Critical 35(5) 629-635

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Es Kommt Die Nacht:1 , the , and the Question of Labor Authoritarianism during World War II

Mark P. Worrell SUNY Cortland, New York, USA

Abstract During World War II, Paul Massing, a research assistant at the Institute of Social Research (the famous ‘Frankfurt School’), helped conduct one of the most important research projects in the history of Marxist sociology. Following on the Institute’s earlier work on family and authority dynamics as well as the Weimar proletariat study, the wartime American labor anti-Semitism study resulted in a massive report that was never published. This article introduces Paul Massing, his role in the labor study, and some important findings regarding the effect of union affiliation and other key variables in regard to working-class authoritarianism.

Keywords anti-Semitism, Frankfurt School, labor, Paul Massing, solidarity

Paul W. Massing (1902–79) was an associate of the wartime Institute of Social Research (ISR), the author of Rehearsal for Destruction, and is perhaps best remembered by stu- dents of Cold War politics as the husband of , Soviet agent and star in the /Alger Hiss drama (Massing, 1987 [1951]; Worrell, 2006a). When Rehearsal was published in 1949 Massing had just ended his association with the ISR, where he had been employed for several years, and was embarking upon his new career as an academic sociologist at .2 Massing’s formal ties to the ‘Frankfurt School’ stretched back 20 years to when he was one of Carl Gruenberg’s students.3 After graduating in 1928 Paul briefly accepted a position at the Agrarian Institute in Moscow4 and, in the spring of 1931, returned to to teach and resist the Nazis as a member of the KPD. He was ultimately captured in an early morning house raid during August 1933 and sent to the Oranienberg concentration camp. Upon his release five months

Copyright © The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and Permissions: DOI: 10.1177/0896920509337610 http://www.sage.pub.co.uk/journals.permissions.nav 630 Critical Sociology 35(5) later he fled to the USA, was pulled into an orbit with the crowd, and pub- lished an account of his imprisonment under the pseudonym ‘Karl Billinger’ (see Worrell 2006b for a more comprehensive account of the above).5 Billinger’s Fatherland (1935) and Hitler Is No Fool (1939) are not much considered by intellectual historians or students of authoritarianism these days but both are valuable and, in the latter book, one can find a brilliant, embryonic analysis of the social psychology of Judeophobia that would figure in his still unsurpassed analysis of German political anti-Semitism a decade later. The ten-year run from 1934 to 1944 represented a kind of variegated limbo for Massing as he drifted from one venture to another: instructor at Commonwealth College in Mena, Arkansas; translator for Henri Barbusse; author and freelance writer for peri- odicals such as The Nation, New Republic, and New Masses; research assistant for both Solwyn Schapiro (City College) and Institute associate Karl Wittfogel; farm and board- ing house operator; and ‘prison guard’ doing undercover anti-Nazi work.6 In 1943, Massing was awarded two grants of $750 each from the Emergency Committee for Displaced Foreign Scholars and he began working for the ISR on the massive anti- Semitism project, the whole of which is summarized in the Institute’s unpublished memorandum ‘Studies in Anti-Semitism’ (ISR, 1944). One of the major planks in the anti-Semitism program was an ambitious study of American labor first proposed by Franz Neumann.7 Essentially, the venture ran concurrently with the well known Berkeley authoritarianism study that ultimately resulted in The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950). For the labor anti-Semitism study the Institute gathered data from major metropolitan areas including New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Their targets were CIO, AFL, and non-unionized workers engaged in what they called defense-related industries. They collected data on skilled, semi-skilled, and manual laborers. There were also data regarding professionals and office workers, i.e. non-factory employees, but their main interest lay in comparing CIO workers with non-CIO workers of various hues and stripes. It was assumed that the CIO represented the cutting edge of labor radicalism and anti-fascism in the USA at the time. The ISR wanted to know if, at the decisive moment, the rank and file would be capable of defending democracy against an authoritarian onslaught on the domestic front. The problem of anti-Semitism was central to the ISR’s perspective because it represented, in their words, the ‘spearhead of fascism’ or the advanced guard in a possible future confrontation between fascism and bourgeois democ- racy. In important respects, the American labor study was related to the Institute’s earlier analysis of the Weimar proletariat.8 The Institute gathered data from 967 separate people but the bulk of the research was based upon what they termed ‘screened’ interviews of 566 workers conducted by 270 vol- unteer interviewers. A screened interview was one where the interviewers were operating ‘under cover’ as participant observers. Interviewers came from the shop floors themselves and were acquainted with the interviewees. They memorized a battery of questions and then engaged in open-ended interviews (and follow-up interviews) with other workers. Workers from 26 AFL and CIO unions were selected for this study – although non-union Worrell: Es kommt die Nacht 631 workers were also interviewed (the sample composition, in terms of unionization, was AFL = 28.8%, CIO = 38.5%; non-Union = 29.5%). Interviewees were initially asked to memorize 10 ‘basic’ and four ‘optional’ questions. But the technical requirements necessitated simplification and the final questionnaire was as follows: 1) Do Jewish people act and feel different from others? What do people say about them? 2) Can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew? How? 3) Do you mind working with on the job? Why? Have you ever worked with any? (a) How about working with Negroes (not posed to black workers)? 4) Did you know any Jews before you started in your first job? At school or in your home town? What were they like? 5) How do you feel about what the Nazis did to the Jews in ? 6) Are there people in this country who would like to see feelings against the Jews grow? What groups? Why do they want it? 7) Do people think the Jews are doing their share in the war effort? What do you think? Close to 4500 questionnaires were distributed in one way or another over the life of the project. Approximately one half of the questionnaires distributed to the target sample were ultimately completed. In survey research, completion rates of 80–85% are typically expected. The reasons for the Institute’s low completion rate were due to a number of fac- tors including the unwillingness of union officers and management to allow ‘horrifying’ and ‘shocking’ responses to be returned to the field workers. Had the Institute been able to incorporate the unreturned questionnaires the gloomy interpretations may have been weighted further to the anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi end of the spectrum.9 The ISR categorized workers into eight basic types: Type A: Exterminatory (10.6%): ‘Actively violent, vicious anti-Semites who openly favor the extermination of all Jews.’ Type B: Intense Hatred (10.2%): ‘Definitely and unwaveringly hostile toward Jews but avoid openly advocating the extermination of Jews or would prefer if Nazis exterminated Jews on a smaller scale or just deported them en masse. Taken together, Type A and B constitute beliefs that are essentially fascist or “Nazi-like”. Workers in the B category were glad that Jews were killed by the Nazi regime but hesitated to recommend that the same methods of dealing with Jews should be adopted in the U.S.’ Type C: Inconsistently Hostile (3.7%): ‘Outspokenly hostile to Jews; desire to see Jews regu- lated or controlled but inconsistent in this attitude; exhibit an inner conflict over how Jews should be controlled and regulated. Prone to rhetorical violence more than actual violence. Potentially an easy convert to fascism within the right social conditions.’ Type D: Intolerant (6.2%): ‘Wants to avoid Jews, get away from them, and to see legisla- tive action taken to separate Jews from everyone else. Discrimination against Jews should be organized and enforced.’ 632 Critical Sociology 35(5)

Types A + B (20.8%) represented pro-fascist or Nazi-like sentiments; Types C+D (9.9%) represented sharply anti-Jewish feelings; Types A + B + C + D comprised 30.7% of the sample. The remainder of the sample fell into categories E – H: Type E: Ambivalent (19.1%): ‘These people can’t make up their mind. While they are potentially anti-Semitic, they can go both ways in terms of their tolerance of Jews. This type feels that Jews have too much power or money, and that something ought to be done about it, but they don’t know what should be done. They are undecided.’ Type F: Consciously Tolerant/Emotionally Inconsistent (19.3%): ‘These types are opposed to anti-Semitism at the level of humanitarian ideals and distaste for injustice. Type F may be mildly intolerant of Jews but are opposed to it at the level of “conscious intentions” so they try hard to control any prejudice they may havez at the level of emotions.’ Type G: Anti-discriminatory/Tolerant (10.8%): ‘These people do not harbor any dislike of Jews, are opposed to discrimination but do criticize some character traits commonly ascribed to Jews. Their criticism is based on reasoning if not in facts.’ Type H: Absolutely not anti-Semitic (20.1%): ‘No resentment, no criticism whatso- ever.’ Including the ‘ambivalent’ workers, those that harbored milder forms of anti-Jewish prejudice but who could potentially be swayed toward more extreme positions, the number of affected workers was exactly 50%. Naturally, there were significant differences between workers in, for example, the A and D categories. Nonetheless, in practical terms, ‘D’ workers may have been less hostile to Jews but clearly supported some measures adopted by Nazis and could be counted on to lend passive support for totalitarian measures against Jews. However, this raises the problem of how to classify workers into categories. How did the Institute ‘label’ a worker as anti-Semitic, ambiv- alent, or non-anti-Semitic? How did the researchers deal with the complexity of gradation? As Gurland stated, ‘classification of different types of attitudes requires care and caution’.

Generally speaking, it could be carried through on the basis of different criteria. People can be classified according to their opinions on Jews, or according to their emotional propensity to like or dislike Jews, or according to the action they want taken with respect to Jews.

For the purposes of a general survey of our sample, it seemed advisable to combine these three criteria for classifying the workers interviewed. But how should such a combination be designed to fit statistical requirements?

Such were the difficulties, however, their novel method of ‘screened’ interviewing allowed for the interviewees to ‘state, develop and illustrate their opinions’ rather than conform to a pre-selected and ‘rigid pattern of single “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe-some” answers to which the analyst could assign score values’ (ISR, 1945: 161). The resulting report was a semi-polished, four-volume behemoth authored primarily by Arkady Gurland and Massing (they were responsible for exactly 75% of the report) Worrell: Es kommt die Nacht 633 with smaller sections written by Leo Lowenthal and .10 The effort was politically out of step with the goals of the Horkheimer Circle (Worrell, 2006a) and it was ultimately abandoned (Amidon and Worrell, 2008; Worrell, 2008a). Flaws aside, the study was a monument of critical sociology and, arguably, among the best work the Institute ever engaged in. At the conclusion of the war, the problem of working-class racism, political attitudes, and the dialectics of class hegemony were richly explored but, in my estimation, the labor anti-Semitism study was the single most important piece of research in, perhaps, the history of 20th century Marxist sociology. Paul Massing’s piece, ‘Union Influence on Worker Anti-Semitism during World War II’ (in this issue), represents a fragment from Anti-Semitism Among American Labor, 1944–45: Report on a Research Project conducted by the Institute of Social Research () in 1944–1945. Specifically, this piece is derived from Volume Three, Part Three (‘War, Fascism, and Propaganda’), Chapter 12 (‘Propaganda, Politics, and the Worker’), Part Six (‘Union Influence’) (ISR, 1944–45: 878–900). Here we find rare data pertaining to worker conceptions of class and authority, of union education, key variables such as age, gender, affiliation, duration of membership, etc. Elsewhere in the report Gurland and Massing indicated that while their sample of the American working class possessed virtually no capacity at all for genuine radical thought (historical materialism was nowhere to be found) and was, on the contrary, deeply afflicted by authoritarianism, it was also their contention that the trend line was toward democracy, however limited. The labor movement, they postulated, would continue to reflect growing participation by women and younger workers with higher levels of education. And the ‘amazingly liberal’ attitudes held by white-collar workers pointed toward significant differences between American workers and their European counterparts. Moreover, excluding older male immigrants of recent arrival in the USA, even though many workers in the Institute’s sample harbored anti-Semitic tendencies, their thoughts and feelings were not identical with key themes found in European Judeophobia typical since the early 1870s.11 Almost completely absent, for example, was any reference to Jews as sexual deviants. The future may not have been exactly ‘bright’ but it was also not the moral and political abyss that Horkheimer believed it would be. The cautious optimism exhibited by Gurland and Massing was vindicated, at least in good measure, by the realities of late Fordist America. Toward the end of 1943 Massing perceived a debilitating darkness enveloping the west – a future confrontation between fascism and democracy on American soil was felt to be, if not inevitable, a very real possibility. By 1945, though, Massing and Gurland arrived at a different conclusion based on solid research and sound interpretations: workers may be plagued by authoritarianism but the phenomenon was dynamic and could be diminished with education, integration, and democratic practices.

Notes

1 In a 15 November 1943 letter to his friend Joseph Freeman, Paul Massing wrote: ‘The time of gesundbeten is gone and what is not done now may never be done. Es kommt die Nacht, da niemand wirken kann.’ 634 Critical Sociology 35(5)

2 Massing worked at the ISR as research associate until July or August 1947 when his funding finally ran out. The American Jewish Committee and the Institute kicked in some money to keep him at the ISR until July 1948 so that he could finish his book. In 1948 Paul began teaching at Rutgers as an adjunct and, later, as a permanent member of the faculty. During the summer of 1949 Massing also worked part-time for the Bureau of Applied Social Research (Lazarsfeld’s organization) at Columbia University. At Rutgers Massing taught political sociology, social movements, and strati- fication and upon retiring in 1967 he and his second wife, Herta Herzog, moved to his childhood home, , Germany. He died of Parkinson’s disease in 1979 (Fischer, 1979). 3 In 1923, after a bike tour of Italy and southern Germany, Massing enrolled in night courses at the University of , spending his days as an apprentice in a rubber tire factory. In 1924 he moved to Frankfurt and earned his first degrees in 1925 and 1926. In 1927 he enrolled at the Sorbonne and remained there until the spring of 1928 at which time he returned to Frankfurt to complete his studies. 4 The International Agrarian Institute had ties to the Frankfurt School and Massing’s stint in may have overlapped with that of Henryk Grossman who was also a student of Gruenberg’s and who had held a position within the Institute at Frankfurt since 1924 (Kuhn, 2007: 111, 140). 5 seems to have been a major conduit between some Institute affiliates and the extended New Masses network in the middle of the 1930s. Not only did he connect Hede and Paul with the front magazine and its resources but it was apparently also one of the first places Wittfogel stopped upon arrival in the USA. According to Wittfogel’s 1951 testimony in front of the HUAC it was Gumperz who was his liaison. For more on Gumperz and his important role in relocating the Institute to Columbia University see Wheatland (2004a, 2004b). 6 Massing worked for Major Sanford Griffiths, the 20th Century Fund, and the American Jewish Committee for eight weeks during 1942 investigating subversive (Nazi, fascist) organizations in America. He was embedded under the alias of ‘Paul Hoffmann’ as an under-cover security guard and investigated enemy aliens interned at Ellis Island. ‘Hoffmann’ was one of roughly 70 other aliases he used over the years including Paul Evans (he borrowed ‘Evans’ from his friend Joe Freeman who used this moniker during his time as an Amtorg employee); Massing also used the names Paul Wenck, Paul Massik, Paul Gumperz, and Payton Winkle, among others. His wife, Hede (they were married in 1936), used over 150 aliases during the same period. During the war Massing also served as a consultant to the Survey of Foreign Experts in New York and the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), Research and Analysis Department on problems of German agriculture and rural sociology. 7 Neumann was the ‘father’ of the labor study but was no longer a paid associate at the time of its execution (see Wiggershaus, 1994 for more information on Neumann’s activities at this time). 8 For more on the ISR’s Weimar worker project see Smith (1998). For a panoramic view of how the Institute’s wartime studies fit into the development and trajectory of authoritarianism research see Worrell (1998, 2008a). 9 Only limited space can be devoted, here, to a discussion of the ISR’s data and methods. The Institute’s own data and methods section, written by Massing, consisted of roughly 80 pages of the fourth volume. For a more complete analysis see Worrell (2006c, 2008a, 2008b). 10 Pollock’s chapters dealt with the thinking of union leaders while Lowenthal’s very interesting contribu- tions were published years later in a completely rewritten form (1987). A number of reasons have been put forth as to why the labor report was abandoned, most of which are covered by either Jay’s seminal study (1996 [1973]) or the monumental history by Wiggershaus (1994). I stray from received wisdom in that I believe political conflict between the Horkheimer circle and the fringe members (the ‘Other Frankfurt School’) was decisive in suppressing the labor study findings (Worrell 2006a). 11 Smith (1997) does a good job summarizing the nature of post-1870 anti-Semitism in Europe. Worrell: Es kommt die Nacht 635

References

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For correspondence: Mark P. Worrell, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, SUNY Cortland, Moffett Center, 2122, Box 2000, Cortland, NY 13045, USA. Email: [email protected]