Henry Clarke received his doctorate in musicology from Harvard University and served during the Second World War as a private. He was a Quaker and came from a family with liberal views. He wrote this letter to his parents (to whom he gives the nickname “Panma”) when he was of college age. He observed that the “common proposals” for laws to prohibit Un-American ideologies (he referred to them as “Laws Against Extreme Radicals”) were uncomfortably similar to Nazi German laws that made every political party except the Nazis illegal. He argued that by considering laws to prohibit Un-American ideologies, the United States was perched on a dangerous precipice and might slide down into the same kind of moral and political bankruptcy and tyranny as could be found in Nazi Germany. Clarke was, as were many in the United States at the height of the Great Depression, clearly sympathetic to socialist and communist critiques of capitalism. The Nazis would enact the “Nuremberg Laws” in September of 1935. These laws would strip German Jews of their citizenship, their property and their right to work in all but the most menial occupations. Millions of Jewish people would be killed in Nazi concentrations camps.
Clarke, Henry Leland. Letter to Ward and Annie Clarke about Communism. May 17, 1935. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, American Centuries. https://americancenturies.org/collection/l06-061/. Accessed on October 16, 2024.
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