tenenbaum
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 Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 7:01 pm Post subject: |
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Fragments from http://varnelis.net/research/johnson.html
"WE CANNOT NOT KNOW HISTORY:" PHILIP JOHNSON’S POLITICS AND CYNICAL SURVIVAL by KAZYS VARNELIS
Journal of Architectural Education, November 1994
But if we are to try and evaluate Johnson and his intellectual legacy today, we have to take into account the information presented by Franz Schulze in his new biography Philip Johnson: Life and Work. Between 1932 and 1940, Johnson was an antisemite, fascist sympathizer, and active propagandist for the Nazi government. Johnson wrote extensively for right-wing organizations during the 1930s and his activities were covered in contemporary publications as well as in more recent histories of prewar movements in the extreme-Right. Johnson’s past has received scant attention in the architectural media. Even Elaine S. Hochman avoided mentioning Johnson’s express commitment to fascist ideology in her book Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich, an attempt to document Johnson’s friend Mies’s collaboration with the Nazi government. Until Schulze’s book came out, to my knowledge only two articles by members of the discipline examined Johnson’s political past: architect Michael Sorkin’s "Where was Philip?" and architectural historian Geoffrey Blodgett’s "Philip Johnson’s Great Depression." But both articles were published outside of the architectural media, in Spy magazine and Timeline, the newsletter of the Ohio Historical Society, respectively. Sorkin concluded his article with bitter questions pointing to the discipline’s silence about Johnson: "And what about some sort of apology? There never has been one from Johnson — not publicly, at any rate. However, apology or no, he has been forgiven.
Johnson shows evidence of having been interested in right-wing politics by 1932, the same year as his MOMA exhibit on the "International Style." During one of his visits to Germany to scout out modern art and architecture, Johnson attended a Hitler rally in Potsdam where, he told Schulze, he was enthralled. After his return to the United States, Johnson and Alan Blackburn, a friend from Harvard and MOMA, began to take an interest in the political philosophy of Lawrence Dennis.
Dennis’s message appealed to Johnson and Blackburn. In December 1934, prominent accounts in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune reported that they had formed their own "Nationalist party," or "Gray shirts" and, after trying to recruit members and holding a few meetings, quit their jobs with the intention of leaving for Louisiana to offer their services to Senator Huey Long, the Kingfish. Their decision must have pleased Dennis, who had written that Long was "the nearest approach to a national fascist leader. … It takes a man like Long to lead the masses. … Long’s smarter than Hitler but he needs a good brain trust." The two told reporters that they hoped that in Louisiana they could "develop [themselves] by doing the sort of things that everybody in New York would like to do but never has time for. We may learn to shoot, fly airplanes, and take contemplative walks in the woods." A reporter for the Herald Tribune noted that Johnson’s office at the Museum of Modern Art was filled with catalogs of firearms. Blackburn was in favor of large pistols whereas Johnson favored the submachine gun.
Suspicious of the two Harvard graduates, Long sent them away to Johnson’s Ohio home turf to organize for a possible 1936 run at the presidency. With Long’s 1935 assassination however, their plans were scuttled and they joined up with Father Charles E. Coughlin, a political figure with tremendous grass-roots support based on his weekly radio programs. With his popular support, the powerful political organization of his National Union for Social Justice, his weekly newspaper Social Justice, and a natural gift for oratory, Coughlin was the other possible candidate for an American fascist leader in Dennis’s eyes. Within three years Coughlin would be notorious as a prominent Nazi sympathizer and one of the leaders of antisemitism in the United States.
Johnson and Blackburn supported Coughlin in a variety of ways. They endorsed Union party presidential candidate William Lemke, contributing $5,000 to his campaign, and Johnson ran for the Ohio state legislature as a Democrat only to withdraw his candidacy in mid-campaign. They supervised the printing of Social Justice, and, in what was probably their biggest coup, they organized a rally in Chicago at which eighty thousand spectators paid fifty cents each to hear Coughlin and Lemke. In one of his first architectural works, Johnson designed a podium for Coughlin that was modeled after the podium he had seen Hitler use at Potsdam.
In 1938, after Blackburn left politics to get married, Johnson returned to New York and began spending more time with Lawrence Dennis. With Dennis’s help, Johnson was invited by the German government to attend a Somerkurs für Aüslander in Berlin, an introduction to Nazi politics for foreigners, and to see Hitler speak at the Nazi rally at Nuremberg marking five years in power. This rally was the greatest and last of the Nuremberg rallies. The next year the country would be at war.
At about this time, according to Schulze’s interviews with Johnson, he had become friends with Viola Bodenschatz, an American journalist married to Major General Karl Bodenschatz, Hermann Göring’s top aide. Johnson continued to try to make his message public: in a letter to her dated 23 April 1939, he wrote that he had planned to buy the American Mercury, a popular conservative magazine to which Dennis frequently contributed, but "The Jews bought the magazine and are ruining it, naturally."
His interest in controlling a periodical thwarted, Johnson began setting his thoughts on paper, contributing to three right-wing publications: the Examiner, a publication dedicated to understanding the good points in fascism put out by critic Geoffrey Stone, a close friend of Wyndham Lewis; Social Justice, which by 1938 had become notorious for its antisemitic, pro-Nazi slant, most notably for reprinting a speech by Goebbels essentially unchanged under Coughlin’s name, as well as for publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and defending the Nazis after Kristallnacht; and Today’s Challenge, a journal distributed by the American Fellowship Forum, an organization with close ties to Lawrence Dennis, funded by the German government and dedicated to disseminating pro-German propaganda to more upper-class types who might not read Social Justice.
Johnson’s first political text was not his own, but rather a translation. Sometime during 1938, Johnson, under the guidance of Dennis, translated Werner Sombart’s essay Weltanschauung, Science and Economy. According to Schulze, Johnson happened upon the essay in a Festschrift for Hjalmar Schacht, German economist and then Hitler’s Minister of Economics and, having sought Sombart out, got permission to translate the essay into English. First printed in the Examiner, the essay was published in book form along with an introduction by Johnson by the Veritas press, a publishing house funded by the German government through the German Library of Information for propaganda purposes. Sombart was an influential German sociologist in the early part of the century who began to veer to the Right when he theorized an antisemitic critique of capitalism via racial archetypes, and supported the Nazi party in the 1930s. While Weltanschauung, Science and Economy is not a particularly important text in Sombart’s oeuvre and does not address the question of race, translating it gave Johnson, Dennis, and the German government a chance to bring Sombart’s ideas to the American public.
In the text Sombart explained that while the Nazis had a strong will, they lacked "a thorough philosophic training and education," leading them to spend their time "aimlessly running about." In other words, Nazi theory was not up to its practice. A reasonable conclusion from this would be that a theory like Dennis’s could give a solid grounding to the American fascist movement to help it avoid the difficulties encountered by the German version. Sombart’s book would thus have formed a complement to Dennis’s writings, a call for an American theory of fascism.
Johnson, however, had political theories of his own. He laid out his position on race in an article for the Examiner (later reprinted in Today’s Challenge) titled "A Dying People?" He opened the article by warning that Americans were failing to reproduce in sufficient quantities, predicting deserted ghost towns and a massive population decline. Midway through the article, however, Johnson displaced population decrease in absolute terms with a decrease in the population of the white race, writing: "This decline in fertility, so far as scientists have been able to discover, is unique in the history of the white race." The decline Johnson was predicting would be only among whites, the non-whites apparently not worthy of consideration as part of the population.
"In short," Johnson wrote, "the United States of America is committing race suicide." Only by thinking in the broader terms of the greater good of the race could whites save it:
| Quote: | …by their lack of will to live and grow, [Americans] themselves accelerate the already rapid decline in births. I have heard many educated men talk in this way: ‘Well if we are not the fittest to survive, nature will wipe us out. The Japanese may be more fit to survive. Remember Darwin.’
But this appeal to Darwin is merely a cloak for weakness. For surely the will to live is a factor in determining what is ‘fittest.’ If we will to live and grow, we shall be fitter than the Japanese. If we sit back and look at the situation purely ‘objectively,’ the Japanese are very likely, with their strong will to live, to become fitter to survive than we.
The course of nature is not pre-destined. Human will is a part of the biological process. Our will, for example, interferes, constantly in the world of the lower animals. When English sparrows threaten to drive out our songbirds, we shoot the sparrows, rather than letting nature and Darwin take their course. Thus the songbirds, thanks to our will, become the ‘fittest’ and survive. |
Johnson’s argument was indebted to the eugenic discourse that was popular in the early part of the century but by the late 1930s had been left behind by scientific eugenicists, retained only by the extreme Right, most notably the Nazis. Like Johnson, the earlier eugenicists were alarmed by indications that Nordic or Anglo-Saxon Americans had a lower birth rate than immigrants from other countries. As Johnson would do later, the eugenicists predicted that "race suicide," and "national deterioration" would be the consequence of these trends. Only eugenic measures against the immigrants and increased fertility for the established could fend off the destruction of the race. Johnson’s reference to the Japanese also recalls eugenicist fears of "the yellow peril" threatening the West with its increased fertility.
In a book review of Mein Kampf for the Examiner, Johnson went into greater detail on his ideas on race, locating a healthy and positive attitude in Hitler’s racism:
| Quote: | | At the basis of the Hitlerian mystique is the notion of ‘race’. The exclusiveness implicit in this notion has repelled anti-Liberal thinkers outside of Germany, who have joined forces with Liberals in condemning it as unhistorical and unscientific. If, however, we overlook the terminology that Hitler inherits from Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain — and that has become so repugnant to Americans because it has been made to appear primarily anti-Semitic — we shall find a different picture than we have been led to expect by reading excerpts from the more lurid German ‘anthropologists’. Reduced to plain terms, Hitler’s ’racism’ is a perfectly simple though far-reaching idea. It is the myth of ‘we, the best’, which we find, more or less fully developed, in all vigorous cultures. Thus Plato constructing the ideal State in his Republic assumed that it would be Greek: apparently even in the realm of Ideas nationality occurs, and one’s own takes precedence over all others. |
Johnson’s position on race was carried over in his role as European correspondent for Social Justice and Today’s Challenge. In his writings, Johnson consistently promoted an antisemitic, pro-German political stance that went far beyond what Paul de Man wrote in his articles for Le Soir. Over and over Johnson explicitly attacked the Jews, depicting them as malicious invaders, comparing them to an plague, and finally lying about their condition in 1939 Germany and Poland. In an article for Today’s Challenge, Johnson wrote expressed his opinion on the Jewish refugees in Paris during the summer of 1939
| Quote: | Another serious split in French opinion is that caused by the Jewish question, a problem much aggravated just at present by the multitude of émigrés in Paris. Even I, as a stranger in the city, could not help noticing how much German was being spoken, especially in the better restaurants. Such an influx naturally makes the French wonder, not only about these incoming Jews, but also about their co-religionists who live and work here and call themselves French. The facts that Blum and the men around him are Jews, that there are two Jews in the present cabinet, Messrs. Zay and Mandel and that the Jewish bankers Mannheimer, de Rothschild and Lazard Freres are known to stand behind the present government all complicate the situation.
The position taken by the Daladier government on this question is an interesting commentary on its policies in general. There are two decree laws which concern the press, one against publishing propaganda paid for by a foreign government. Under these laws, the patriotic weeklies Le Defi and La France Enchainee were just recently suppressed, presumably for getting money from Hitler; but L’Humanité, which no one doubts gives out Russian propaganda, paid for by Russia, has been left alone. What is freedom of the press and for whom is it done, the French ask. |
It is hard to imagine the author of this piece, the review of Mein Kampf, and "A Dying People?" supporting the admission of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe into the Unite States.
Johnson wrote a similar piece, "Aliens Reduce France to an ‘English Colony’," published in Social Justice on July 24. In this article he explained that while the American papers were trying to make the French seem, as he put it, "unified and courageously prepared for the worst," in reality "Lack of leadership and direction in the State has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nation’s time of weakness: the Jews." Again Johnson insinuated that the Jews were doing better under the new government, writing that while Catholics were still "not allowed the right of assembly or instruction" and instead "It would seem that only Jews have freedom in the Third Republic. Small wonder one hears so many reports of growing antisemitism among the common people of France." To emphasize, he quoted "a patriotic French woman, a well-known writer and journalist, whose name I must withhold for obvious reasons":
| Quote: | ‘My heart aches for the future of my country. When I see my beloved city of Paris overrun with German, Czech and Hungarian Jews, I say to myself are these the "Frenchmen" who with their "French" cousins are to rule France? And am I not even to be allowed to raise my voice against it?
…‘With our internal affairs in the hands of the Jewish bankers, our foreign affairs in the hands of Great Britain, and our country rent by dissension, what is to be the end for France? Who will save her?’ |
Johnson toured Poland with Viola Bodenschatz a month before the outbreak of the war and reported back on what he saw in an article for Social Justice. Again Johnson singled out the Jews in classically antisemitic terms, this time comparing them with a disease upon the European race:
| Quote: | | When I first drove into Poland, the countryside was a shock to me. Like most Americans who learned their geography since the World War, I was brought up to think of Poland as a country which looked much like the other countries of Europe. … Once on the Polish side [of the Polish-German border], I thought I must be in the region of some awful plague. The fields were nothing but stone, there were no trees, mere paths instead of roads. In the towns there were no shops, no automobiles, no pavements and again no trees. There were not even any Poles to be seen in the streets, only Jews! |
In an interview with Schulze, Johnson described part of this journey in language that underscores how little his opinions have changed over the years. Having gotten lost in the narrow streets of the town of Maków, Johnson found his car surrounded by Jews:
| Quote: | | At first, I didn’t seem to know who they were except that they looked so disconcerting, so totally foreign. They were a different breed of humanity, flitting about like locusts. Soon enough I realized they were Jews, with their long black coats, everyone in black, and their yarmulkes. Something about them … desperate, as if they were pleading about something … maybe because we wee Americans, with our American license plates. You know how in your dreams your world sometimes drops from under you? I felt out of my depth. |
While he had disparaged Poland and its large Jewish population, Johnson painted Germany in a starkly better light. Johnson compared Hitler to Lenin: both had provided their people with a positive revolutionary ideal for which they were prepared to sacrifice their lives. The preconditions of revolution, "starvation, oppression, suffering" were "very far from being sufficient to cause a revolt." Those opposed to Hitler constituted a diverse group — from "lawyers who miss the good old days when lawyers were looked up to and paid well" to "artists who resent the official disapproval of their art" — incapable of uniting on a common front. It wasn’t really so bad, Johnson explained:
| Quote: | | none of those opposed to Hitler that I know would prefer the liberalism of the Weimar Republic to National Socialism as a system of government. … They do not like Hitler, but they feel that if Hitler were not Hitler but some imaginary person that would be nice in their own particular way, then National Socialism or rather national socialism, would be a good idea. Such thoughts are not the stuff of revolutions. |
One is left wondering what happened to the Jews in Johnson’s Germany. Had the plague been eliminated in Germany? Johnson couldn’t have been ignorant of the vicious campaign against the Jews, either in his first-hand experience or from the accounts printed in the American press, especially after Kristallnacht. Schulze relates a chilling incident told to him by Johnson about his firsthand experience with the antisemitic violence of the Nazis. Passing through Brno, Johnson called upon Otto Eisler, an architect who had participated in the International Style exhibit and was a Jew and homosexual. Johnson told Schulze that Eisler "could only keep his head up at a distorted, painful angle. ‘Obviously you don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been in the hands of the Gestapo, and they let me out just the other day. I don’t know how long I can talk to you.’" Johnson was shaken by the incident and wrote J. J. P. Oud to ask him to help. Oud could not do anything and Johnson quickly put the incident behind him.
At the invitation of the German Propaganda Ministry, Johnson accompanied the German army into Poland to see the invasion first-hand. In his Berlin Diary, journalist William Shirer recounted his encounter with Johnson:
| Quote: | | Dr. Boehmer, press chief of the Propaganda Ministry in charge of this trip, insisted that I share a double room in the hotel with Philip Johnson, an American fascist who says he represents Father Coughlin’s Social Justice. None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis. For the last hour in our room here he has been posing as an anti-Nazi and trying to pump me for my attitude, I have given him no more than a few bored grunts. |
While in his contemporary writings Johnson was eager to repeat quotations from individuals like the French woman, he would not repeat Eisler’s statement. Instead, Johnson acted as a mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda. Returning to New York, Johnson recounted what he had seen of the war in Poland. In another article for Social Justice he wrote: "You have been led to believe that the Germans have devastated Poland. 90 per cent false. I saw Warsaw burn. Modlin, Miava, and the hamlet of Nowograd I saw in ruins. But 99 per cent the towns I visited since the war are not only intact but full of Polish peasants and Jewish shopkeepers."
Johnson also gave at least three speeches on what he said he saw during the war. Historian Geoffrey Blodgett recounts that in mid-October Johnson told the New London Rotary Club that journalists were distorting the war. The New London Record reported "He found, especially in Poland, business as usual, the citizens contented and more or less satisfied with the change of government, and the Jew but very little molested." Johnson followed this with a second lecture on December 13, 1939 in Philadelphia on "Facts and Fiction in the Present War" about which as yet little is known.
On January 26, 1940, Johnson gave a speech at a Springfield, Massachusetts Turn Verien (Germanic gymnastics hall) for the American Fellowship Forum. According to a Springfield Evening Union account, his theme was a warning that on account of British interests, the United States was ready to go to war with Germany. Calling himself a foreign correspondent, Johnson explained that the American newspapers were deceiving the public about the European war. Of the New York Times, he declared that it had only British correspondents in Europe, who would send back only articles favoring their country’s positions. Johnson went on to cite a picture that appeared in the Springfield Evening Union the previous month depicting victims of the war and said that it was taken in Brooklyn. Johnson continued to cite instances of purported anti-German propaganda in the American papers, according to the account "The newspapers lied about the war in Poland, he [Johnson] said, averring that the countryside was not made destitute as reported. He said only one town actually was destroyed and the half of another. The first town had been used as a fort, he said."
But Johnson knew what was going on. Schulze cites a letter sent by Johnson to Viola Bodenschatz after he had visited post-invasion Poland and had driven through the same town he described in the Social Justice article as being full of Jews:
| Quote: | | I was lucky enough to get to be [invited by the German government to be] a correspondent so that I could go to the front when I wanted to and so it was that I came again to the country that we had motored through, the towns north of Warsaw. Do you remember Markow [sic }? I went through that same square where we got gas and it was unrecognizable. The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle. |
Johnson’s letter is in conflict with his public lectures on the topic. It would appear that Johnson knowingly erased the fate of the Jews for what can only have been propaganda purposes. The no-doubt-violent purge of the Jews from the village was doubled in this erasure of memory that Johnson produced in his speeches and writings.
Johnson’s antisemitism and dishonesty about the plight of the Jews fit in with the publications he wrote for. Coughlin’s Social Justice played a key role in spreading antisemitism in the prewar United States. Indeed, during the period of Nazi rule, it was very difficult for European Jews to immigrate to this country because of the Roosevelt administration’s fear of offending established Americans. Hitler himself used the American position to justify his antisemitic policies, asking if the United States refused the Jews, why should Germany accept them? That Coughlin, Social Justice, and Johnson had a role in spreading this antisemitic attitude, gives them a very real role in the history of the Holocaust.
By 1940 pressure on Johnson to end his political activities was mounting. According to Schulze, that May the FBI began to assemble its dossier against him and by June internal documents in the Office of Naval Intelligence marked him as suspected of being a spy. That fall the American Fellowship Forum would undergo Congressional scrutiny by the House Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities. Roosevelt himself, in his fireside chat of May 26 pointed to a danger within: "The Trojan Horse. The Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery." With the Wehrmacht rolling through the Low Countries and Roosevelt asking congress to nearly double the military budget in preparation for possible war, being an activist for subversive groups under government suspicion must have begun to seem like a bad idea to Johnson. He was also beginning to get bad press: the September issue of Harper’s described his activities as one of "The American Fascists."
Abandoning his political career, Johnson returned to Harvard that fall to study architecture as a graduate student and to begin re-fashioning his public persona. His efforts were successful: after graduation and a short stint in the army as a latrine orderly in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, Johnson would get back his earlier position in MOMA’s architecture department with little difficulty and soon after became a practicing architect.
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Eugene Tenenbaum |
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