Part 1
James
D. Mooney thrust his arm diagonally, watching its reflection in his
hotel suite mirror. Not quite right. He tried once again. Still not
right. Was it too stiff? Too slanted? Should his palm stretch
perpendicular to the ceiling; should his arm bend at a severe angle? Or
should the entire limb extend straight from shoulder to fingertips?
Should his Sieg Heil project enthusiasm or declare obedience? Never
mind, it was afternoon. Time to go see Hitler.
Just the day before, May 1, 1934, under a brilliant,
cloudless sky, Mooney, president of the General Motors Overseas
Corporation, climbed into his automobile and drove toward Tempelhof
Field at the outskirts of Berlin to attend yet another hypnotic Nazi
extravaganza. This one was the annual "May Day" festival.
Tempelhof Field was a sprawling, oblong-shaped
airfield. But for May Day, the immense site was converted into parade
grounds. Security was more than tense, it was paranoid. All cars
entering the area were meticulously inspected for anti-Hitler pamphlets
or other contraband. But not Mooney´s. The Fuhrer´s office had sent
over a special windshield tag that granted the General Motors´ chief
carte blanche to any area of Tempelhof. Mooney would be Hitler´s
special guest.
As Mooney arrived at the airfield, about 3:30 in the
afternoon, the spectacle dazzled him. Sweeping swastika banners
stretching 33 feet wide and soaring 150 feet into the air fluttered
from 43-ton steel towers. Each tower was anchored in 13 feet of
concrete to resist the winds as steadfastly as the Third Reich resisted
all efforts to moderate its program of rearmament and oppression.
Thousands of other Nazi flags fluttered across the
grounds as dense column after column of Nazis, marching shoulder to
shoulder in syncopation, flowed into rigid formation. Each of the 13
parade columns boasted between 30,000 and 90,000 storm troopers, army
divisions, citizen brigades and blond-blue Hitler Youth enrollees.
Finally, after four hours, the tightly packed assemblage totaled about
2 million marchers and attendees.
Hitler eventually arrived in an open-air automobile
that cruised up and down the field amid the sea of devotees.
Accompanied by cadres of SS guards, Hitler was ushered to the stage,
stopping first to pat the head of a smiling boy. This would be yet
another grandiose spectacle of Fuhrer-worship so emblematic of the Nazi
regime.
When ready, Hitler launched into one of his
enthralling speeches, made all the more mesmerizing by 142 loudspeakers
sprinkled throughout the grounds. As the Fuhrer demanded hard work and
discipline, and enunciated his vision of National Socialist destiny,
the crisp sound of his voice traveled across an audience so vast that
it took a moment or two for his words to reach the outer perimeter of
the throng. Hence, the thunderous applause that greeted Hitler´s
remarks arrived sequentially, creating an aural effect of continuous,
overlapping waves of adulation.
General Motors World, the company house organ,
covered the May Day event glowingly in a several-page cover story,
stressing Hitler´s boundless affinity for children. "By nine, the
streets were full of people waiting to see Herr Hitler go meet the
children," the publication reported.
The next day, May 2, 1934, after practicing his Sieg
Heil in front of a mirror, Mooney and two other senior executives from
General Motors and its German division, Adam Opel A.G., went to meet
Hitler in his Chancellery office. Waiting with Hitler would be Nazi
Party stalwart Joachim von Ribbentrop, who would later become foreign
minister, and Reich economic adviser Wilhelm Keppler.
As Mooney traversed the long approach to Hitler´s
desk, he began to pump his arm in a stern-faced Sieg Heil. But the
Fuhrer surprised him by getting up from his desk and meeting Mooney
halfway, not with a salute but a businesslike handshake.
This was, after all, a meeting about business — one
of many contacts between the Nazis and GM officials that are
spotlighted in this multipart JTA investigation that scoured and
re-examined thousands of pages of little-known and restricted Nazi-era
and New Deal-era documents.
This documentation and other evidence reveals that
GM and Opel were eager, willing and indispensable cogs in the Third
Reich´s rearmament juggernaut, a rearmament that, as many feared during
the 1930s would enable Hitler to conquer Europe and destroy millions of
lives. The documentation also reveals that while General Motors was
mobilizing the Third Reich and cooperating within Germany with Hitler´s
Nazi revolution and economic recovery, GM and its president, Alfred P.
Sloan, were undermining the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt and
undermining America´s electric mass transit, and in doing so were
helping addict the United States to oil.
For GM´s part, the company has repeatedly declined
to comment when approached by this reporter. It has also steadfastly
denied for decades — even in the halls of Congress — that it actively
assisted the Nazi war effort or that it simultaneously subverted mass
transit in the United States. It has also argued that its subsidiary
was seized by the Reich during the war. The company even sponsored an
eminent historian to investigate, and he later in his own book disputed
many earlier findings about GM´s complicity with the Nazis. In that
book, he concluded that assertions that GM had collaborated with the
Nazis even after the United States and Germany were at war "have proved
groundless."
A fascination with four wheels
Hitler knew that the biggest auto and truck
manufacturer in Germany was not Daimler or any other German carmaker.
The biggest automotive manufacturer in Germany — indeed in all of
Europe — was General Motors, which since 1929 had owned and operated
the long-time German firm Opel. GM´s Opel, infused with millions in GM
cash and assembly-line know-how, produced some 40 percent of the
vehicles in Germany and about 65 percent of its exports. Indeed, Opel
dominated Germany´s auto industry.
Impressive production statistics aside, the Fuhrer
was fascinated with every aspect of the automobile, its history, its
inherent liberating appeal and, of course, its application as a weapon
of war. While German automotive engineers were famous for their
engineering innovations, the lack of ready petroleum supplies and gas
stations in Germany, coupled with the nation´s massive depression
unemployment, kept autos out of reach for the common man in Nazi
Germany. In 1928, just before the Depression hit, one in five Americans
owned a car, while in Germany, ownership was one in 134.
In fact, just two months before Mooney´s meeting at
the Chancellery, Hitler had commented at the Berlin International
Automobile and Motor Cycle Show: "It can only be said with profound
sadness that, in the present age of civilization, the ordinary
hard-working citizen is still unable to afford a car, a means of
up-to-date transport and a source of enjoyment in the leisure hours."
Even if few Germans could afford cars — GM or
otherwise — the company did provide many in the Third Reich with jobs.
Hitler was keenly aware that GM, unlike German carmakers, used mass
production techniques pioneered in Detroit, so-called "Fordism" or
"American production."
As the May 2, 1934, Chancellery meeting progressed,
Hitler thanked Mooney and GM for being a major employer — some 17,000
jobs — in a Germany where Nazi success hinged on re-employment.
Moreover, since Opel was responsible for some 65 percent of auto
exports, the company also earned the foreign currency the Reich
desperately needed to purchase raw materials for re-employment as well
as for the regime´s crash rearmament program. Now, as Hitler embarked
on a massive, threatening rearmament program, GM was in a position to
make Germany´s military a powerful, modern and motorized marvel.
The quest for the ´people´s car´
During the meeting with Mooney, Hitler estimated
that if Germany were to emulate American ratios, the Reich should
possess some 12 million cars. But, Hitler added, 3 million cars was a
more realistic target under the circumstances. Even this would be a
vast improvement over the 104,000 vehicles manufactured in Germany in
1932.
Mooney told Hitler that GM was willing to mass
produce a cheap car, costing just 1,400 marks, with the mass appeal of
Henry Ford´s Model T, if the Nazi regime could guarantee 100,000 car
sales annually, issue a decree limiting dealer commissions and control
the price of raw materials. Many automotive concerns were vying for the
chance to build Hitler´s dream, a people´s car or "volkswagen," but GM
was convinced it alone possessed the proven production know-how. An
excited Hitler showered his GM guests with many questions.
Would the cost of garaging a car be prohibitive for
the average man? Could vehicles parked outdoors be damaged by the
elements? Mooney answered that the same vehicle built to withstand
wind, dust and rain at 40 mph to 60 mph could stand up to overnight
exposure outdoors. To promote automobile ownership Hitler even promised
something as trivial as legalized street parking.
Of course, Hitler had already committed the Reich to
expedite completion of the world´s first transnational network of auto
highways, the Autobahn. Now, to further promote motorcar proliferation,
Hitler suggested to Mooney that the German government could also reduce
gasoline prices and gasoline taxes. Hitler even asked if Opel could
advise him how to prudently reduce car insurance rates, thus lowering
overall operating costs for average Germans.
The conference in Hitler´s Chancellery office, originally scheduled for a quarter hour, stretched to 90 minutes.
The next morning, May 3, 1934, an excited Hitler
told Keppler, "I have been thinking all night about the many things
that these Opel men told me." He instructed Keppler, "Get in touch with
them before they leave Berlin." Hitler wanted to know still more.
Mooney spent hours later that day ensconced in his hotel suite
composing written answers to the Fuhrer´s many additional questions.
Clearly, Hitler saw the mass adoption of autos as
part of Germany´s great destiny. No wonder Mooney and GM were
optimistic about the prospects for a strategic relationship with Nazi
Germany.
A few weeks after the prolonged Chancellery session,
the company publication, General Motors World, effusively recounted the
meeting, proclaiming, "Hitler is a strong man, well fitted to lead the
German people out of their former economic distress… He is leading
them, not by force or fear, but by intelligent planning and execution
of fundamentally sound principles of government."
Ironically, Hitler´s famous inability to follow up
on ideas caused GM officials to wonder if they had been too revealing
in their company publication´s coverage of the Chancellery meeting.
Copies of General Motors World were seized by Opel company officials
before they could circulate in Germany. Mooney later declared he would
do nothing to make Adolf Hitler angry.
For Mooney, and for Germany´s branch of GM, the
relationship with the Third Reich was first and foremost about making
money — billions in 21st century dollars — off the Nazi desire to
re-arm even though the world expected that Germany would plunge Europe
and America into a devastating war.
Typical of news coverage of events at the time was
an article in the March 26, 1933, edition of The New York Times,
headlined "Hitler a Menace."
The article, quoting former Princeton University
President John Hibben, echoed the war fear spreading across both sides
of the Atlantic. "Adolf Hitler is a menace to the world´s peace, and if
his policies bring war to Europe, the United States cannot escape
participating," the article opened. This was one of dozens of such
articles that ran in American newspapers of the day, complemented by
continuous radio and newsreel coverage in the same vein.
However, the commanding, decision-making force at
the carmaker was not Mooney, GM´s man in Nazi Germany, but rather the
company´s cold and calculating president Alfred P. Sloan, who operated
out of corporate headquarters in Detroit and New York.
Who was Sloan?
Mr. Big
Sloan lived for bigness. Slender and natty, attired
in the latest collars and ties, Sloan commonly wore spats, even to the
White House. He often out-dressed his former GM boss, billionaire
Pierre du Pont. An electrical engineer by training, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology graduate was a strategic thinker who was as
driven by a compulsion to grow his company as he was compelled to
breathe oxygen.
"Deliberately to stop growing is to suffocate,"
Sloan wrote in his 1964 autobiography about his years at GM. "We do
things in a big way in the United States. I have always believed in
planning big, and I have always discovered after the fact that, if
anything, we didn´t plan big enough. I put no ceiling on progress."
For Sloan, motorizing the fascist regime that was
expected to wage a bloody war in Europe was the next big thing and a
spigot of limitless profits for GM. But unlike many commercial
collaborators with the Nazis who were driven strictly by the icy quest
for profits, Sloan also harbored a political motivation. Sloan despised
the emerging American way of life being crafted by President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. Sloan hated Roosevelt´s New Deal, and admired the
strength, irrepressible determination and sheer magnitude of Hitler´s
vision.
For Sloan, the New Deal — with its Social Security
program, government regulation and support for labor unions — clanged
an unmistakable death knell for an America made great by great
corporations guided by great corporate leaders.
In a 1934 letter to Roosevelt´s Industrial Advisory
Board, Sloan complained bitterly that the New Deal was attempting to
change the rules of business so "government and not industry [shall]
constitute the final authority." In Sloan´s view, GM was bigger than
mere governments, and its corporate executives were vastly more suited
to decision-making than "politicians" and bureaucrats who he felt were
profoundly unqualified to run the country. Government officials, Sloan
believed, merely catered to voters and prospered from backroom deals.
Sloan´s disdain for the American government went
beyond ordinary political dissent. The GM chief so hated the president
and his administration that he co-founded a virulently anti-Roosevelt
organization, and donated to at least one other Roosevelt-bashing
group. Moreover, Sloan actually pressured GM executives not to serve in
government positions, although many disregarded his advice and loyally
joined the government´s push for war preparedness.
At one point, Sloan´s senior officials at GM even
threatened to launch a deliberate business slowdown to sabotage the
administration´s recovery plan, according to papers unearthed by one
historian. At the same time, Sloan and GM did not fail to express
admiration for the stellar accomplishments of the Third Reich, and went
the extra mile to advance German economic growth.
Indeed, Sloan felt that GM could — and should —
create its own foreign policy, and back the Hitler regime even as
America recoiled from it. "Industry must assume the role of enlightened
industrial statesmanship," Sloan declared in an April 1936 quarterly
report to GM stockholders. "It can no longer confine its
responsibilities to the mere physical production and distribution of
goods and services. It must aggressively move forward and attune its
thinking and its policies toward advancing the interest of the
community at large, from which it receives a most valuable franchise."
In ramping up auto production in the Nazi Reich,
Sloan understood completely that he was not just manufacturing
vehicles. Sloan and Hitler both knew that GM, by creating wealth and
shrinking unemployment, was helping to prop up the Hitler regime.
When explaining his ideas of mass production to Opel
car dealers, Sloan proudly declared what the enterprise would mean:
"The motor car contributes more to the wealth of the United States than
agriculture. The automobile industry is a wealth-creating industry."
What was true in America would become true in Germany. Ironically, GM
chose the alliance with Hitler even though doing so threatened to
imperil GM at home. Just days after Hitler came to power on Jan. 30,
1933, a worldwide anti-Nazi boycott erupted, led by the American Jewish
Congress, the Jewish War Veterans and a coalition of anti-fascist,
pro-labor, interfaith and American patriotic groups. Their objective
was to fracture the German economy, not resurrect it.
The anti-Nazi protesters vowed not only to boycott
German goods, but to picket and cross-boycott any American companies
doing business with Germany. In the beginning, few understood that in
boycotting Opel of Germany, they were actually boycotting GM of
Detroit. Effectively, they were one and the same.
Part 2
Hitler’s Carmaker: As the Nazis Amassed Power, What Did GM Know and When?
By
the spring of 1933, the world was beginning to learn about the
lawlessness and savagery of the Nazi regime, and the Reich’s
determination to crush its Jewish community and threaten its neighbors.
On March 27, 1933, a million protesters jammed Madison Square Garden in
New York, and millions more around the world joined in a coordinated
show of protest against Nazi brutality. By May 10, 1933, Nazi-banned
books were being torched in public bonfires across Germany. The
corporate library at General Motors’ Opel in Germany was purged, as
well, of Jewish-authored publications and other undesirable literature.
Beginning in the late spring of 1933, concentration camps such as Dachau were generating headlines reporting great brutality.
By June 1933, Jews everywhere in Germany were being
banned from the professional, economic and cultural life of the
country. As state-designated pariahs, they were forbidden to remain
members of the German Automobile Association, the popular organization
for the general German motorist. Hitler’s anti-Semitic demagoguery and
the daily, semi-official, violent attacks against Jews were discussed
in the American media almost daily.
GM’s president Alfred P. Sloan knew what was
happening in Germany. Sloan and GM officials knew also that Hitler’s
regime was expected to wage war from the outset. Headlines, radio
broadcasts and newsreels made that fact apparent. America, it was
feared, would once again be pulled in.
Nonetheless, GM and Germany began a strategic
business relationship. That relationship is largely the focus of a JTA
investigative series that re-examines the company’s conduct on both
sides of the Atlantic before, during and immediately after World War
II. GM has declined comment for this story. The company has steadfastly
denied for decades that it actively assisted the Nazi war effort.
Unleashing the Blitzkrieg
Opel became an essential element of the German
rearmament and modernization Hitler required to subjugate Europe. To
accomplish that, Germany needed to rise above the horse-drawn divisions
it deployed in World War I. It needed to motorize, to “blitz,” that is,
to attack with lightning speed. Germany would later unleash a
Blitzkrieg, a lightning war. Opel built the three-ton truck named
“Blitz” — to support the German military. The Blitz truck became the
mainstay of the Blitzkrieg.
Quickly, Sloan and James D. Mooney, GM’s overseas
chief, realized that the Reich military machine was in fact the
corporation’s best customer in Germany. Sales to the army yielded a
greater per truck profit than civilian sales — a hefty 40 percent more.
So GM preferred supplying the military, which never ceased its
preparations to wage war against Europe.
In 1935, GM agreed to locate a new factory at
Brandenburg, where it would be geographically less vulnerable to feared
aerial bombardment by allied forces. In 1937, almost 17 percent of
Opel’s Blitz trucks were sold directly to the Nazi military.
That military sales figure was increased to 29
percent in 1938 — totaling some 6,000 Blitz trucks that year alone. The
Wehrmacht, the German military, soon became Opel’s No. 1 customer by
far. Other important customers included major industries associated
with the Hitler war machine.
Expanding its German workforce from 17,000 in 1934
to 27,000 in 1938 also made GM one of Germany’s leading employers.
Unquestionably, GM’s Opel became an integral facet of Hitler’s Reich.
More than just an efficient manufacturer, Opel
openly embraced the bizarre philosophy that powered the Nazi
military-industrial complex. The German company participated in cultic
Fuhrer worship as a part of its daily corporate ethic. After all, until
GM purchased Opel in 1929 for $33.3 million, or about one-third of GM’s
after-tax profit that year, Opel was an established carmaker with a
respected German persona. The Opel family included several prominent
Nazi Party members. This identity appealed to rank-and-file Nazis who
condemned anything foreign-owned or foreign-made.
For all these reasons, during the Hitler years,
Sloan and Mooney both made efforts to obscure Opel’s American ownership
and control. As a result, the average storm trooper, Nazi Party member
or German motorist accepted the company’s cars and trucks as the
product of a purely Aryan firm that was working toward Hitler’s great
destiny: “Deutschland uber alles.”
The masquerade
Opel became an early patron of the National
Socialist Motor Corps, a rabid Nazi Party paramilitary auxiliary.
Ironically, most of the members of Corps were not drivers, but Germans
seeking to learn how to drive to increase national readiness. Opel
employees were encouraged to maintain membership in the Motor Corps.
Furthermore, Opel cars and trucks were loaned without charge to the
local storm trooper contingents stationed near company headquarters at
Russelsheim, Germany. As brownshirt thugs went about their business of
intimidation and extortion, they often came and went in vehicles
bearing prominent Opel advertisements, proud automobile sponsor of the
storm troopers.
The Opel company publication, Der Opel Geist, or The
Opel Spirit, became just another propagandistic tool of Fuhrer worship,
edited with the help of Nazi officials. Hitler was frequently given
credit in the publication for Opel’s achievements, and was frequently
depicted in Der Opel Geist portraits as a fatherly or stately figure.
Hitler’s voice regularly echoed through the
cavernous Opel complex. His hate speeches and pep rallies were
routinely piped into the factory premises to inspire the workers. Great
swastika-bedecked company events were commonplace, as Nazi gauleiters,
or regional party leaders, and other party officials spurred gathered
employees to work hard for the Fuhrer and his Thousand-Year Reich. Opel
contributed large cash donations to all the right Nazi Party
activities. For example, the company gave local storm troopers 75,000
reichsmarks to construct the gauleiter’s new office headquarters.
In the process, Opel became more than a mere
carmaker. It became a stalwart of the Nazi community. Working hard and
meeting exhausting production quotas were national duties. Employees
who protested the intense working conditions, even if members of the
Nazi Party, were sometimes visited by the Gestapo. SS officers worked
as internal security throughout the plant. Order was kept.
Of course, GM’s subsidiary vigorously joined the
anti-Jewish movement required of leading businesses serving the Reich.
Jewish employees and suppliers became verboten. Established dealers
with Jewish blood were terminated, including one of the largest serving
the Frankfurt region. Even long-time executives were discharged if
Jewish descent was detected. Those lower-level managers with Jewish
wives or parentage who remained with the company did so stealthily,
hiding and denying their background.
To conceal American ownership and reinforce the
masquerade that Opel stood as a purely Aryan enterprise, Sloan and
Mooney, beginning in 1934, concocted the concept of a “Directorate,”
comprised of prominent German personalities, including several with
Nazi Party membership. This created what GM officials variously termed
a “camouflage” or “a false facade” of local management. But the
decisions were made in America. GM as the sole stockholder controlled
Opel’s board and the corporate votes.
Among the decisions made in America beginning in
about 1935 was the one transferring to Germany the technology to
produce the modern gasoline additive tetraethyl lead, commonly called
“ethyl,” or leaded gasoline. This allowed the Reich to boost octane
that provided better automotive performance by eliminating disruptive
engine pings and jolts. Better performance meant a faster and more
mobile fighting force — just what the Reich would ultimately need for
its swift and mobile Blitzkrieg.
As early as 1934, however, America’s War Department
was apprehensive about the transfer of such proprietary chemical
processes. In late December 1934, as GM was considering building leaded
gasoline plants for Hitler, DuPont Company board director Irenee du
Pont wrote to Sloan: “Of course, we in the DuPont Company have always
recognized the propriety and desirability of closely cooperating with
the War Department of the United States. …In any case, I know that word
has gone to the War Department and have the impression that they would
be adverse to disclosure of knowledge which would aid Germany in
preparing that chemical.” The profits were simply not worth it, argued
du Pont.
Sloan had already bluntly told du Pont, “I do not
agree with your reasoning to this question.” Days later, Sloan appended
that GM’s commercial rights were “far more fundamental… than the
question of making a little money out of lead in Germany.”
GM moved quickly — in conjunction with its close
ally Standard Oil. Each company took a one-quarter share of the Reich
ethyl operation, while I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical
conglomerate, controlled the remaining 50 percent.
The plants were built. The Americans supplied the
technical know-how. Captured German records reviewed decades later by a
U.S. Senate investigating committee found this wartime admission by the
Nazis: “Without lead-tetraethyl, the present method of warfare would be
unthinkable.”
Years after the war, Nazi armaments chief Albert
Speer told a congressional investigator that Germany could not have
attempted its September 1939 Blitzkrieg of Poland without the
performance-boosting additive.
Dwarfing the competition
Within a few years of partnering with the Hitler
regime, Opel began to dwarf all competition. By 1937, GM’s subsidiary
had grown to triple the size of Daimler-Benz and quadruple that of
Ford’s fledgling German operation, known as Ford-Werke. By the end of
the 1930s, Opel was valued at $86.7 million, which in 21st-century
dollars, translates into roughly $1.1 billion.
In the meantime, GM was responsible for stunning
growth in Germany’s economy. As most economists of the day knew, and as
Sloan himself bragged, automobile manufacturing created thousands of
factory jobs, hundreds of suppliers, numerous dealerships, widespread
motorization and an attached oil industry.
Moreover, the growth of the highway network, from
local roads to the Autobahn, spurred a construction boom that spawned
thousands of additional jobs and necessitated hundreds of additional
suppliers. Even GM’s own sponsored expert historian, who decades later
examined Hitler-era documentation, concluded: “The auto industry
spearheaded the remarkable recovery of the German economy that boosted
the popularity of the Nazi regime by virtually eliminating within a few
years the mass unemployment that had idled a quarter of the workforce
and contributed so importantly to Hitler’s rise.”
But Reich currency restrictions obstructed the
outflow of cash for profits or even the purchase of raw materials to
build trucks. GM in America circumvented those regulations through the
overseas sales of German pencils, sewing machines, Christmas tree
ornaments and virtually any other exports that would earn foreign
currency internationally. Those sales proceeds were then exchanged for
profits or raw materials through complicated bank transfers.
On the homefront
Ironically, while GM’s Opel was a deferential
corporate citizen in Nazi Germany, going the extra mile to comply with
Reich requirements and making no waves, Sloan helped foment unrest at
home as part of the company’s efforts to undermine the Roosevelt
administration.
For example, the GM president was one of the central
behind-the-scenes founders of the American Liberty League, a racist,
anti-Semitic, pro-big business group bent on rallying Southern votes
against Roosevelt to defeat him in the 1936 election. The American
Liberty League arose out of a series of private gatherings organized in
July 1934 by Sloan, du Pont and other businessmen. Some of those
meetings were even held at GM’s office in New York.
The businessmen sought to create a well-financed,
seemingly grass-roots coalition that du Pont declared should “include
all property owners… the American Legion and even the Ku Klux Klan.”
Sloan served on the American Liberty League’s national advisory board
and was one of a number of wealthy businessmen who each quietly donated
$10,000 to its activities. The American Liberty League, which raised
more money in 1935 than the National Democratic Party, in turn, funded
an array of even more fanatical, racist and anti-Jewish groups.
One such group funded by the American Liberty League
was the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. With help from
the du Pont family fortune, the Southern Committee circulated what it
called “nigger pictures” of Eleanor Roosevelt with African-Americans.
Sloan sent a $1,000 check directly to the Southern Committee after
those pictures were distributed, according to congressional testimony.
Racist diatribes found in Southern Committee
literature included an anti-union screed that complained: “White women
and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes
whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” The Southern
Committee also jointly organized protest marches with the American Nazi
“Silver Shirts.”
The American Liberty League also financed the
Sentinels of the Republic. The Sentinels of the Republic, in turn,
orchestrated incendiary, anti-Semitic letter-writing campaigns, and
otherwise provoked a backlash against Roosevelt and what was sometimes
derisively labeled his “Jew Deal.”
True, the Sentinels of the Republic bore all the
earmarks of a rabble-rousing extremist group. But behind it were some
of the nation’s most affluent and well-heeled, supplying the operating
cash and direction. Among them: Sun Oil President Howard Pew,
investment banker Alexander Lincoln who served as the group’s
president, and the president of Pittsburgh Plate Glass, John Pitcairn.
Sloan himself wrote a $1,000 check directly to the Sentinels of the
Republic.
Only after an April 1936 congressional investigation
was Sloan’s financial involvement in the Sentinels outed. Just days
after the disclosure, Sloan issued a statement to an inquiring Jewish
newspaper in Louisville, promising, “Under no circumstances will I
further knowingly support the Sentinels of the Republic.” He added,
ambiguously: “I have no desire to enter into any questions involving
religious or political questions.”
Although Sloan backed away from further financing of
the Sentinels, the GM chief continued to fund and fund raise for
another anti-Roosevelt-agitation group, the National Association of
Manufacturers. Founded in 1895 as a pro-business organization and still
prominent more than 100 years later, NAM sowed anti-union and anti-New
Deal discord among Americans in the 1930s through clandestinely owned
and operated opinion-molding arms.
Roosevelt openly acknowledged that Sloan, GM, the du
Ponts and other corporate giants hated him for his reforms and his
efforts to relieve Depression-era inequities. In his final 1936
campaign speech, the president threw down the gauntlet, shouting to an
overflow Madison Square Garden crowd, “They are unanimous in their hate
for me — and I welcome their hatred.”
Roosevelt added that he wanted his first four years
to be remembered as an administration where “the forces of selfishness
and of lust for power met their match.”
Fearing Roosevelt’s possible re-election, several of
Sloan’s top executives at GM actually considered deliberately extending
the financial woes of the Depression, presumably in retaliation against
the entire nation. In the final days of the 1936 election campaign,
several GM officials met with W.H. Swartz, a Lehman Brothers investment
banker, according to a historian who studied the incident.
The GM officials apparently planned to stop
investing in and expanding their company in the event of Roosevelt’s
expected victory. Swartz’s Nov. 4, 1936, confidential memo about the GM
meeting asserted, “Certain General Motors people also felt further
capital expenditures could not be expected now, in view of Roosevelt’s
possible re-election.” Based on their plans, Swartz predicted “a break
in general business next year … mid-summer is the logical time to
expect it,” adding, “I would suggest that the rather intense political
emotions of certain of these men may have colored their thinking more
than they themselves may have realized.”
Despite the lush opposition funding by Sloan and other affluent anti-New Deal nemeses, Roosevelt was re-elected by a landslide.
While no capital slow-down was actually implemented
by GM, Sloan did continue to battle the administration. The conflict
was not subtle. Washington knew that Sloan and GM were powerful
adversaries. For example, in 1937, when Sloan telephoned Secretary of
Labor Francis Perkins to renege on a promise made to meet with labor
strikers, Perkins lashed out bitterly at the GM chief.
Shocked at the reversal, Perkins shouted into the
phone, “You are a scoundrel and a skunk, Mr. Sloan. You don’t deserve
to be counted among decent men…You’ll go to hell when you die… Are you
a grown man, Mr. Sloan? Or are you a neurotic adolescent? Which are
you? If you’re a grown man, stand up, and be a man for once.” A
flabbergasted Sloan protested, “You can’t talk like that to me! You
can’t talk like that to me! I’m worth 70 million dollars and I made it
all myself! You can’t talk like that to me! I’m Alfred Sloan.”
Edwin Black is the author of the award-winning
IBM and the Holocaust and the recently published Internal Combustion:
How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed
the Alternatives.
