3 May 2000
American Heritage
Forbes Building
New York City, NY 10011

RE: Home Grown Terror by Philip Jenkins American Heritage Sep 1995

Dear Richard Snow:

The Gentlemen of the Rockaway Park Philosophical Society bid you greetings. Recently the membership had occasion to discuss “Home Grown Terror” an interesting article which captures an untold facet of the Second World War and its origins kept hidden by the wizzled heroes of Tarawa and Iwo Jima. The rehabilitation of a veteran of that war who had been implicated in the “treason trial of 1940” has sparked attention to the secret past. The article “Home Grown Terror” suffers from several historical inaccuracies.

In 1940, as the War in Europe had begun. America was still smarting from deep divisions down secretarian lines over the recently concluded Spanish Civil War. American Catholics almost uniformly supported Franco's nationalists. Protestants even conservative ones favored the ill-fated Spanish Republic. As the prospect of a new World War loomed, Americans were divided and uncertain. When the American Front conducted its demonstration in front of the Albemarle Theatre in Brooklyn protesting a film favorable to the Spanish republicans, they were swept up in an arrest on sedition charges. Following these arrests, the Government claimed it was the victim of a far reaching Catholic conspiracy against it reaching from this obscure faction to a “Fifth Column” in New York State and City police, National Guard and Regular Army. Prosecutions were launched against the Front and various police and military figures. Supposedly according to the Government this group planned to steal weapons from the Army and the National Guard to launch a Bolshevik Revolution sparking a counter coup.

The government's cover story was as imaginative as it was fanciful.

Under the law of the time the prosecutor, utilizing the Blue Ribbon panel procedures, successfully kept Catholics from sitting as jurors. However the fault in the case for sedition came when FBI informants admitted having taken money from the Government to make the set-up and having used it on a personal vacation in Canada.

The trial which had been launched as a referendum on joining the European War turned into a murky farce. What saved the accused was the indecision of the American protestants who sat on the jury on support for entry in England’s latest war. Acquittals of the American Front joined the failures to obtain convictions in courts-martials in the Guard and Active Army. The verdict rendered early 1941 must have impressed the Roosevelt Administration that a greater causus belli than a Stallinist styled show trial would be necessary. Prophetically, the Times of the morning the Government conceded defeat in all its efforts spoke of the threat of Pacific territories if Japan entered the war on the side of Germany.

There is a certain determinism in the fate of men and nations. Yet if the great risk in taking the next logical step that followed led to a dashing victory in the Second World War, the victory viewed from the perspective of 50 years thence soured into an ironic tragedy. The three major objectives of the Roosevelt Administration in veering toward War: Preserve the British Empire; restrain the nations of East Asia from independence and prevent a shift in economic power from West to East ultimately failed. The world of today shows little lasting impact of the Great American victory of 1945.

Very truly yours,

JOHN F CLENNAN ESQ

author of If All Men Were Angels (Denlingers 1999); Arthur Rex Britanicus: The Celtic National Epic (Fullosia 1999), Tested Positive (Inverted A 1994) Stephen Decatur My Country: A Misinterpreted Quote (Inditer 1999) his many articles and short stories are regularly carried in the Inditer On Line Press http://www.inditer.com