The Fifth Column In America

Nazi Germany's efforts to weaken the United States by subversion failed miserably. Bungling spies were captured and half-hearted efforts at sabotage came to nothing. Yet anyone who lived through WWII remembers the chilling posters warning Americans that "Enemy Agents Have Big Ears" and "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Even Superman joined the struggle against these insidious foes. In 1940, polls showed that 71% of Americans believed a Nazi Fifth Column had penetrated the country. Almost half were convinced that spies, saboteurs, dupes, and rumor-mongers lurked in their own neighborhoods and work-places. These fears extended to the White House and Congress. In this book, Francis MacDonnell explains the origins and consequences of America's Fifth Column panic, arguing that conviction and expedience encouraged President Roosevelt, the FBI, Congressmen, Churchill's government, and Hollywood to legitimate and exacerbate American's fears. Gravely weakening the isolationists, fostering Congress's role in rooting out Un-American activities, and instigating the creation of the modern intelligence establishment, the Fifth Column scare did far more than sell movie tickets, comic books, and pulp fiction. Insidious Foes traces the panic from its origins in the minds of reasonable Americans who saw the vulnerability of their open society in an age of encroaching totalitarianism.

“One of the best historical thriller authors in the business... [A] stellar novel.” —Associated Press #1 New York Times bestselling author of The One Man Andrew Gross once again delivers a tense, stirring thriller of a family torn apart set against the backdrop of a nation plunged into war. February, 1939. Europe teeters on the brink of war. In New York City, twenty-two thousand cheering Nazi supporters pack Madison Square Garden for a raucous, hate-filled rally. In a Hell’s Kitchen bar, Charles Mossman is reeling from the loss of his job and the demise of his marriage when a group draped in Nazi flags barges in. Drunk, Charlie takes a swing at one with tragic results and a torrent of unintended consequences follows. Two years later. America is wrestling with whether to enter the growing war. Charles’s estranged wife and six-year-old daughter, Emma, now live in a quiet brownstone in the German-speaking New York City neighborhood of Yorkville, where support for Hitler is common. Charles, just out of prison, struggles to put his life back together, while across the hall from his family, a kindly Swiss couple, Trudi and Willi Bauer, have taken a liking to Emma. But Charles begins to suspect that they might not be who they say they are. As the threat of war grows, and fears of a “fifth column”—German spies embedded into everyday life—are everywhere, Charles puts together that the seemingly amiable Bauers may be part of a sinister conspiracy. When Pearl Harbor is attacked and America can no longer sit on the sideline, that conspiracy turns into a deadly threat with Charles the only one who can see it and Emma, an innocent pawn.

Featuring Hemingway's only full-length play, The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War brilliantly evokes the tumultuous Spain of the 1930s. These works, which grew from Hemingway's adventures as a newspaper correspondent in and around besieged Madrid, movingly portray the effects of war on soldiers, civilians, and the correspondents sent to cover it. He provides unique insight into how the city itself and the people within it functioned during this time of war. Through love, hate, fear, and brutality, Hemingway explores the complexities that times of war contain in his famed powerful prose.

Originally published in English in 1956, this book is divided into 3 parts : the first outlines how, after 1933, those outside Germany began to become increasingly afraid of sinister operations on the part of German agents and the partisans of National Socialism. The second part examines the role of the German Fifth column during the war and the third part analyses the role of the groups which were living outside Germany at the time Hitler started his assault.

What this all adds up to is the reestablishment of “freedom”—freedom to be ourselves, to have the right to our feelings, to have the right to our own thoughts, to have the right to free speech on whatever it is that we have to say and to say it whenever and wherever we find ourselves, to have the right to see the truth in all things as we are able to perceive it, and to deliberately recognize the reality that surrounds us as we engage in the continual struggle for genuineness. “Keeping it real” is good for all people without this faculty, fantasy, and prevarication takeover. Our culture is our social environment. We need to have the power and the will to protect it. It is the womb of our civilization. Our innately personal ideals as well as our interpersonal social norms, mores, and colloquialism—our national integrity is being cancelled out by the corrupt regime in Congress and the federal courts. We all have the right to live within the society and culture we were born into at the very least—the right to our own individuality, to our own opinions, and to express our love of who and what we are. Unfortunately, the current phase that the federal government has lapsed into is one of denying all of these rights to the degree that the Bill of Rights is superseded. Citizenship has become superfluous. It is time to get radical. It is past time for citizens to revolt. Otherwise, this will soon become no different than any other oppressed country with the federal tyranny of the D. C. Treason Regime.

Nazi Germany's efforts to weaken the United States by subversion failed miserably. Bungling spies were captured and half-hearted efforts at sabotage came to nothing. Yet anyone who lived through WWII remembers the chilling posters warning Americans that "Enemy Agents Have Big Ears" and "Loose Lips Sink Ships." Even Superman joined the struggle against these insidious foes. In 1940, polls showed that 71% of Americans believed a Nazi Fifth Column had penetrated the country. Almost half were convinced that spies, saboteurs, dupes, and rumor-mongers lurked in their own neighborhoods and work-places. These fears extended to the White House and Congress. In this book, Francis MacDonnell explains the origins and consequences of America's Fifth Column panic, arguing that conviction and expedience encouraged President Roosevelt, the FBI, Congressmen, Churchill's government, and Hollywood to legitimate and exacerbate American's fears. Gravely weakening the isolationists, fostering Congress's role in rooting out Un-American activities, and instigating the creation of the modern intelligence establishment, the Fifth Column scare did far more than sell movie tickets, comic books, and pulp fiction. Insidious Foes traces the panic from its origins in the minds of reasonable Americans who saw the vulnerability of their open society in an age of encroaching totalitarianism.