Dillard Stokes had good sources close to the U.S. Department of Justice’s newly formed “propaganda squad” investigation. On one unseasonably cool end-of-summer morning in September 1941, the thirty-three-year-old Washington Post reporter was pursuing a very hot tip he’d received from one of those sources about an address worth watching in a nondescript residential neighborhood near downtown Washington, D.C. When his taxicab arrived in front of the modest apartment building at 1430 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, a little after 9:00 a.m., Stokes was worried he was already late to the proceedings. The anxious newsman directed the driver to nose in catty-corner to the building and keep the meter running. Stokes stayed in the backseat and watched, undetected, as two obviously unhappy young men finished hauling a bunch of unwieldy and overstuffed canvas bags down the steps of the apartment building and into an official government mail truck.
When they finally finished the loading and one of the young men edged the truck out into traffic, Stokes thought the driver might be headed to the federal courthouse. A recently impaneled grand jury, under the guidance of Special Prosecutor William Power Maloney, was weighing evidence suggesting that German agents were working in concert with members of Congress to paper America with carefully scripted Nazi propaganda, funded and directed by the Hitler government in Berlin. Since grand jury subpoenas often came with requests for documents, maybe these heavy bags full of paper that were being hauled out of the apartment in question were going to be part of the grand jury presentation. In fact, the jurors were expecting to hear testimony that morning from a resident of that very address: 1430 Rhode Island Avenue.
The main aim of the Germans’ massive U.S. propaganda effort was to keep American public opinion firmly positioned against our armed forces joining the Allies in the war in Europe, which—the Nazis knew—was the most important thing that could be done anywhere in the world to clear the way for Hitler’s conquest of all of Europe, and perhaps beyond. Germany trying to run this kind of massive information operation on American soil, targeting the American public, was one level of threat; elected members of the U.S. Congress helping them do it—that was something else. And that was the plot that William Power Maloney’s newly created DOJ propaganda squad was onto, thanks in no small part to the work Henry Hoke had started more than a year earlier. Hoke’s exposés—and Drew Pearson’s columns, and reporting by newspapers like the left-wing tabloid PM in New York—had alerted the public, and upped the pressure on DOJ to get to the bottom of it.
Maloney had been handpicked for this propaganda investigation by the attorney general of the United States, and for good reason. Just thirty-seven years old at the time of his appointment, the exuberant, bantamweight government attorney had already won a reputation as a fearless prosecutor (the “Little Napoleon of the courtroom,” one defendant called him). He had spent six years as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted rich and powerful businessmen, made himself an expert in mail fraud and stockjobbing, and ran up an eye-popping 400–0 trial record. The Fordham Law School graduate seemed to live for the hard challenge; he preferred a swim in the rough ocean surf of Long Island to the placid chlorinated water of the lap pool. The choppier things got, the more he liked it. He was known around DOJ as bright, pugnacious, and fond of the spotlight, pushing high-profile, high-risk cases. “ Hustling young William Power Maloney,” Time magazine noted back in 1935, “obtained a $4,500,000 mail fraud indictment against three young Yalemen, 49 other individuals and 20 corporations—biggest mail fraud indictment in U.S. history.” This new investigation he was heading, Maloney figured, could be even bigger. Dillard Stokes, already hot on the trail of that same story, agreed with the prosecutor’s assessment.
WHEN THE TRUCK took off from 1430 Rhode Island Avenue that Friday morning, Stokes bade his taxi driver to follow. And at first, as Stokes suspected it would, the truck appeared to be hurrying toward the courthouse at Judiciary Square, where Maloney and his propaganda squad awaited. But the truck blew past the court facility and continued southeast, before turning in to an alley behind some low-key Capitol Hill offices. There, the driver stopped just long enough to drop off what looked like about a dozen of the stuffed mailbags he had removed from the apartment. He then hopped back into the truck and headed to the other side of Capitol Hill, where he got help hauling the remaining bags inside a building that housed official government offices for members of Congress.
That morning, Dillard Stokes was unable to determine the ultimate destination of those big canvas bags that had been removed from the apartment of the man who had just been subpoenaed to testify to the propaganda squad’s grand jury. And he didn’t know what was in the bags, either, other than that it was clearly printed material. But he knew that material didn’t get delivered to the courthouse, and he had a sense he might have finally found a lever to crack open this story that he very eagerly wanted to tell.
By that Friday morning, September 19, 1941, Dillard Stokes had been on the trail of Nazi propagandists on Capitol Hill for nearly as long as Henry Hoke. His managing editor at The Washington Post had got the scent in his nose first; something about all this pro-German, isolationist propaganda flooding the country just smelled wrong. So, the graying leader of the Post newsroom put Dillard Stokes on the story. Stokes was one of the newspaper’s best legmen and a licensed attorney to boot. He knew his way around the law. “Take your time, be sure of your facts,” Post editor Casey Jones told Stokes.
Once he had witnessed the curious route of those official congressional mailbags, it didn’t take long for Dillard Stokes—or the prosecutors—to start to unravel the mystery. Within the span of a week, the grand jury was hearing testimony from the superintendent at the House Post Office, which had dispatched its mail truck to and from the apartment on Rhode Island Avenue. They heard from the truck driver, too. The panel also heard from Isabel French, a secretary who worked at the D.C. headquarters of the America First Committee, which was the first location where the truck dropped off some of the mailbags from the Rhode Island Avenue apartment.
The day after Mrs. French’s less than candid grand jury appearance, propaganda squad investigators dragged ten mailbags out of the America First office for further inspection. They found them filled with unaddressed envelopes, adorned with the franks of a host of members of Congress, and stuffed with copies of German-friendly treatises, each of them ready to be addressed for (free) shipment. Mrs. French told the jurors she had no earthly idea why anybody would want to send those bags full of free-postage envelopes to her office. The chair of the America First Committee’s Washington chapter promptly issued a statement exclaiming that this was exactly the sort of persecution she had come to expect from the warmongering Roosevelt administration. “ The smear of the America First Committee undertaken by the Department of Justice will fade into nothing but a cheap trick on the part of the department itself,” Mrs. Bennett Champ Clark, wife of a sitting U.S. senator, told the press. “The committee has always been on the ‘up and up’ and always will be.”
Dillard Stokes, meanwhile, was naming names in the Post. The headliner was the powerful Republican congressman Hamilton Fish of New York, who counted among his least favorite constituents President Franklin Delano Roosevelt of Hyde Park. The German Foreign Office had been assiduously cultivating Fish over the years, counting him friendly to the Reich in spite of his occasionally professed unease with its Jewish policies. There was hard evidence that the truck from the House Post Office had been sent to the Rhode Island Avenue apartment on orders from Fish’s congressional office, which Stokes reported in the Post.
Congressman Fish was in no position to make a flat denial, but he did have an explanation at the ready: the whole mailbag escapade was the doing of the fellow living and working at 1430 Rhode Island Avenue, one Prescott Dennett. (Dennett was the press agent for the Islands for War Debts Committee who had so mournfully lamented the committee founder, Ernest Lundeen. He had also started a small “Fish for President” boomlet in 1940, at Fish’s request, and for a small fee.) Dennett—whom Fish claimed not to have laid eyes on for a year or more—had casually called up an aide in Fish’s office and asked if he wanted five hundred reprints of Hamilton Fish’s recent antiwar speech, at least according to the congressman. Fish’s aide said, Why sure, there was a great and growing demand for that particular speech, and promptly sent a House of Representatives mail truck to Dennett’s apartment. When questioned directly by Stokes, Fish had insisted he was not personally involved in, or even aware of, the transaction; said he didn’t know a thing about any mailbags taken to his office.
Too bad for Fish, Dillard Stokes found out two days after that interview with the congressman that some of the unaccounted-for mailbags were now residing on an upper floor of the New House Office Building, where Fish’s office had an official storage space. Stokes dutifully called the Fish office for comment on this odd happenstance. “They are not ours,” Fish’s first secretary, Walter Reynolds, told Stokes. “We don’t care what happens to them. Mr. Fish said the Department of Justice can have them if it wants them. You can come and get them yourself if you want to.” Reynolds even offered to have somebody escort Stokes to the location of the bags.
When Stokes showed up at Fish’s office fifteen minutes later, Reynolds was nowhere to be found. But Dillard Stokes didn’t need a guide. He’d been aggressively reporting the story for long enough, and he had a pretty good idea where to look. Stokes raced up to the sixth floor, to storeroom 30, and—sure enough—found eight full-sized mailbags, sitting just outside Representative Fish’s designated area. At first glance, this appeared a mighty large number of mighty large bags for just five hundred reprints of a single speech. Either that was a monstrously long speech, or something else was going on. Stokes settled in to examine the contents of the bags, but not before he called in a photographer from the Post.
“Eight mailbags crammed with anti-Roosevelt speeches by many members of Congress, in franked envelops [sic], which ten days ago were spirited away from grand jurors investigating German agents ‘turned up’ yesterday,” Stokes wrote in his splashy story in the Post, which included a photograph of Stokes in the storeroom examining the contents of the open bags. On the front page. Above the fold. After the jump, there were reproductions of the printed speeches and franked envelopes signed in the names of at least a dozen members of Congress. Among the franking signatures was Ernest Lundeen, who had been unable to sign anything for the past year, on account of being dead.
William Power Maloney and his team of prosecutors, according to Dillard Stokes, were going to be “anxious to unravel” the meaning of all this. Happily, Stokes himself had already handed them another important clue. “One of the bags,” he had written, “had a tag with this address on it: Cong. Fish. Attention Mr. Hill.”
Hamilton Fish, beetle-browed, lantern-jawed, entitled by a storied family history in politics, and pugnacious to a fault, went to the floor of the House to defend his wounded honor. He attacked the Post and called its recent reporting “contemptible, dastardly, and lying.”
Stokes answered the next day with a deliciously detailed account of how the mailbag plot unfolded: Prescott Dennett—residing with his mother at 1430 Rhode Island Avenue—had been served with the grand jury subpoena on the night of September 18, directing him to turn up to the grand jury room to testify the very next day. Dennett had immediately called George Hill, secretary to Congressman Hamilton Fish. Hill went to the House Post Office, demanding a truck be sent to Dennett’s home to “pick up some things.” The foreman assigned the driver Charlie Wilson to the task; he piloted the mail truck over to Prescott Dennett’s apartment, and with the help of Dennett himself he trundled twenty or so mailbags into the truck. This required multiple trips up and down the interior stairs of the building. When a neighbor complained about the noise, young Charlie was clearly rankled but also somewhat apologetic. “I’m not supposed to be doing this kind of work, anyway,” he said.
THAT SAME WEEKEND that Dillard Stokes was exposing the involvement of members of Congress in the Nazi propaganda operation, Senator Burton Wheeler arrived in Los Angeles for a week of anti-Roosevelt, isolationist rallies, replete with broadsides against what the senator and his supporters were calling the warmongering, anti-German U.S. movie industry. Wheeler was promising an investigation aimed at bringing to heel the Hollywood studios (a lot of them run by Jews, you know). “Some claim,” Wheeler said, “the silver screen will become known in the future as the modern Benedict Arnold.”
Wheeler’s activities were well covered that week, thanks to Leon Lewis and his undercover team of antifascist spies. Lewis and his double agents had been hunting and cataloging Nazi-friendly and fascist Angelenos for eight years by then. They had been feeding reports to Congress, military intelligence, and the FBI for nearly that long. They had also started publishing their own weekly broadsheet, News Letter, which made Wheeler’s visit to Southern California the anchor for its next issue.
The Montana senator was met at his train in Los Angeles by a crowd of cheering fans “liberally sprinkled with well-known Nazi agitators,” the News Letter reported on its front page. Its reporters followed Wheeler closely all week. One of the ushers at the senator’s biggest event that week, it was noted, was “the swastika-braceleted” woman who doubled as a waitress at downtown L.A.’s Deutsches Haus. Lewis’s News Letter identified dozens of German agents and leading antisemites in attendance at Wheeler’s speeches and symposia. “Among the Senator’s Heilers were Hermann Schwinn, West Coast leader of the German-American Bund until his citizenship was revoked; Hans Diebel, proprietor of the Aryan Book Store, whose application for U.S. citizenship was denied by Federal Court…Charles Cobb, chairman of the Pasadena chapter of America First, whose rantings against the Washington Administration were such that the school board withdrew the use of the hall until Cobb promised to ‘tone down.’ ”
Leaflets from the Los Angeles headquarters of the National Peace Crusade papered some of Wheeler’s events: “AWAKE, CHRISTIAN AMERICA AND CLAIM YOUR BIRTHRIGHT…Let’s Be Frantically American. LET’S SAVE U.S. FOR US.” Attendees received instructions about boycotting a local dentist and other businesses who advertised in the Los Angeles Daily News, a newspaper that had voiced support for Roosevelt’s tough stance on Hitler. A leaflet defending Charles Lindbergh against a “peevish power-mad Roosevelt” offered reprints of the famous flier’s recent Des Moines speech (about “the Jewish”) at ten cents a dozen.
BY THE FIRST day of October 1941, Prescott Dennett, resident at 1430 Rhode Island Avenue, had been on the witness stand in front of the grand jury for seven days, mostly filibustering. But Congressman Hamilton Fish was clearly getting anxious. He made a twenty-two-minute speech on the floor of the House in which he accused the Post reporter Dillard Stokes of illegally obtaining the contents—and publishing photographs of same—from the mailbags left outside storeroom 30. He wanted Congress to call Stokes “before the bar of the House and try him for violation of the law.” Moreover, Fish charged, somebody was likely giving information to Stokes. “There is some leak on the part of some of the witnesses, or on the part of the grand jurors, or the officials,” Fish said in his floor speech, “and it may be necessary for the House to call this reporter before it and ask him how he got this information from the grand jury.”
Things started moving apace after that, and not in Fish’s favor.
Prosecutor William Power Maloney summoned to the witness box, for the first time, a known German agent: George Sylvester Viereck. Viereck first appeared on the grand jury witness stand on October 3, exactly two weeks after the day Stokes had seen the mail truck at Dennett’s home. Five days later Viereck was charged with falsifying statements he had filed with the U.S. State Department about his role as an agent for the German government.
The indictment charged Viereck with “aiding, abetting and assisting Prescott Dennett and divers other persons in organizing and setting up a certain committee known as the Make Europe Pay War Debts Committee.” This was the group first chaired by Ernest Lundeen, which had morphed into the Islands for War Debts Committee by the time of his death. In the indictment, prosecutors spelled out that Viereck was acting as an agent of Hitler’s government when he paid Prescott Dennett to help set up and run the War Debts Committee chaired by Senator Lundeen. No wonder Senator Lundeen’s widow had been so eager to collect her husband’s correspondence with Viereck before anyone else could get their hands on it.
Viereck was arrested at his home on Riverside Drive in New York. Federal agents reported that the apartment was “adorned with pictures of Hitler and Goebbles [sic], its bookshelves packed with the books and articles [Viereck] has written to depict Kaiser Wilhelm as a wronged statesman and Hitler as a champion of peace.” Dillard Stokes was on hand to report on Viereck’s arraignment in Washington. “ Small, slender, and graying with the quiet dress, heavy spectacles and diffident manner of a ‘typical’ college professor,” Stokes wrote, “the 57-year-old Viereck has been the acknowledged leader of pro-German thought in this country all his adult life.”
Prosecutors called Viereck “one of the most serious menaces in this country.” The defendant insisted he was tragically misunderstood. “ If I had worked for war as I have for peace I would not now stand indicted,” Viereck dashed off in a statement for reporters. “My real crime, whatever the accusation against me may be, is twofold: I am American of German blood and I oppose this desperate and despicable attempt to catapult our country into Europe’s war.” The indictment, he said, “is only an incident in the perfidious plot to smother and smear all opposition to the arbitrary forces cunningly at work to destroy the America we know and love.” He made bond and went home to prepare his defense.
The day after Viereck’s arraignment, congressional staffer George Hill was called before the grand jury to give evidence. He fared no better than Viereck. Hill was a slim, lipless, not particularly attractive figure who was nevertheless known as a man-about-town, with multiple girlfriends and a reputation as someone who always had money to spend. A small part of Hill’s problem before the grand jury was his reluctance to produce the eight mailbags that had been stashed at storeroom 30. He said he could not do so without the blessing of his boss, Congressman Fish—a position the judge found understandable. A bigger problem was Hill’s refusal to identify the source of the $12,000 that had fallen into his bank accounts in the previous five months. (A pretty good take for a man whose federal salary was around $2,000 per year.) But Hill’s biggest problem was falsely swearing under oath that he had nothing to do with the mailbags, that he had not met with George Sylvester Viereck in any congressional office, and that in fact he was not acquainted with Viereck at all, except by reputation.
LATE ONE NIGHT in the third week of October 1941, Dillard Stokes was out on the streets of D.C., keeping a vigil on the America First Committee’s headquarters. The reporter really did have good sources, because somebody had put him in place that night to witness an America First employee burning a pile of mail in a trash can in the alley behind the committee offices. Stokes waited until the coast was clear and then rushed over to pull what he could from the can. “ The ashes still warm and slightly smoking,” he reported. The charred fragments Stokes examined included more franked envelopes from the isolationist wing of Congress. Now that Prescott Dennett had been hauled before the grand jury, and the Viereck indictment was laying out the connection between Dennett and a Nazi agent, here was the America First Committee burning the evidence that had been piled up in Dennett’s apartment and then trucked to them once Dennett was subpoenaed. Stokes, aware that he was both reporting on a story and witnessing part of a crime spree that was actively under federal investigation, decided to deliver the warm and smoky remainder of that evidence to the propaganda squad at DOJ, even as he rushed to file with his editor. “Early today,” Stokes wrote in his story that ran that very day, “the crumpled but faintly legible ashes were being studied by Special Prosecutors William Power Maloney and Edward J. Hickey.”
This turned out to be an especially busy Friday for Maloney and Hickey. That afternoon, they indicted George Hill for his role in the cover-up of the franking operation—for coordinating the effort to hide evidence that was being sought by the grand jury investigating the German government’s secret propaganda operation inside Congress. According to the prosecutors, Hill was the person inside Congress Henry Hoke had been looking for—“ the keyman of a propaganda machine master-minded by German agents.”
Hill pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer, a former congressman, stood up to defend both Hill and Hill’s boss. Hill “ is an unimportant person in the picture,” said the defense attorney, John O’Connor. “This is aiming at the lion and shooting the rabbit, and if I may say, I am here to plead Congressman Fish ‘not guilty.’ ”
“I am not aware that Congressman Fish has been indicted,” Prosecutor Maloney countered. “Mr. O’Connor’s protestations remind me of Shakespeare in that he ‘protesteth too much.’ ”
When Fish himself was finally summoned to appear before the grand jury a few weeks later, the congressman went on the floor of the House and more or less begged the body to formally instruct him not to comply. He was very anxious to protect them all from any grand jury invading “the rights and privileges of the House of Representatives.”
By the time the House got around to explaining that Congressman Fish did indeed have the discretion to appear before the grand jury if he so desired, Fish had left town for reserve army training. He was defiant in his too-tight colonel’s uniform when he boarded the train for North Carolina. Fish harrumphed to a reporter on hand that he did know the identity of the benefactor who bestowed the $12,000 worth of mysterious payments on his aide George Hill. But he was not at liberty to divulge the source to the reporter or anyone else. “They can’t subpoena me while I’m in the army,” he said on his way out of town.