“Louis Wirth made no bones about his suspicion of the groups that were traditionally known as “ethnic,” ic., the recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Like Stalin, his mentor on the nationalities issue, Wirth considered ethnics as a fifth column which could not be trusted to serve the interests of the ruling class. Those interests became national security issues once that elite succeeded in maneuvering America into war. In this he shared the political views of the psychological warfare establishment as well as the ethnic prejudices which undergirded them. The purpose of psychological warfare as it was resurrected at the University of Chicago in the late ’30s was ultimately ethnic. The WASP elite used their advanced communications techniques to prevent ethnic groups in America from communicating with their countries of origin but also to disrupt communications among the members of those groups in the United States as well. “At heart modern psychological warfare has been a tool for managing empire,” writes Christopher Simpson, “It’s primary utility has been its ability to suppress or distort unauthorized communication among subject peoples, including domestic U.S. dissenters who channeled the wisdom or morality of imperial policies.” CatholicismUrban Planning Book:The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing Source: The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing
“The United States could not win the war if blacks continued as sharecroppers down South. The South was not an important area either politically or economically as far as the internationalists were concerned. (“The white South,” Myrdal wrote, “is itself a minority and a national problem.”) It was important only as a source of much-needed labor, at a time when most white southerners concurred because they no longer needed them to chop or harvest cotton and considered migration a simple solution to their biggest social problem. The foundations which did the thinking for the internationalist ruling class quickly realized that that flow of labor into the factories of the industrial North was impeded less by the system of political segregation in the South than by what they would eventually term the de-facto housing segregation in the North, which meant, in effect, the existence of residential patterns based on ethnic neighborhoods. The logistics problem facing Louis Wirth and his colleagues in the psychological-warfare establishment was not so much how to move the black up from the South — the wage differential and the railroads would accomplish that — but rather where to put him when he got there. Northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia were essentially an assemblage of neighborhoods arranged as ethnic fiefdoms, dominated at that time by the most recent arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe as well as the Irish and Germans. As Wirth makes clear in his sociological writings, any group that has this kind of cohesiveness and population density had political power, and the question in his mind was precisely whether this political power was going to be used in the interests of the WASP ruling elite, who needed these people to fight a war that had nothing approaching majority support among ethnics of the sort Wirth viewed with suspicion. This group of “ethnic” Americans posed a problem for the psychological-warfare establishment because it posed a problem to the ethnic group that made up that establishment. This group of people constituted a Gestalt - ethnic, Catholic, unionized, and urban - whose mutual and reinforcing affiliations effectively removed them from the influence of instruments of mass communication which the psychological-warfare establishment saw as critical in controlling them. If one added the demographic increase this group enjoyed — as Catholics they were forbidden to use contraceptives — it is easy enough to see that their increase in political power posed a threat to WASP hegemony over the culture at precisely the moment when the WASP elite was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with fascism. It was Wirth’s job to bring them under control, lest they jeopardize the war effort.” CatholicismWorld War IBlack HistoryUrban Planning Book:The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing Source: The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing