Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies
The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies (abbr .: CDAAA; also: William Allen White Committee) was an American propaganda organization which called for material and moral support from England and other allies in the fight against Nazi Germany .
The establishment was announced to the public on May 20, 1940. The CDAAA was based in New York .
Members
The chairmen were William Allen White and Clark Eichelberger. According to White, the shoe manufacturer William Lewis Douglas had the greatest influence . Influential advisors in the background were the banker Thomas W. Lamont and the lawyer Frederic R. Coudert. At the top of the leadership were the entrepreneur Hugh Moore, Frederick McKee, Frank G. Boudreau, the lawyer Thomas K. Finletter (since November 1940), John Price Jones, William Emerson, Florence Jaffray Harriman , the sugar manufacturer Ellsworth Bunker and Chester LaRoche.
The Marxist historian Gerhart Hass counts JP Morgan, Jr. , William A. Vanderbilt and Herbert H. Lehman from the Lehman Brothers banking house among its prominent members.
The 750,000 members included a large number of medium and large business people, academics and intellectuals. There were 633 local committees, the most active of which were those in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, and San Francisco.
Of 550 members in June 1940, more than half lived in the northeastern United States, 143 were located in New York. West of the Mississippi, it was only 95 where the main contender, the America First Committee, had most of its supporters.
activities
The CDAAA organized hundreds of radio broadcasts, thousands of meetings and rallies in all parts of the country, distributed millions of leaflets, handouts, reprints of speeches and articles, stickers and Christmas cards. Initiated thousands of letters to the President and Congress and collected millions of petition signatures.
After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the CDAAA advocated aid deliveries to the Soviet Union .
Cooperation with the government was close, but in April 1941 government support shifted more to the Freedom Committee .
The Socialist Party of America claims the CDAAA was started by reactionary elements of Wall Street's industrial and financial oligarchy .
literature
- Jane Harriet Schwar: Interventionist Propaganda and Pressure Groups in the United States 1937–1941 . Dissertation from Ohio State University 1973, pp. 173-232. on-line
Individual evidence
- ↑ Gerhart Hass : From Munich to Pearl Harbor. On the history of German-American relations 1938-1941 . Berlin 1965, p. 222.