjit upon v/hich the American churches agreed in the early 1930s, it was that there should be no more v;ar. Heaven knew that there v;ere a host of other matters on v-fhich there v;as no such consensus, for Catholics and Protestants eyed one another with more than a little suspicion. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the anti-Catholic polemic of the election of 1928 certainly gave the Catholic no reason to think that the average Pi'otestant 2 wished him well. Within Protestantism itself, the fundamentalist- modernist controversy still continued, dividing Christians from one another, and in some instances dividing churches as well. At the same time, there were increasing attempts to bring Christians together. The Federal Council of Churches was a visible sign of this burgeoning ecumenism in the United States. Its world- wide expression was in the Faith and Order and Life and V/ork move- ments. During the 1930s, these organizations had important meetings at Edinburgh and Oxford, and by the eve of World War II had made provisional arrangements for coming together in a World Council of Churches. More immediately, all the churches v/ere concerned to some degree with the depression. This v.'as clearly evident in the religious journals. Some had to cut back on the number of their issues each year and use an inferior grade of paper, for which they apologized to their readers, f'requent articles lamented that there were more ministers available than the churches could afford to hire. The churches J just as much as the secular world, were ques- tioning the presuppositions of society. Particularly in doubt were the virtues of unfettered capitalism and nationalism. The debates and issues of the 19305 » vdth their concern over the problems of poverty and government responsibility, the plight of the migrant laborer and the Negro, and the restlessness of youth bear striking resemblance to those of the 1960s. At least part of the reason for this similarity may be traced back to events in Germany in the year of 1932-1933. For v.'hat v;as happening there v.'ould in time lead the world into a bloody war v;hich in all countries would push concern with domestic problems aside. The United States would not have the opportunity to give sustained attention to them until the 1960s. The rise of Hitler and the Nazi party has been the subject of countless books and articles, and it is not the intention of this dissertation to reconstruct these events. Rather it will attempt to study the varying ways in vjhich American Christians reacted to the Nazi challenge to the institutions and values of V/estern civilization and Christianity in the years prior to the beginning of the Second V/orld VJar. The study is divided into five parts. The first part is concerned with the general attitudes and reactions of American Christians to Nasi Germany.; It considers the v;ays in which they accounted for Hitler's rise to povrer, their general opinions of vii Nazism as an ideology, and suggests factors that might be responsible for various changes in their thinking. The first part also studies how the rise of Nazism affected the attitudes of American Christians toward Germany and the German people.
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