In early September 1939, the press contingent racing after the German army as it invaded Poland reached the final battleground on the Baltic Sea. From the German command post on a Gdansk hilltop, the journalist William L. Shirer surveyed the front along a ridge two miles distant—“where the killing was going on,” he told American listeners in a broadcast a few days later. He had refused the offer of a German helmet, he wrote in his secret notes, finding it “repellent” and “symbolic of brute German force.” The battle was too far off to spot individual fighters, but he could see the Polish positions and that the Germans had surrounded them on three sides and cut off escape with their artillery fire on the fourth.
Shirer was sickened and horrified by what he saw. But something about the press pool he was traveling with disturbed him in a different way. Although normally most at ease in the company of his many reporter friends, Shirer was dismayed by his assigned traveling companion. The German Propaganda Ministry had forced him to share a room with another American correspondent, Philip Cortelyou Johnson. Despite the two men’s similar ages and American pasts, their shared love for Europe, and the overseas camaraderie war reporters might normally enjoy, “none of us can stand the fellow,” Shirer noted in a diary entry. He wanted only to slip away from him. The reporters in the pool felt an intense dislike for the talkative and frenetic Johnson, already among the most prominent evangelizers for modernism in architecture, though not yet among the most famous architects in the world. They had reason to fear this flighty, off-putting American who seemed uncomfortably close to their German Propaganda Ministry minders. According to a memo in the dossier the F.B.I. began keeping on Johnson, which traced his activities throughout the 1930s in some detail, “From a source considered reliable, it was reported that Johnson was feted by the German authorities in charge of the press correspondents visiting the Polish front, and that the Germans were quite solicitous about his welfare.”
For Philip Johnson, following the German army as it wiped out the last resisters in Poland seemed like living within a dream—in his case, a very happy dream. Like Shirer, he had watched the Third Reich rise as a relentlessly aggressive military power. He had encountered Hitler’s spellbinding rhetoric even before Hitler became Germany’s leader. His reactions were as different from Shirer’s as night from day: Shirer’s nightmare scene was, for Johnson, a Utopian fantasy come true. He had thrown himself wholly into the Fascist cause.
“Crescendo and Climax”
Articulate and passionate about anything modern, new, artful, and monumental, Johnson was stunningly creative, socially incandescent, and passionately opinionated on all matters of taste. He had a coruscating, arrogant wit, and relished table talk and wicked gossip about art and ideas and the people who made them. Margaret Scolari Barr, the wife of the influential art historian Alfred Barr, Johnson’s mentor and the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, recalled him in the period as “handsome, always cheerful, pulsating with new ideas and hopes. He was wildly impatient, could not sit down. . . . His way of speaking, of thinking—that quickness and vibration” brought him many friends, wide attention, and early success.
Thanks to his prominent Cleveland family, he also had money. This endowed Johnson with endless opportunity and the ability to make friends not only with his charm and intellectual gifts but with his material ones, too. He knew everyone in the art world who mattered and made a home among Manhattan’s artistically minded high-society crowd. At most gatherings, that scene centered on him. Enamored of Europe as the result of boyhood summers spent there with his mother, Johnson returned often to the continent. And, as his biographer Franz Schulze observed, along with rich artistic and intellectual exposure, those trips gave Johnson his first chance to explore his sexual longing for men. The smartest of the smart set, Johnson never lacked for offers to attend society’s finest salons or to share his bed with lovers.
Consumed by the idea then foreign to most Americans that architecture and design were fine arts in their own right, he used his personal funds to establish the new Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture, making it the first major American museum to exhibit contemporary architecture and design. At age 26, he collaborated in curating MoMA’s landmark 1932 show, “The International Style: Architecture Since 1922.” This groundbreaking exhibition introduced Americans to masters of modern European architectural style, such as Walter Gropius and Berlin’s Bauhaus school and the French master Le Corbusier, along with a few American practitioners, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Raymond Hood. The exhibition and the accompanying book would set the course of world architecture for the next 40 years.
But Johnson longed for something greater. He had read deeply in the writings of the ancients and their 19th-century German interpreters, especially the works of his foremost philosophical inspiration, Friedrich Nietzsche. His notion of the superman, the hero able to exercise his will without regard for modern society’s conventions of right and wrong, fit Johnson’s conception of the master builder, in architecture and perhaps more.
Not long after the MoMA exhibition, Johnson traveled back to Europe. In the summer of 1932 he went to Berlin, where he stayed on into the fall during a period of revolutionary ferment and political struggle when Nietzschean ideas were about to come to power in the form of Adolf Hitler. At a friend’s urging, Johnson drove in early October to a Hitler Youth rally being held in a large field in Potsdam, outside Berlin. It would be the first time he saw Hitler. That day, he experienced a revolution of the soul, a revelation he would ultimately describe as “totally febrile.” Decades later, he told Franz Schulze, “You simply could not fail to be caught up in the excitement of it, by the marching songs, by the crescendo and climax of the whole thing, as Hitler came on at last to harangue the crowd.” He could not separate the energy of the orchestrated frenzy from the day’s sexual charge, either, feeling thrilled at the sight of “all those blond boys in black leather” marching past an ebullient führer.
From Hitler to Huey
Johnson returned home certain his life had been transformed. He found in Nazism a new international ideal. The aesthetic power and exaltation he experienced in viewing modernist architecture found its complete national expression in the Hitler-centered Fascist movement. Here was a way not merely to rebuild cities with a unified and monumental aesthetic vision for the Machine Age but to spur a rebirth of mankind itself. He had never expressed any interest in politics before. That had now changed.
Over the next two years, Johnson moved back and forth between Europe and New York City. At home, he mounted shows and promoted modernist artists whose works he considered the best of the new. All the while, he kept an eye on the Nazis as they consolidated power. He had slept with his share of men in the demimonde of Weimar Berlin; now he turned a blind eye to Nazi restrictions on homosexual behavior, which brought imprisonment and even death sentences.
Yet it was in modern art and architecture, the scene of his greatest personal triumphs, that he overlooked the most obvious discrepancies between Nazi policy and his own views. While arranging for Bauhaus friends to flee the increasingly dangerous attacks against their “degenerate” art by anti-modernist Nazi forces, he saw the apparent contradiction in their plight only as a momentary falling back in order to leap that much further ahead.
Sharing the Protestant social elite’s then common disdain for Jews and its fear of organized labor, he had no problem with the Nazis’ scapegoating of Jews or excoriation of Communists. He wrote of a visit to Paris, “Lack of leadership and direction in the [French] state has let the one group get control who always gain power in a nation’s time of weakness—the Jews.” To his bigotry he added a personal snobbery toward mass democratic society. In an age of social collapse, Germany had figured out solutions he thought right for the crisis of democracy. He was sure Fascism could transform America, if perhaps occasioning some temporary dislocations for certain “alien” groups, much as it had in Germany. He felt ready to embark on an effort to import Fascism to America.
To that end, he became a devoted follower of Lawrence Dennis, a Harvard graduate 13 years his senior, and began to support him financially. A light-skinned African American who passed his life as white, Dennis was a former foreign service officer and a sharp economic analyst who was deeply alienated from American society. He had attended Nuremberg rallies and met with the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. He wrote several theoretical works on the decay of capitalism and on the Fascist alternative, including The Coming American Fascism in 1936. Five years later, Life magazine described him as “America’s No. 1 intellectual Fascist.” Johnson and his longtime friend Alan Blackburn, a fellow MoMA official, were drawn to Dennis. The three gathered regularly at Johnson’s apartment to explore how, in practical terms, to bring about America’s Fascist future.
The press could not help but take notice of the prominent young men’s switch from the art world to the political arena. The New York Times reported on their newfound mission in an article headlined “TWO FORSAKE ART TO FOUND A PARTY.” Blackburn told the Times, “All we have is the strength of our convictions. . . . We feel that there are 20,000,000 to 25,000,000 people in this country who are suffering at present from the inefficiency of government. We feel that there is too much emphasis on theory and intellectualism. There ought to be more emotionalism in politics”—emotionalism, he meant, of the kind Hitler had tapped so successfully in Germany.
First, though, they needed an American Hitler. They thought they might have found him in Huey Long, the “Kingfish.” The populist former Louisiana governor and now United States senator was already famous, and among many notorious, for his rabble-rousing charisma and autocratic grip on his impoverished southern state. In Johnson’s view, Long needed only “a brains trust,” like the one F.D.R. took with him to Washington, to win audiences throughout the land with his message. As Schulze describes it, Johnson and Blackburn put on gray shirts—a restyled version of the brown ones worn by Hitler’s paramilitary followers—placed pennons emblazoned with a flying wedge of Johnson’s design on his Packard’s fenders, and nosed the big car south to Baton Rouge.
Their footloose political convictions exuded a whimsy in venturing beyond society’s norms. “I’m leaving … to be Huey Long’s minister of fine arts,” Johnson said to friends, a risible version of Albert Speer’s role as Hitler’s personal architect in Berlin. Perhaps with tongue in cheek, the New York Herald Tribune article covering their trip to Louisiana noted that the pair thought not only about politics but also about firearms: “Mr. Johnson favored a submachine gun, but Mr. Blackburn preferred one of the larger types of pistols.” Blackburn was quoted as saying in earnest, “Of course we are interested in firearms. . . . I don’t think it will do any of us here in the United States any harm in the next few years to know how to shoot straight.” According to biographer Franz Schulze, the cultural impresario Lincoln Kirstein stopped speaking to Johnson for several years after learning that Johnson had kept him and others on a list slated “for elimination in the coming revolution.”
In Louisiana, Johnson and Blackburn tried to meet with Huey Long, who was considering a run for president. Before they could put their talents into his service, though, one of Long’s many political enemies shot him dead.
Falling for Father Coughlin
Despite this setback, Johnson was undeterred. He shifted his allegiance to a man even more in tune with his personal political agenda, Father Charles Edward Coughlin.
Every Sunday, the Roman Catholic “radio priest” preached a secular “Mass” over the airwaves during his wildly popular The Golden Hour of the Shrine of the Little Flower, broadcast from his parish house in Royal Oak, Michigan (where Johnson lived briefly, in 1936). At its peak, Coughlin’s listenership reached some 30 million to 40 million people each week over William Shirer’s own CBS Radio network—about one-third of the U.S. population, and the largest audience of any regular radio program on the planet. Eventually, Coughlin forged his own 68-station coast-to-coast network.
After church on Sunday mornings, families tuned in during the afternoons to hear his weekly on-air sermon, a florid combination of religious homily, politics, storytelling, and economic theory—delivered in his honeyed brogue with musical interludes on the organ and appeals for donations. Drawing on scriptural revelation and sensational secret sources placed deep within the enemy camp, he offered answers to the causes of his listeners’ struggles and solace for their misery—together with a wrathful finger of blame pointing at elites, bosses of all kinds, Communists, and anti-Christians. As the Depression deepened, he accused F.D.R. of having turned his back on the little guy.
Coughlin excoriated Wall Street bankers and the Federal Reserve, whom he called “the international money changers in the temple,” for fleecing millions of average Americans. As the years went on, he homed in on a single Janus-faced culprit he called the “international conspiracy of Jewish bankers” and, without seeing any contradiction, the “closely interwoven relationship between Communism and Jewry.” Listeners who might never have met a Communist or a Jew understood that there were stateless, conspiratorial, money-grubbing villains working their evil designs upon America—and plotting worse. Audiences worshipped Coughlin. At his frequent public appearances, men and women fought to touch the hem of his cassock. A special post office had to be set up in Royal Oak, for letters, often carrying listeners’ precious dimes and dollars. These letters arrived at the rate of as many as one million weekly.
The money and popularity encouraged ambitions that grew beyond preaching. Out of the Little Flower parish house, Coughlin launched a political organization he called the National Union for Social Justice, which backed candidates for office in several elections. Social Justice, the National Union’s weekly news-and-opinion broadsheet, published his sermons, long disquisitions by theologians about evil loosed upon the world, texts of speeches by sympathetic politicians, and articles about economics and world events. Almost every issue contained articles about the “Jewish conspiracy” or about destructive economic forces led by figures with Jewish names.
Coughlin rallied his following with a call “for restoring America to the Americans.” However, he did not pretend to be democratic. The night before the 1936 election, Coughlin, who had thrown his weight behind a third-party right-wing candidate for the presidency, proclaimed, “We are at the crossroads. One road leads to Communism, the other to Fascism.” His own road was clear: “I take the road to Fascism.” Although not religious, Philip Johnson believed Coughlin could emerge as an American Fascist leader. He relished the Fascistic message underlying Father Coughlin’s movement and shared the commonly held view that, as one reporter wrote at the time, “Coughlinism is the thread on which American Fascism has been strung.”
An estimated 80,000 supporters turned out for a September 1936 rally at Chicago’s Riverview Park. Clad in white clerical collar and priestly black cassock, Coughlin stood alone before the vast throng high atop a stark white rostrum towering some 20 feet over the heads of his listeners. Directly behind him rose a five-story white wall topped by a row of enormous American flags fluttering from black posts. Silhouetted against the white, Coughlin bobbed like a shadowboxer, punching back with his fists and raising his hands in slashing gestures toward the blue sky. His voice blasted out of immense speakers. He commanded his thousands to “form your battalions, take up the shield of your defense, unsheathe the sword of your truth, and carry on … so that the Communists on the one hand cannot scourge us and that the modern capitalists on the other cannot plague us.” Philip Johnson had designed the platform, modeling it on the one from which Hitler spoke each year at the giant Nazi Party rally on Zeppelin Field, in Nuremberg.
Welcoming the War
Johnson returned to Germany in the summer of 1938. The threat of war had been building ever since Hitler’s annexation of Austria the previous March. According to Schulze, Johnson arrived with twin goals of taking a special course offered by the German government for foreigners interested in Nazism—during which he seems to have made contact with German agents who would be active in the United States—and attending the annual Nazi rally in Nuremberg.
Like Shirer, though with the opposite reaction, Johnson found in the Nazi Party rallies much of the spectacle of Wagnerian opera—an artistic performance encompassing all the audience’s senses and beyond its power to resist. Here was a vision combining aesthetics, eroticism, and war, forces capable of sweeping away the past and building a new world. It was not lost on him that Hitler was trained in the visual arts and was obsessed with architecture and with constructing monumental works and carrying out gargantuan urban-redevelopment plans for all the great cities of Europe to serve his vision of a Thousand-Year Reich.
On September 1, 1939, the day Hitler invaded Poland, Johnson needed to pinch himself to be sure he was not dreaming. Sitting at an outdoor café in Munich, he kept repeating, “This is the first day of war.” Three weeks later, he went as Social Justice’s correspondent on the German Propaganda Ministry road trip to see the war close up in Poland. Sticking beside Shirer, Johnson kept grilling him. Shirer thought it odd that Johnson was the lone American reporter invited along on the press trip who was not affiliated with a major news outlet. Shirer noted that Johnson kept “posing as anti-Nazi,” but Johnson’s reputation had preceded him, and Shirer tagged his traveling companion as “an American Fascist.” He grumbled that Johnson kept trying “to pump me for my attitude.” He fended him off with “a few bored grunts.” Shirer assumed Johnson would report back anything he heard to the German Propaganda Ministry.
Johnson’s views on the German invasion would soon appear in his articles for Social Justice. Johnson had visited the Polish Corridor, the Baltic seacoast, and Danzig during the last days of peace, in August. At the time he described it as “the region of some awful plague. The fields were nothing but stone, there were no trees, mere paths instead of roads. In the towns there were no shops, no automobiles, no pavements and again no trees. There were not even any Poles to be seen in the streets, only Jews!” He found that “the longer I am here, the more I have to struggle to grasp once more what could possibly be the reason for Danzig’s not being part of Germany.”
One thing was clear to him: the resolution of Danzig’s and the Polish Corridor’s status, he wrote for Social Justice, would “not be solved by courts of law, on who has what right, where and for how long, but will be solved by the play of power politics.” The arbiter of Poland’s fate lay in the war for dominance among the powerful nations of Europe. Right and wrong meant nothing—only strength did, in all its manifestations. In his final report from his Polish trip on behalf of Social Justice, Johnson declared that the German victory amounted to an unmitigated triumph for the Polish people and that nothing in the war’s outcome need concern Americans. German forces had inflicted scant harm on the country’s civilian life, he wrote, noting that “99 percent of the towns I visited since the war are not only intact but full of Polish peasants and Jewish shopkeepers.” He termed press representations of the Nazis’ treatment of the Poles “misinformed.”
Covering His Tracks
Back in the United States by the end of 1939, Philip Johnson was confident that the war would end soon. At the time, he wrote in Social Justice that, while London rattled its tin sabers and Paris shivered within its reinforced bunkers along the Maginot Line, Germany had raced forward, but the race was no longer to war. “[Berlin’s] war aims are already attained, which is consistent with her inaction in the military sphere and her peace offensive in the ‘talk’ sphere,” wrote Johnson. After Poland, Germany was intent on ultimate victory in “the moral war,” he insisted. That was a war Berlin was also on the verge of winning, he argued. Hitler wished only to conclude peace with the rest of the world, in particular England. England’s far more aggressive aims, on the other hand, could only be pursued through total war, according to Johnson. Who then, he asked, was guilty of fomenting war in Europe?
Johnson asserted that imperial London was unwilling to accept a rival power’s domination of Europe and had therefore responded by insisting upon “the destruction of Hitlerism.” To Johnson’s mind, Germany’s success was a fait accompli. He scoffed at the Allies’ bellicose gestures. England’s social and economic decay and moral decadence appeared in stark relief, he wrote, through this hollow chatter about her intention to wage “an extremely aggressive war against the best armed nation in the world.” The windbags of England, according to Johnson, had nothing but the ability to bluff in the face of a virile Germany’s demonstrated willingness to fight. Bellicose threats backed by inaction, Johnson wrote, offered ample evidence of the pitiful state into which Britain had slumped. America, he argued, should support the formation of a new Europe dominated by the Third Reich.
As Americans debated what, if anything, their nation should do in the European war, and as anxieties mounted about German agents and sympathizers in the U.S., Johnson’s pro-Nazi activities began to attract wider public notice. In September 1940, a lengthy Harper’s Magazine article featured him among leading American Nazis. The F.B.I. followed Johnson and reported to headquarters that Johnson had friendships with several German diplomatic officials and Americans whose activities on behalf of German interests were well known. According to F.B.I. agents shadowing him, plus informant reports, Johnson had developed extensive contacts with the German Propaganda and Foreign Ministries while in Germany and then returned to propagandize on the Nazis’ behalf in the United States. The F.B.I. dossier includes a list of some of the books that could be found in Johnson’s personal library, at his home in Manhattan. They included the Nazi manifesto Signale der Neuen Zeit, by Joseph Goebbels; the anti-Semitic tract Handbuch der Judenfrage, by Theodor Fritsch; Germany’s Third Empire, the 1923 book that first popularized the idea of a Third Reich, by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; and The Radio Discourses of Father Coughlin. Johnson’s friends began warning him about the risks he was running. On F.D.R.’s orders, the Justice Department soon began to scrutinize groups advocating for Germany and against American intervention in the European war. On January 14, 1940, after a lengthy undercover operation, during which an informant was planted in Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, the F.B.I. arrested 18 members of the New York City branch on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. The F.B.I. claimed the men had planned to bomb various Jewish- and Communist-organization offices; blow up theaters, bridges, banks, and other structures; assassinate government officials; and seize stores of arms—“so that,” according to F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, “a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany.” Most of those arrested were eventually acquitted, but anyone associated with Coughlin was now under watch as a possible subversive. Lawrence Dennis, Johnson’s intellectual guiding light, became a prime target: he was indicted and charged with sedition, along with 28 others (four more were indicted before the case came to trial). After the death of the trial judge resulted in a mistrial, the government dropped the case. Some of the charged men died before they could be brought to trial. One committed suicide. Alone among those implicated by the F.B.I. and by congressional investigations as possible German agents, Philip Johnson was never arrested or charged.
Fascist? Me?
With nearly all of his American Fascist friends and associates under indictment, the 34-year-old Johnson knew he had to change his spots. He enrolled as a full-time student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He stopped in twice in September 1940 at the German Embassy in Washington for reasons F.B.I. informants could not explain, but after that his life as an evangelist for Fascism came to an abrupt end.
He went to class and soon became Harvard’s enfant terrible of modernism. He designed and built a glass-walled modernist pavilion as his residence in Cambridge. Not surprisingly, his lively, sharply opinionated presence and prodigious spending made his home the center for forward-looking intellectuals. He was back to arguing about principles of art, design, and architecture. But the ghost of his past could not be put aside entirely. William Shirer’s best-selling Berlin Diary, which was published in 1941, pulled no punches in its description of Johnson, the “American fascist” who covered the Polish front with him at the start of the Second World War.
When the book appeared, Johnson was distraught. He went to absurd lengths to show that he was not the man Shirer depicted, even organizing a campus anti-Fascist group. Johnson knew that F.B.I. agents were still stalking him, looking into his current activities and questioning his associates. Investigators reported back to bureau headquarters in Washington: “In some quarters [it is] believed that [Johnson] has reformed and is attempting to convince people of his sincerity while others feel that his present position is covering up his real feelings.” Whatever Johnson’s shape-shifting and his neighbors’ doubts about him at this point, he continued on at Harvard and avoided being swept up in government crackdowns. Nonetheless, a year later, when questions arose about a possible position for Johnson in government intelligence, an F.B.I. agent sent a memo to J. Edgar Hoover observing, “I can think of no more dangerous man to have working in an agency which possesses so many military secrets.”
How did Johnson, virtually alone among his Fascist associates, manage to avoid indictment? The answer may lie in the influence of powerful friends. One man in particular could well have been influential: Washington’s powerful Latin-American intelligence-and-propaganda czar Nelson Rockefeller, who knew Johnson well from his New York days. Rockefeller’s mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was the force behind the Museum of Modern Art. Rockefeller regarded himself as a connoisseur of art, particularly architecture, and had helped his father develop the monumental Rockefeller Center. He was a leading patron of modern art in America and served as president of the Museum of Modern Art, where he had taken a particular interest in Johnson’s Department of Architecture.
Two years younger than Johnson, Rockefeller was present when, in the last days of 1934, Johnson announced his grandiose plan to leave the museum and become “Huey Long’s minister of fine arts.” Did Rockefeller ask the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, which were busy hauling in Coughlinites and Fascist leaders, to stay away from Johnson? The arrest of MoMA’s precocious and celebrated architectural leading light for being a German agent would have cast an embarrassing shadow upon his friends in the Rockefeller family. For whatever reason, Johnson remained free to pursue his Harvard studies. He was determined to leave the world of politics behind him—to make himself anew as an architect and tastemaker for the postwar world that was coming to be.
Years later, in 1978, the journalist and critic Robert Hughes interviewed Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who had spent 20 years in prison for his crimes. Hughes described the meeting in an article in The Guardian in 2003—he had just come across a lost tape recording of the conversation. He wrote:
Speer then asked Hughes to bring Johnson an inscribed copy of his book on architecture, which Hughes duly presented to him at the Four Seasons—much to the architect’s horror. Hughes did not seem to know anything about Johnson’s Fascist past—he makes no reference to it at all. He reports that Johnson said, “You haven’t shown this to anyone?” And when assured that Hughes had not, he added, “Thank heavens for small mercies.” Hughes read no particular meaning into this comment. His account of the episode suggests amusement. But Johnson’s reaction comes across as alarm.
The last thing Johnson needed was chatter about his buried Nazi history. Johnson always wanted to be on the winning side. The Thousand-Year Reich was not to be, but so far the American century had been turning out just fine.
Adapted from 1941: Fighting the Shadow War, by Marc Wortman, to be published this month by Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc.; © 2016 by the author.
