Think accusing your opponent of being a Nazi is an Internet-age addition to our political culture? Think again.
It's one of those things I only realized about my book when I got to the end: Americans amped up their (often weak) political argument by throwing around the N-word, and the H-word, all the time. It is one of the gifts Nixonland bequeathed our own era.
The first comes on page 13-14 when, in the summer of 1965, shortly after the famous footage of CBS's Morley Safer narrating a "Zippo raid" -- American soldiers burning down thatched Vietnamese peasant huts with cigarette lighters -- when the first mass arrests of anti-Vietnam War protestors began. Brigades from Berkeley's Vietnam Day Committee stood in front of barreling troop trains shipping soldiers out for Vietnam, giving way like matadors only at the last possible moment. They explicitly compared themselves to the Germans who defied Hitler. It became a common New Left trope; this was the reason the people willing to go to jail to defy the draft laws called themselves the "Resistance."
That fall, Richard Nixon Nazi-baited from the right side of the political spectrum. Rutgers history professory Eugene Genovese said at a teach-in, "I am a Marxist and a socialist. Therefore, I do not fear or reject the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it." Nixon traveled to Jersey to campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nominee, who made Genoses his marquee campaign issue, and cried, "If anyone had welcomed a Nazi victory during World War II there would have been no question about what to do. Leadership requires that the governor step in and put the security of the nation above the security of the individual."
When Martin Luther King Jr. moved to Chicago to organize for open housing in 1966, a landmark open housing law languished in Congress and eventually failed. The great Illinois liberal senator Paul Douglas, running that year for reelection (he lost), received a remarkable fusillade of letters from his constituents in the Chicago neighborhoods where King marched. (I'm hoping to have a big post up on these letters tomorrow.) One read: "It is my firm belief, and [that] of all my neighbors, that King should be taken into custody. ... Today, the insufferable arrogance of this character places him on a pedestal as a dark-skinned Hitler." That, too, was a common trope of Chicago homeowners battling to preserve their right to sell their homes only to white people; after Mayor Daley negotiated with King that August, another letter-writer wrote his senator: "When greedy Mr. Hitler started taking over other countries, people at first thought 'give him a little more, then he will be satisfied.' Give greedy Mr. King a little more freedom then he will stop. Isn't that what we are being told today?"
