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The Boston Herald Rumor Clinic of World War II

When malignant rumors threatened to undermine civilian morale during World War II, the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic tried to put them to rest. The pioneering effort spread to dozens of other cities before the U.S. government consigned it to a slow death.

Rumors were a big problem during World War II, more so than in World War I. Then, they were directed against the enemy and usually involved atrocities committed by soldiers. But the most common World War II rumors involved the U.S. war effort. For example, Indian soldiers at Fort Devens were raping women. Or no U.S. Navy vessels survived Pearl Harbor.

One rumor had a woman’s head exploding after she permed her hair and went to work in a shell factory. According to another, unmarried, pregnant WAACs were sent home from North Africa. Some people spread the canard that canned crabmeat packed in Japan contained glass or poison.

Through its listening network of ‘morale wardens,’ the Rumor Clinic tracked down rumors. They spread in taverns and on factory floors, in schools and at parties, on wharves and in stores. Each Sunday, the Boston Herald published a rumor and refuted it. Often, the refutation included analysis of the motivation that started the rumor.

Sometimes the Herald blamed rumors on Axis propaganda. Germany had effectively waged psychological warfare to spread panic and demoralization among civilians before invading Poland and France.

“…[T]he Axis has been clever enough, via short-wave broadcasts and moral saboteurs, to exploit existing lines of discontent,” reported Life magazine in its Oct. 12, 1942 edition. “Thus the people of the U.S. are led to a sort of psychological suicide by serving to circulate dangerous lies about U.S. Jews, U.S. Negroes, U.S. allies, U.S. leaders.”

Boston Herald Rumor Clinic

The first Boston Herald Rumor Clinic column in early 1943 spiked a rumor supplied by the government. By the next week, readers were sending in rumors. By the third week, the Clinic received more rumors than it could handle.

The column included the rumor in italics followed by the word FACT. It then refuted the rumor in boldface, often explaining the psychological reason for the rumor’s popularity. The columns were posted on factory bulletin boards, included in department store pay envelopes and sent with clean wash to laundry customers.

One for the Rumor Clinic

Here’s one: A man walked into a Boston saloon and offered to buy a round. He said he was celebrating because his son was sent to Australia and had been promoted to corporal. The stranger beside him replied, “No cause to celebrate, my friend. Hundreds of soldiers who went out there are right back here in Boston now — insane. Bad food, terrible living conditions. Why, I’m told there’s not even room for all of them in the hospitals.” The bartender overheard the conversation, wrote it down and sent it to the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic.

Mistreatment of American soldiers was a common theme. So were waste of rationed items, government corruption, the imminence of defeat or victory and the value of war bonds. Rumors exacerbated fears about military weakness. They also worsened racial tensions and undermined cooperation for programs like food rationing.

Homegrown Rumors

Rumors didn’t always result from German propaganda. People distrusted the U.S. government, partly because they opposed the war. But they also had reason to question what the government told them. The Roosevelt administration, for example, kept from the public the extent of the losses at Pearl Harbor. Rumors flew that the West Coast had no defenses because the Japanese had destroyed the entire Pacific fleet and most military aircraft. The rumors spread so widely that President Roosevelt finally described the actual damage in a fireside chat – 10 weeks after the attack.

Sometimes rumors started casually. A man who commented that Boston’s chimneys could hide anti-aircraft led to the rumor that the roofs were bristling with guns.

Resentment of the women who stepped in to take a man’s job inspired lurid tales that plagued the WAACs – the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. A rumor flew that male doctors lined up naked WAACs for inspection at training centers. According to another, the training centers handed out contraceptives to the WAACs. Some spread the rumor that 90 percent of WAACs were prostitutes.

It turned out American GIs started those rumors.

Morale Wardens

The Boston Herald Rumor Clinic had three parts: First, the Boston Herald itself. Second, the Division of Propaganda Research, set up within the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety. The Division of Propaganda Research supervised the third part: a listening network of 300 ‘morale wardens’ — bartenders, waitresses, union representatives and insurance salesmen.

Robert Knapp, a student of Harvard psychology professor Gordon Allport, ran the Division of Propaganda Research.

Among the morale wardens was Frances Sweeney, who believed the enemy was exploiting traditional Irish hatred of the British. Life magazine described how the ’fighting Irish girl’ tracked down a rumor:

An African-American editor at the Boston Herald, William Harrison, told her he had heard a rumor that Indian soldiers at Fort Devens were killing and raping white people. He heard it from a friend who heard it from an artist, Lawrence Kupferman. Sweeney talked to Kupferman in his studio, where he told her he heard it from another artist, Giglio Dante. Dante told her he heard it in a North End bar from Tom McGowan, a business agent for the seaman’s union. Sweeney tracked him down at the union offices in what Life called the ‘tough Italian district.’ McGowan told her the rumor started after a Fort Devens soldier complained that Indians didn’t have a sense of humor.

Sweeney took the rumor to the anti-Fascist editor of La Costrocorreste, an Italian language newspaper, who printed a refutation in a column similar to the Herald’s Rumor Clinic.

Rise and Fall of the Rumor Clinic

Readers Digest and American Mercury also printed stories about the Rumor Clinic. Soon Allport and Knapp were helping to set them up around the country, in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, Long Island, Syracuse, New Jersey, South Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Chicago, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Montreal, Oregon, and Washington.

The Roosevelt administration was not pleased. It had established the Office of War Information (OWI) to control all information about the war, and had started its own Rumor Control project. It never got off the ground because government bureaucrats wanted centralized control. They didn’t like the idea of ivory tower academics freely handling government information.

The OWI went to war with the local Rumor Clinics. It established stringent criteria for getting federal funding and tried to bury them in red tape. The OWI condemned the rumor clinics in a 1943 New York Times story, claiming the attempts to spike rumors actually spread them. The Rumor Clinics went into a decline and were gone by war’s end.

How effective was the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic? It’s hard to say. The OWI claimed it helped spread rumors rather than spike them. Gordon Allport published a study arguing his approach was more effective.

Whatever the case, it is quite certain that no woman’s head blew up in a shell factory after she had a perm.

This story was updated in 2021.

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Ida May Fuller Gets the First Social Security Check

Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., received the first Social Security check on Jan. 31, 1940.

Ida May Fuller

The check was numbered 00-00-0001, the first of the first batch of 220,000 checks issued to adults as well as children.

Born on a farm outside of Ludlow, Ida May Fuller attended the Black River Academy in Rutland, Vt., three years behind Calvin Coolidge. She worked for a while as a schoolteacher, then in 1905 began work as a legal secretary. She never married.

Between 1937 and her retirement in 1939, she paid a total of $24.75 in Social Security payroll taxes.

While running an errand on Nov. 4, 1939 she dropped by the Rutland Social Security office to inquire. Urged to apply for benefits, she filed her claim.

“It wasn’t that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I’d been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it,” she said.

That first Social Security check was for $22.54, nearly what she had paid into the system.

Frances Perkins

Some critics thought it suspicious that a Vermonter received the first check because John Winant, former New Hampshire governor, was the first head of the Social Security Board.

But it was another New Englander who made sure Ida May Fuller got her check: Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of Labor.

Perkins was born in Boston, grew up in Worcester and summered at her family homestead in Newcastle, Maine. Her ancestors included Revolutionary War orator James Otis.

Perkins persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to ride the wave of Townsend clubs to support a federal retirement program for workers. California physician Francis Townsend started the clubs after he saw three elderly women rooting through a garbage can for food. During the Great Depression, more than half of older Americans were poor.

Thousands of Townsend clubs pressured Congress to pass an old age pension plan. Sensing the opportunity, Roosevelt acquiesced to Perkins’ demand. He assigned her to run the committee that would craft the legislation.

President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins behind him.

“The Taxing Power, My Dear”

As soon as the Social Security Act passed, conservatives in Congress began to attack it as unconstitutional. Frances Perkins had made sure it would withstand judicial scrutiny. Months before Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on Aug. 14, 1935, she had consulted with Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone, a native of Chesterfield, N.H.

Kirstin Downey describes what happened in her biography of Perkins:

At an afternoon part at Stone’s home, Frances was drinking tea with the justice when he asked her how things were going. She told him they were wrestling with how to establish an economic security program. Stone looked around to see if anyone was listening, then leaned in toward Frances. “The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power,” he said in quiet tones.

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security Act.

Paying for My Expenses

Though Ida May Fuller had paid into Social Security for only three years, she received monthly checks until her death on Jan. 27, 1975 at 100 years old. She received a total of $22,888.92 from Social Security.

During her last eight years, Ida May Fuller lived with her niece in Brattleboro, Vt. Near the end of her life she told a reporter her Social Security benefits “come pretty near paying for my expenses.”

She was described in 1955 as “a kindly, likable, practical and placid woman whose ability to derive deep satisfaction from simple, wholesome living has eased her through life.”

But as a Republican, she hadn’t voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

Ida May Fuller was 76 when the photo at the top of the page was taken in 1950. Congress had just voted an 80 percent raise in benefits, and she held up her check for $41.30. She didn’t think Congress should have raised the benefits.

With thanks to The Woman Behind the New Deal, by Kirstin Downey. This story was updated in 2021.

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The Spy Who Came In To The Bretton Woods Conference

As World War II was ending, 730 delegates from 44 nations converged on the Mount Washington Hotel for the Bretton Woods Conference. They aimed to create the economic foundations for a lasting peace.

At Bretton Woods: Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes

The two key figures in Bretton Woods, N.H., during three summer weeks in 1944 came from opposite ends of the social scale. On the one hand, British economist John Maynard Keynes has been described as the ‘servant-reared scion of Cambridge academics.’ U.S. Treasury official Harry Dexter White, on the other hand, was‘ a brash, dogged technocrat raised in working-class Boston by Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.’

One was a Soviet spy.

Bretton Woods

The 22-day Bretton Woods Conference increased government power over markets and ended shortages of gold and U.S. dollars. It established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to prevent the manipulation of exchange rates and to restrain dictators from economic aggression. It also created a predecessor to the World Bank.

Some people credit the economic reforms that emerged from Bretton Woods for the robust economic recovery after World War II. Others blame the World Bank and IMF for increasing poverty around the world.

The conference got off to a chaotic start at exactly 3 pm on July 1, 1944. The Mount Washington Hotel had been closed for two years, and its president needed to be persuaded to reopen it. The staff had only a month to get the hotel ready for the sudden influx of guests, and there were shortages of everything from beds to hot water.

Bit there was a political reason to hold the conference at the Mt. Washington Hotel: the Republican senator from New Hampshire, Charles Tobey.

Treasury Secretary Harry Morgenthau wanted an Eastern resort away from the heat and crowding of Washington, D.C. Charles Tobey faced a tough primary opponent. He was also likely to vote against the formation of a new international organization. President Roosevelt figured the conference would help Tobey win his primary, and he’d be more likely to vote for the Bretton Woods agreement when it came to the Senate for approval.

Mt. Washington Hotel

Harry Dexter White

Harry Dexter White was born on Oct. 9, 1892, the seventh son of recently arrived immigrants. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served in France. It wasn’t until he was 30 that he entered college. He graduated from Stanford and earned a PhD at Harvard at 38.

After teaching for a few years, White accepted a job at the U.S. Treasury in 1934. Long fascinated by the Soviet Union, and in Washington, D.C., he met men working for the Soviet Underground, including Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers.

Whittaker Chambers

Officially, Harry Dexter White was a New Deal Democrat. Unofficially, he supported Soviet-style socialism. He believed it worked.

At Bretton Woods he served as the senior U.S. negotiator. He dominated the conference and prevailed over Keynes, who sought a central world bank and a reserve currency other than the U.S. dollar. White was solicitous of the difficult Soviets at the conference, but biographers say that didn’t affect his negotiations on behalf of U.S. interests.

Revelations

On Jan. 23, 1946, President Truman nominated Harry Dexter White as U.S. director of the International Monetary Fund. The Senate approved him two weeks later, unaware the FBI had White under investigation.

On June 19, 1947, Harry Dexter White abruptly resigned from the IMF and cleared out his office that day. The U.S. attorney general had just ordered a federal grand jury investigation into charges he had passed documents to the Soviet Union during World War II.

White testified that he was not a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee on Aug. 13, 1948. Three days later he died of a heart attack at his home in Fitzwilliam, N.H. He was 55 years old.

Aftermath of Bretton Woods

The World Bank and IMF have come under heavy criticism. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz argued their free-market reforms harm developing countries.

The Washington Consensus, reached in the 1990s by the two organizations in the 1990s, also has a growing chorus of detractors. The Consensus preaches deregulation, privatization and shrinking of government. Critics call those “failed neoliberal policies” and charge they have exacerbated poverty.

With thanks to The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Mt. Washington Hotel By rickpilot_2000 from Hooksett, USA – Mt. Washington HotelUploaded by jbarta, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26447136.

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Marian Anderson Sings at the Lincoln Memorial

It was one of the most extraordinary concerts in history. Marian Anderson sang before 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial on April 9, 1939. She did it because the Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t let her sing before an integrated audience at their Constitution Hall.

Marian Anderson’s rich contralto voice, said conductor Arturo Toscanini, was heard “once in a hundred years.” Her dignified stage manner “melted the hearts of music lovers around the world,” wrote the New York Times. “Her determination helped shatter racial barriers in the arts.”

The Lincoln Memorial concert became a touchstone for the civil rights movement, a poignant symbol of African Americans’ struggle for equality.

Marian Anderson

Born Feb. 27, 1897, she rose from a poor childhood in South Philadelphia to acquire international fame and the warmth of a community in Danbury, Conn.

Until the mid 1930s, she performed mostly in Europe. There, she encountered less racial prejudice than in the United States. She sang everything from classical music to traditional American songs and spirituals.

In the late 1930s, Marian Anderson began to tour the United States, giving about 70 recitals a year. Despite her growing celebrity, she was denied admission to some hotels and restaurants. Albert Einstein helped her out. She first stayed at his house in 1937 when denied a hotel room before she performed at Princeton University.

Marian Anderson, 1940, by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The DAR’s refusal to let her perform thrust her into the international spotlight as a champion of racial equality. It sparked a furor in Washington, D.C., and a mass protest was planned. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR. She wrote about it in her weekly column. “They have taken an action which has been widely criticized in the press,” she wrote. “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.”

Then Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange the Lincoln Memorial concert.

The Concert

Anderson later admitted the prospect of that concert terrified her. But, she later wrote,” I could not run away from this situation. If I had anything to offer, I would have to do so now.”

Marian Anderson performed on Easter Sunday, not just to the 75,000 people standing before her, but to millions listening on the radio. Six microphones carried her voice for blocks.

Marian Anderson in front of the Lincoln Memorial..

The concert began at dusk. Ickes accompanied her to the stage under the statue of Abraham Lincoln.

“In this great auditorium under the sky all of us are free,” he said. “When God gave us this wonderful outdoors, He made no distinction of race or creed or color.”

She began with an emotional rendition of My Country ‘Tis of Thee. Then she sang she sang an aria from La favorite by Gaetano Donizetti. She followed that with Ave Maria by Franz Schubert and ended with the spirituals, Gospel Train, Trampin’ and My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord. At the end, the enthusiastic crowd insisted on an encore. She sang, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

Mitchell Jameson mural, “An Incident in Contemporary American Life,” 1943, inside the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Reaction

The concert lasted only a half hour, but it created a sensation. (Watch newsreel footage of it here.) The crowd rushed the stage, and police had to hold it back.

“I am so overwhelmed, I just can’t talk,” said Anderson when it was over. Then she thanked the crowd “from the bottom of my heart.”

Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, had joined Marian Anderson on stage. As the crowd surged forward, a single figure caught his eye.

It was a slender black girl dressed in somewhat too garishly hued Easter finery. Hers was not the face of one who had been the beneficiary of much education or opportunity. Her hands were particularly noticeable as she thrust them forward and upward, trying desperately, though she was some distance away from Miss Anderson, to touch the singer. They were hands that despite their youth had known only the dreary work of manual labor. Tears streamed down the girl’s dark face. Her hat was askew, but in her eyes flamed hope bordering on ecstasy. Life which had been none too easy for her held out greater hope because one who was also colored and who, like herself, had known poverty, privation, and prejudice, had, by her genius, gone a long way toward conquering bigotry. If Marian Anderson could do it, the girl’s eyes seemed to say, then I can, too.

Danbury

The year after the historic concert, Marian Anderson and her husband, architect Orpheus Fisher, bought a 100-acre farm on Joe’s Hill Road in Danbury. She lived there for 50 years.

The couple built a music studio on the property, now preserved and open to the public in downtown Danbury. They involved themselves in Danbury’s civic life. She joined the Danbury Music Centre board of directors. She also supported the Charles Ives Center for the Arts and the Danbury Chapter of the NAACP. He designed Danbury’s New Hope Baptist Church.

Marian Anderson insisted on being treated like an ordinary person. She would wait in line like everyone else at shops and restaurants. She visited the Danbury State Fair, gave a concert at Danbury High School, and at Christmas she sang at Danbury City Hall for the lighting of the Christmas tree.

Anderson died on April 8, 1993, one day shy of the 54th anniversary of her historic performance at the Lincoln Memorial.

The DAR

The Daughters of the American Revolution have since come full circle. Four years after refusing to let Marian Anderson sing at Constitution Hall, they invited her to perform at a benefit for the American Red Cross. She said she felt no sense of triumph.

When I finally walked onto the stage of Constitution Hall, I felt no different than I had in other halls… I felt that it was a beautiful concert hall and I was very happy to sing there.

The DAR’s Constitution Hall.

Seventy-five years after Marian Anderson’s historic performance, the DAR scheduled a concert to honor her. Then in 2014, the DAR issued a press release.

The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is truly honored to celebrate the life, the talent and the legacy of world-renowned opera singer Marian Anderson on the upcoming 75th anniversary of her historic concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

With thanks to Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey by Alan Keiler. This story has been updated in 2022. Image: Constitution Hall By AgnosticPreachersKid at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17979389.

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Frances Perkins Works for God, FDR and the Common Workingman

Frances Perkins was having tea with her friend, Mrs. Gordon Norris, in New York City, on the afternoon of March 25, 1911, when they heard fire engines screaming by. As the sirens kept coming, Frances Perkins followed them, and what she saw changed her life.

Frances Perkins

Smoke and flames engulfed a 10-story factory. Young men and women were jumping from the windows on the top floors as the fire pressed in on them. Onlookers screamed, ‘Help is coming,’ but they were beyond help.

In the end, 146 people – 123 women and 23 men – died in one of the worst industrial disasters in history, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Frances Perkins would never forget.

Frances Perkins

She was born on April 10, 1880 in Boston, Mass., as Fannie Coralie Perkins. Her parents, natives of Maine, owned a stationers’ store. Fannie changed her name to Frances after she graduated from college.

Fannie Perkins grew up in Worcester, Mass., and graduated from Mount Holyoke College committed to social change. She taught for a while, volunteered at settlement houses and at 30 received an M.A. in political science from Columbia University.

On the day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Frances Perkins headed the New York Consumers League. She lobbied for better hours and conditions for workers. Then came the afternoon when she witnessed the horror of dozens of young men and women flinging themselves to their deaths in front of her. Of that day she said,

I shall never forget that frozen horror which came over us as we stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing there was no help.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

She knew about the dangers of New York’s factories because she was taking a crash course in fire safety. After she witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist disaster, she left her job at the Consumers League. She then got a job as executive secretary for the Committee on Safety of the City of New York.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected governor in 1929, he appointed her as New York’s first Commissioner of Labor. In that post, she fought for minimum wage and unemployment insurance laws. She also fought against child labor and dangerous workplaces.

As a close ally of Governor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins reduced the work week for women and expanded factory investigations.

Brahmin Reformer

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., described her:

Brisk and articulate, with vivid dark eyes, a broad forehead and a pointed chin, usually wearing a felt tricorn hart, she remained a Brahmin reformer, proud of her New England background . . . and intent on beating sense into the heads of those foolish people who resisted progress. She had pungency of character, a dry wit, an inner gaiety, an instinct for practicality, a profound vein of religious feeling, and a compulsion to instruct . . .

Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in November 1932. He then appointed Frances Perkins Secretary of Labor, the first woman ever to serve in a United States cabinet position on Feb. 28, 1933. When he asked her to take the job, she told him she had a long list of programs she’d fight for, including a minimum wage and Social Security. “Nothing like this has ever been done in the United States before,” she said. “You know that, don’t you?”

She then served as Secretary of Labor for 12 years, longer than anyone. In that job she played a key role in writing New Deal legislation and helping to create Social Security. She also helped oversee the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Social Security

Thousands of Townsend clubs pressured Congress to pass an old age pension plan. Sensing the opportunity, Roosevelt agreed to Perkins’ demand. He assigned her to run the committee that would craft the legislation.

Of her time in Washington, she said,

I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain common workingmen.

With thanks to The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins–Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage by Kirstin Downey. You can learn more about Frances Perkins at the Frances Perkins Center in Damariscotta, Maine, where she spent her summers. This story was updated in 2022.

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