A few weeks ago, I watched a movie from 1943 titled Watch on the Rhine. It starred Bette Davis and Paul Lukas. I highly recommend it.
I won’t say much about the plot because it develops as it goes and to say much would be to give away too many spoilers.
Here’s the Wikipedia write-up for those who are impatient.
It takes place in 1940 in Washington, D.C. or its suburbs, when the U.S. is not yet explicitly at war with Germany.
I noted two things that highlight the loss of two of our important economic freedoms.
First, one of the characters needs to carry a great deal of money with him: $20,000, which would translate to over $400,000 today. Yet he doesn’t worry about being stopped by police and facing almost certain asset forfeiture.
Second, someone calls an airline to get one of the characters a flight to Mexico. She gives the name Ritter. That’s not his real name. But wouldn’t they figure that out when he checked in by comparing that name with the name on his ID? No. There was no such check.
It isn’t just that in 1940, people had freedom to carry large sums of money and freedom to travel without being ID-checked. I first travelled on an airline in the summer of 1969, when I flew from Winnipeg to Chicago to attend a conference in Rockford, Illinois. I didn’t carry large sums of money but I could have. Also, no one checked my ID. I just gave my name to the Northwest Orient ticket guy in Winnipeg, who wrote it out.
Interesting fact: Lillian Hellman, the author of the play, may have been a Communist. Dashiell Hammett, the screenwriter, was a Communist. Why is that interesting? Here’s what Wikipedia says:
Hellman wrote Watch on the Rhine in 1940, following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939. The play’s call for a united international alliance against Hitler directly contradicted the Communist position at the time. Its title comes from a German patriotic song, “Die Wacht am Rhein“.
Good for her.
Dashiell Hammett would have had no trouble writing the screenplay because he did so in 1942, after the Communist Party had turned against Hitler.
READER COMMENTS
Alan Goldhammer
Apr 19 2025 at 11:05am
There is no doubt that Hellman was a communist.
More famous was the longstanding feud between Hellman and Mary McCarthy. McCarthy’s put down, “….every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”” remains a classic. I saw the Dick Cavett show episode when she said this. Hellman sued for defamation. The case lingered on until Hellman’s death without being adjudicated. Nobody really knows what triggered the feud but this Katie Roiphe article is interesting.
One of the findings by McCarthy’s defense team was that Hellman’s story where she cast herself as an anti-Nazi heroine who smuggled money into pre-war Berlin was false. Some might remember the movie about this story, ‘Julia’, that starred Jane Fonda and Vannessa Redgrave (the film was pretty good). The actual events were true but the smuggler was a woman Hellman had never met.
David Henderson
Apr 19 2025 at 11:37am
Thanks, Alan.
I suspect you’re right about Hellman being a Communist, but I couldn’t find the slam-dunk evidence. I might have looked too quickly.
Alan Goldhammer
Apr 19 2025 at 1:24pm
There was a good biography that came out in 2012 that I read (A difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman By Alice Kessler-Harris). It covers the period in the 1930s when she supported the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil war. She joined the party at that time. It’s not clear whether this was because of Hammett’s politics which were also far left and he was open about his joining of the party.
I only know this stuff right now as I’m working on a Substack post on California Noir fiction (mostly Chandler and Macdonald) and read up on Hammett. If you can find a copy of his “Red Harvest”, it makes for interesting reading as it has been cited as a Marxist critique of society.
David Henderson
Apr 19 2025 at 2:48pm
Thanks, Alan.
Monte
Apr 19 2025 at 3:35pm
Freedom from income taxes was lost in 1913 with the ratification of the 16th amendment. Since then, there’s been a host of books and movies of every genre centered around people dealing with the IRS. One such movie is Stranger Than Fiction, a hilarious take on the mundane life of an IRS agent “who begins hearing a disembodied voice narrating his life as it happens – seemingly the text of a novel in which it is stated that he, the main character, will soon die – and he frantically seeks to somehow prevent his death.”
On a more serious note, The Income Tax: Root of All Evil is a book written by Frank Chodorov lamenting the abrogation of citizen’s property rights by taxation:
“What’s the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.” – Mark Twain
Craig
Apr 20 2025 at 10:19am
Maybe not 1940 because of the war, but just prior to that most had the ability to emigrate/immigrate at will and give life a try somewhere else.
Peter
Apr 22 2025 at 12:59am
Yep, people forget how the right immigrate and emigrate, even between states, was lost. You don’t even have to go back to 1943, flying without ID or moving between states without restriction was something I remember even doing in the 21st century.
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