The Great Sedition Trial of 1944

George Sylvester Viereck

In a fireside chat in May 1940, Franklin Roosevelt, who was something of a conspiracy theorist, warned Americans, “Today’s threat to our national security is not a matter of military weapons alone. We know of new methods of attack – the Trojan Horse, the Fifth Column that betrays a nation unprepared for treachery. Spies, saboteurs and traitors are the actors in this new strategy. With all of these we must and will deal vigorously.”

A month later, he signed the Alien Registration Act, aka the Smith Act. It made it a crime punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment to advocate the overthrow of the federal or local governments. It allowed law enforcement to round up not just individuals but whole groups suspected of spreading sedition. To help agents track these pernicious activities and influences, it also required all foreign nationals above the age of 14 to register with the government and be fingerprinted.

As soon as he declared war in December 1941, Roosevelt directed his Attorney General to use the Smith Act to begin rounding up and putting away some of the country’s more vocal and visible Nazi sympathizers. In July 1942 a grand jury in Washington brought indictments against 28 people around the country, all of them irritants to FDR but few of them seeming to pose any real threat to national security. Among them were the German American writer George Sylvester Viereck, who had just been jailed in a separate trial for colluding with the Nazis, and William Griffin, the publisher of the New York Enquirer, accused of colluding with Viereck.

Viereck’s name has been lost to history now, but 100-odd years ago he was the darling of the New York literary set. He was born in Munich in 1884. His father Louis was the illegitimate son of a beautiful actress in Berlin and a royal lover, rumored to be Kaiser Wilhelm himself. Sylvester (he spurned the pedestrian-sounding George) was nicknamed Putty, for Lilliput, because he was so petite.

Louis brought the family to New York City in 1896. Sylvester was 24 when his first volume of verses, entitled Nineveh (his trope for Manhattan), was published in 1907. Decadent and romantic, with a titillating bisexual eroticism, Nineveh made him, according to the Saturday Evening Post, “the most discussed young literary man in the U.S. today,” and “unanimously accused of being a genius.” His fans ranged from Theodore Roosevelt to Nikola Tesla.

That moment quickly passed. Literature was moving into the 20th century, while Viereck’s style – “Beyond the sea a land of heroes lies,/ Of fairy heaths and rivers, mountains steep” – seemed stuck in the 19th. He turned to fiction and journalism. When the Great War broke out he started a magazine, The Fatherland, to counter the unfavorable coverage Germany was getting in the American press. Even though he changed the name to Viereck’s American Monthly, it got him ejected from a few literary societies and gentleman’s clubs, along with threats of vigilante violence.

In 1922 he made his first postwar trip to Europe, conducting numerous interviews with European political and intellectual leaders for William Randolph Hearst’s New York daily American. They included Kaiser Wilhelm, Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, George Bernard Shaw, Oswald Spengler, and Adolf Hitler. Hitler explained his vision of a Germany cleansed of all Bolsheviks, Jews and other “aliens.” To Viereck, he seemed “more like a poet than a politician” and an “idealist, however mistaken.”

Viereck grew increasingly sympathetic to the Nazis through the 1920s. In 1932 he entered a paid arrangement with the New York public relations firm Carl Byoir and Associates to serve business clients in Germany. (It’s worth noting that Byoir was the son of Jewish immigrants, and his other clients included Franklin Roosevelt.) In 1934 he was called before the newly-formed House Special Committee on Un-American Activities to explain himself. The committee’s findings eventually led to the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938, requiring anyone serving the interests of foreign governments to report it.

By 1939, Viereck was writing articles for the German Library of Information in New York, the German consulate’s clearinghouse for pro-German literature. He also took over control of a small anti-British publishing house in New Jersey called Flanders Hall, and started writing for the Trans-Ocean News Service on Madison Avenue, ostensibly established to promote international trade, but in fact a leading distributor of Nazi propaganda in the U.S. and Latin America. He continued to back the Nazis even after his 1928 novel My First Two Thousand Years, a fantasy about the Wandering Jew, made their list of forbidden books.

In 1940 he was profiled in the New Yorker, branded Hitler’s top apologist in America by the New York Post, and thrown out of the Overseas Press Club. He called it all war hysteria.

In September 1941 a federal grand jury impaneled to investigate Nazi agents in the U.S. started with Viereck and Flanders Hall. The jurors indicted him on five counts of violating FARA, and Justice Department agents arrested him at his home on Riverside Drive. He was convicted on three of the counts in March 1942. At his sentencing hearing he made a grand speech, claiming his loyalty to America but adding, “I shall never foreswear my German ancestry.” He also compared himself to Martin Luther and Woodrow Wilson. Unimpressed, the judge gave him eight months to two years on each count. He remained behind bars while appealing the decision up to the Supreme Court, which overturned the convictions on technicalities in March 1943. Three weeks after his release, the federal government slapped him with six new indictments. He was convicted on all counts that summer, and was still behind bars when the Great Sedition Trial commenced.

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The Enquirer’s William Griffin was best known for having sued Winston Churchill for libel. A protégé of Hearst’s, he’d started the Enquirer, with Hearst backing, as a weekly, the only New York paper published on Sunday afternoons. Hearst used it as a place to air articles and opinions that might be too extremely conservative for his conservative dailies. The result was a broadsheet that read like a tabloid, so sensationalist that one observer called it the Sunday Scream – very anti-Roosevelt, anti-New Deal, staunchly isolationist, and very anti-British.

In 1936, Griffin wrote that on a recent trip to London he’d had a private conversation about the Great War with First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill, and Churchill had in effect agreed that America never should have gotten into that war and should stay out of any future European war. Churchill evidently wasn’t an Enquirer reader and issued no response to the article. Then in the summer of 1939, when Hitler had annexed Austria and was threatening Poland, isolationists exhumed Churchill’s remarks in their arguments against America’s getting involved. When the New York Times questioned Churchill about Griffin’s story, he called it “a vicious lie.” Griffin lashed back with a million-dollar libel suit, and they began fighting it out in print. Churchill was forced to back away from an initial insistence that he’d never met Griffin, but remained adamant that Griffin’s version of their conversation was “a palpable travesty and distortion of anything I have ever said or thought.”

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on the morning of Sunday December 7 1941, the first New York newspaper with the story was, ironically, Griffin’s isolationist, anti-British New York Enquirer, the only paper in the city that came out on Sunday afternoon. New Yorkers mobbed newsstands to snap up the issue, which bore a giant three-deck headline:

JAPS ATTACK U.S.

HAWAII, PHILIPPINES

BOMBED BY AIRMEN!

Meanwhile, Griffin’s libel suit against Churchill was still alive somewhere in the court system. It was still working its way through the courts when Griffin was indicted as a Nazi fifth columnist with Viereck and the 27 others in 1942. Apparently stunned, Griffin suffered a hear attack. As a result, he missed a court date and the judge threw out the case.

When the Great Sedition Trial finally got under way in April 1944, fears of Nazi fifth columnists attacking the U.S. from within had faded from the public mind. The feds, after spending three years building their case, doggedly persisted anyway. There were now 30 defendants. Griffin had been dropped, but Viereck (who was still behind bars) remained on the list.

The trial quickly devolved into a circus. It was obvious that the government prosecutor had only the flimsiest circumstantial evidence indicating that the odd lot of defendants, many of whom had never met before the trial, had conspired among themselves and with Hitler in what the feds called a “worldwide Nazi movement” to “destroy democracy.” A few defendants were former members of the pro-Hitler German-American Bund; a few were already doing time for sedition; a very few, like Viereck, had demonstrable ties to the Nazi government; the rest were outliers, kooks, and publishers or writers of small pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic tracts, annoying but hardly deadly threats to the republic.

As the trial stumbled along, the judge cited the argumentative and irascible defendants so often for contempt that they formed a “contempt club.” One defendant demanded that all his fellow defendants submit to psychiatric testing. The twenty-seven defense lawyers, some of them kooks themselves, argued and fought constantly among themselves. As the case dragged on through the summer of D-Day, mainstream newspapers pulled their reporters. “I’m not going to keep a man tied up all summer on a lot of baloney,” the New York Post’s managing editor said. It all collapsed in a shambles when the judge died of a heart attack in November and a new judge declared a mistrial the following month.

The trial was the last hurrah for Viereck. He would remain behind bars until 1947, then fall into obscurity and die quietly in 1962 at the age of 77. Griffin’s widow would sell the New York Enquirer after the war to a publisher who morphed it into the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer.

by John Strausbaugh