Elizabeth Dilling - Anticommunist and Isolationist Activities

Anticommunist and Isolationist Activities

The couple traveled widely, and in 1931 they visited the Soviet Union. They spent a month there, and filmed what they saw of the atrocious conditions. Especially alarming to Dilling was their Soviet guide's proclaiming, "Our world revolution will start with China and end with the United States!"

When Dilling returned home to Illinois, she went on tour showing her movies and describing the Soviet "workers' paradise" as anything but. From 1932 to 1934 she was associated with Edwin Marshall Hadley of Chicago, serving as secretary of his anti-Communist organization, the Paul Reveres. She broke with him in 1934 over Hadley's anti-Jewish stance, and the organization was dissolved later that year (Ironically, Dilling's own views about Jews were soon to become much more extreme than Hadley's).

After leaving Hadley, Dilling threw herself into collecting facts on Communism full time. The result was published as The Red Network—A Who's Who of Radicalism for Patriots (1934), a self-declared exposé of Communist front activity in the U.S., which was widely circulated (100,000 copies are claimed). As an example of her technique, in the entry for Albert Einstein, which links him to various Communist organizations, Dilling notes: "married to Russian; his much press-agented relativity theory is supposedly beyond the intelligence of almost everyone except himself." She offers an apologia for the Nazi confiscation of Einstein's property in Germany, saying it was because he was a Communist. The entry for Eleanor Roosevelt reads "Socialist sympathizer and associate, pacifist". A Protestant minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, was listed because his books were "highly recommended by socialists and other radicals"

She then wrote The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background (1936), condemning the New Deal, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and officials in his administration, claiming they had strong links to Communists. In The Octopus (1940), which she wrote under the pseudonym Rev. Frank Woodruff Johnson, she attacked the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and linked Jews to communism. It was then that she shifted her emphasis to Jews as being responsible for all the world's problems, partly based on her readings of the Talmud.

As debate raged about whether the U.S. should get involved in World War II, Dilling became an activist in two organizations inspired by the antisemitic Detroit-based radio priest Father Charles Coughlin: Mothers' Peace Movement, which she co-founded with Lyrl Clark Van Hyning, and We the Mothers Mobilize for America, based in Chicago. She was also involved with the America First Committee, famously associated with Charles Lindbergh, Norman Thomas, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other prominent isolationists and opponents of the war.

After the Pearl Harbor attack, Dilling was indicted, along with 28 others, which led to the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. The case finally ended in a mistrial after the death of the presiding judge, Edward C. Eicher. The Chicago Tribune editorialized on the trial as "one of the blackest marks on the record of American jurisprudence". The Smith Act under which the prosecution took place was later found to be unconstitutional in several rulings by the Supreme Court.

In the 1950s, Dilling was a frequent contributor to Conde McGinley's antisemitic broadsheet Common Sense, and her name often joined his in joint letters to members of the United States Congress.

On October 18, 1943, Elizabeth and Albert were divorced after 25 years of rocky marriage. Her second husband, Jeremiah Stokes (1877–1954), was a lawyer and author. He published the antisemitic The Plot Against Christianity in 1964, which included over 200 pages of photocopies from the Soncino edition of the Talmud, with his wife's underlines added.