Elizabeth Dilling Stokes (April 19, 1894 – May 26, 1966) was an American far-right political activist. She stood trial for sedition in Washington in 1944.[1][2]
Contents
Early life and family
Dilling was born Elizabeth Kirkpatrick in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Lafayette Kirkpatrick, was a surgeon of Virginian, Scots-Irish, Presbyterian ancestry; her mother, Elizabeth Harding, was of English and French ancestry. Her father died when she was six weeks old, after which her mother added to the family's wealth by selling real estate. Dilling's brother, Kirkpatrick, who was seven years her senior, also sold real estate and became wealthy by the age of 23, after developing properties in Hawaii.[3]
She had an Episcopalian upbringing, but attended a Catholic girls' school. She was extremely religious, and was known to send her friends 40-page letters about scripture. Prone to bouts of depression, she travelled around the United States, Canada, and Europe with her mother. In 1912 she enrolled at the University of Chicago, where she studied music and languages. She learned French, and studied the harp, intending to become an orchestral musician; she left after three years before graduating, lonely and bitterly disillusioned.[4]
In 1918, she married Albert Dilling, an engineer studying law, who attended the same Episcopalian church as Elizabeth. The couple were well off financially, thanks to Elizabeth's inherited money and Albert's job as chief engineer for the Chicago Sewerage District. They had two offspring: Kirkpatrick, born in 1920, who joined his mother's crusade against communism, and Elizabeth Jane ("Babe"), born in 1925.[5]
The family travelled extensively abroad at least ten times between 1923 and 1938, an experience that focussed Dilling's political outlook and served to convince her of American superiority. In 1923, offended by the lack of gratitude for American intervention in World War I, she vowed to oppose any future American involvement in European conflict. She spent a month in the Soviet Union in 1931, where her Russian guides, who she claimed were Jews, showed her a map of America with Soviet-style city names, and told her that communism would take over the world. She documented her travels in home movies, filming such scenes as bathers swimming nude in a river beneath a Moscow church. She was appalled by communism's "atheism, sex degeneracy, broken homes [and] class hatred."[6][7]
She also toured Germany in 1931, and returned in 1938, when she noted a "great improvement of conditions". She attended Nazi party meetings, and the German government paid her expenses. She wrote that "The German people under Hitler are contented and happy. ... don't believe the stories you hear that this man has not done a great good for this country." She also toured Palestine in 1938, where she filmed what she described as Jewish immigrants ruining the country, and revolutionary Spain, where she filmed "Red torture chambers" and burnt-out churches.[8]
Anticommunism
Dilling's activism was spurred by the "bitter opposition" she encountered, on her return to Illinois in 1931, "against my telling the truth about Russia... from suburbanite 'intellectual' friends and from my own Episcopal minister." In the political turmoil that emerged from the Great Depression, she found like-minded leaders in the Protestant far-right, such as Gerald L. K. Smith, Gerald Winrod and William Pelley, who feared the New Deal's supposed antagonism towards Christianity even more than its supposed threat to capitalism. Like Father Charles Coughlin, who she also admired, they were united in their antisemitic rhetoric, which intensified towards the end of the decade.[9][10]
Dilling began public speaking as a hobby, on her doctor's advice. Iris McCord, a Chicago radio broadcaster who taught at the Moody Bible Institute, arranged for her to speak at local church groups. Within a year she was touring the Midwest, the Northeast and the West coast, accompanied by her husband, showing her films of the Soviet Union and making the same speech several times a week to audiences sometimes as large as several hundred, to organisations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the American Legion, and local civic and womens' clubs. She earned little from these engagements. Together with a financial sponsor, in 1932 she began her first anti-communist organisation, the Paul Reveres, with headquarters in Chicago and several local chapters, which closed due to lack of interest in 1934. With McCord's encouragement, in 1932 her lectures were published in a Wilmette, Illinois newspaper, and then collected in a pamphlet entitled Red Revolution: Do We Want It Here?, which, Dilling claimed, sold 10,000 copies to the DAR.[11][12]
Beginning in early 1933, Dilling spent twelve to eighteen hours a day for eighteen months researching and cataloguing suspected subversives. The result was The Red Network—A Who's Who of Radicalism for Patriots, self-published in 1934, more than 15 years before McCarthyism. The first half of the 352-page book was a collection of essays, mostly recycled from Red Revolution. The second half described more than 460 organisations classified as "Communist, Radical Pacifist, Anarchist, Socialist, I.W.W. controlled", followed by analyses of more than 1,300 "Reds" and sympathisers.[13][14]
By 1941 the book had been reprinted eight times and sold more than 16,000 copies. Thousands more were given away. It was sold in Chicago book stores and mail order from Dilling's house. It was distributed by the KKK, the Knights of the White Camellia, the German-American Bund and the Aryan Bookstores. Subscribers to Winrod's new journal The Revealer received a copy, noted fundamentalist preacher and president of the Northwest Bible Training School W. B. Riley claimed he had given away hundreds of copies, and it was advertised and sold by the Moody Bible Institute. The book was endorsed by officials in the DAR and the American Legion. Copies were bought by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the New York Police Department, the Chicago Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A Los Angeles arms manufacturer bought and distibuted 150 copies, and the Erie Chemical Company, a tear gas manufacturer, bought 1,500 copies which it distributed to the Standard Oil Company, the National Guard and hundreds of police departments.[15][16]
Dilling's next book, The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background, published two weeks before the 1936 presidential election, was less successful. It was little more than a series of quotations. Roosevelt's "Jew Deal" was already a central theme of The Red Network, and moreover the New Deal was being debated elsewhere by more persuasive critics. Dilling later claimed that the House Un-American Activities Committee was founded largely thanks to her two books. She wrote a pamphlet attacking Senator William Borah entitled Borah: "Borer from Within" the G.O.P, as she feared that if he won the Republican nomination, voters would be forced to choose between two communists. She distributed 5,000 copies at the 1936 Republican National Convention, and claimed credit for his defeat.[17][18]
The Patriotic Research Bulletin, a newsletter outlining Dilling's political and personal views, which she mailed free of charge to her supporters, began regular publication in 1938. In the same year, she founded the Patriotic Research Bureau in Chicago, a vast archive with a staff of "Christian women and girls" from the Moody Bible Institute who could fulfil requests for information on radicals. In 1940 she published The Octopus, a book expounding her theories of the Jewish nature of communism. It was published under the pseudonym "Rev. Frank Woodruff Johnson". Avedis Derounian reported Dilling claiming that "The Jews can never prove that I'm anti-semitic, I'm too clever for them." Dilling's husband worried that charges of anti-semitic extremism could damage his law practice.[19][20]
Isolationism
Dilling became a prominent leader in a political movement of isolationist conservative womens' groups. These groups had a combined membership of aprroximately five or six million by 1941.[21] They claimed to oppose American involvement in World War II from a "maternalist" standpoint. According to historian Kari Frederickson: "They argued that war was the antithesis of nurturant motherhood, and that as women they had a particular stake in preventing American involvement in the European conflict. ... they intertwined their maternalist arguments with appeals that were right-wing, anti-Roosevelt, anti-British, anti-communist and anti-Semitic."[22]
Dilling was indicted, along with 28 others, in the Great Sedition Trial in 1944.[23] The case ended in a mistrial after the death of the presiding judge, Edward C. Eicher.[23]
Elizabeth and Albert divorced in 1943.[24] She remarried in 1954.
Contemporary press coverage
"Who then, is Mrs Dilling? Upon what strange meat has she been fed that she hath grown so great: And what inspired her, she who might have taken up knitting or petunia-growing, to adopt as her hobby the deliberate and sometimes hasty criticism of men and women she has never seen." - Harry Thornton Moore, "The Lady Patriot's Book," The New Republic, 8 January 1936
"To see the lady in action, screaming and leaping and ripping along at breakneck speed, is to see certain symptoms of simple hysteria on the loose." - Milton S. Mayer, "Mrs. Dilling: Lady of the Red Network," American Mercury, July 1939
"May God strengthen and uphold you, [Mrs Dilling] ... May your wonderful work grow and help save our Republic, ... a time is coming when you will be blessed ... You deserve a place in history comparable to Washington and Lincoln." - Quoted in Patriotic Research Bureau Bulletin, 4 July 1941[25]
Media references
A character based on Dilling named 'Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch' appears in Sinclair Lewis's 1930s novel It Can't Happen Here. The book deals with a fascist takeover of the United States in 1937.
Mari Sandoz's 1939 satirical novel Capital City makes reference to Dilling: "Mrs. Dilling...came to town to denounce the university 'with a Red behind every bush of bridalwreath.'"[26]
Bibliography
Books
- Dilling, Elizabeth Kirkpatrick (1964). The Plot Against Christianity. Omaha, NE: The Elizabeth Dilling Foundation. p. 497 pp. ISBN 0-939482-45-2.
- Dilling, Elizabeth Kirkpatrick (1940). The Octopus. Omaha, NE: Privately Printed. p. 256 pp. ISBN 0-89562-094-4.
- Dilling, Elizabeth Kirkpatrick (1935). The Red Network, A Who's Who And Handbook Of Radicalism For Patriots. Chicago, IL: Ayer Company Publishers. p. 338 pp. ISBN 0-405-09946-0.
- Dilling, Elizabeth Kirkpatrick (1936). The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background. Chicago, IL: Privately Printed. p. 439 pp. ASIN B0006ANJE8.
Pamphlets
- Red Revolution: Do We Want It Here? (1932)
- Borah, "borer from within" the G.O.P. (1936)
- Dare We Oppose Red Treason? (1937)
- The Red Betrayal of the Churches (1938)
- The Protocols 'Killed' Again
- Brotherhood (1953)
See also
References
- ^ Jeansonne, Glen (1996), "Chapter 12", Women of the Far Right: The Mother's Movement and World War II, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0-226-39589-8
- ^ Jeansonne, Glen; Luhrseen, David. "Elizabeth Dilling (1894–1966)", in Cook, Bernard A. Women and War: A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to the Present, ABC-CLIO, 2006, ISBN 978-1-85109-770-8, p. 153.
- ^ Jeansonne, p8
- ^ Jeansonne, p8
- ^ Jeansonne, p8
- ^ Erickson, p474-475
- ^ Jeansonne, p9
- ^ Jeansonne, p9
- ^ Erickson, pp475-476, p484
- ^ Jeansonne,p9
- ^ Jeansonne, p10
- ^ Erickson, p478
- ^ Jeansonne, p12
- ^ Erickson, p478
- ^ Jeansonne, p12
- ^ Erickson, p480
- ^ Erickson, pp480-482
- ^ Jeansonne, pp13-14
- ^ Erickson, pp480-482
- ^ Jeansonne, pp13-14
- ^ Jeansonne
- ^ Frederickson 825 - 826
- ^ a b A Mockery of Justice—The Great Sedition Trial of 1944
- ^ Jeansonne, Glen (1996), Women of the Far Right: The Mother's Movement and World War II, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 81, ISBN 0-226-39589-8
- ^ Erickson, 273
- ^ Sandoz, Mari. Capital City. 1939. Page 40
- Glen Jeansonne (9 June 1997). Women of the Far Right: The Mothers' Movement and World War II. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-39589-0.
- Erickson, Christine K. (2002). "“I have not had One Fact Disproven”: Elizabeth Dilling's Crusade Against Communism in the 1930s". Journal of American Studies 36 (3): 473–489. doi:10.1017/S0021875802006928. ISSN 0021-8758.
- Frederickson, Kari (1996). "CATHRINE CURTIS AND CONSERVATIVE ISOLATIONIST WOMEN, 1939-1941". The Historian 58 (4): 825–839. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.1996.tb00977.x. ISSN 0018-2370.
External links
- Full text of The Red Network
- A Mockery of Justice – The Great Sedition Trial of 1944, Barnes Review.
- Zoominfo page for Kirkpatrick Dilling
- Lawsuit against estate of Kirkpatrick
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