Bill Cohn on “Combating the Enemy Within”

Early in the Depression, on February 2, 1931, Silas H. Strawn, Chairman of the United States Chamber of Commerce, warned,  “in a condition of this kind, the thing to be feared most is fear itself.” In March 1933 President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt echoed this same sentiment in his inaugural address when he told the American people “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  

Even before America’s entry into World War II and then during the war, FDR discovered there was something to fear in the likely presence of fascist and communist foreign agents who were engaged in internal subversion, among other things.  

Internal dangers and combating the enemy within has a history dating back to the late nineteen century if not before, reaching full maturity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Cohn is a retired college professor who taught history and American studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and European history at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.