One thing was clear to him: the resolution of Danzig’s and the Polish Corridor’s status, he wrote for Social Justice, would “not be solved by courts of law, on who has what right, where and for how long, but will be solved by the play of power politics.” The arbiter of Poland’s fate lay in the war for dominance among the powerful nations of Europe. Right and wrong meant nothing—only strength did, in all its manifestations. In his final report from his Polish trip on behalf of Social Justice, Johnson declared that the German victory amounted to an unmitigated triumph for the Polish people and that nothing in the war’s outcome need concern Americans. German forces had inflicted scant harm on the country’s civilian life, he wrote, noting that “99 percent of the towns I visited since the war are not only intact but full of Polish peasants and Jewish shopkeepers.” He termed press representations of the Nazis’ treatment of the Poles “misinformed.”

Philip Johnson in 1964 sitting in front of his "Glass House,” designed in 1949. By Bruce Davidson/Magnum.

Covering His Tracks

Back in the United States by the end of 1939, Philip Johnson was confident that the war would end soon. At the time, he wrote in Social Justice that, while London rattled its tin sabers and Paris shivered within its reinforced bunkers along the Maginot Line, Germany had raced forward, but the race was no longer to war. “[Berlin’s] war aims are already attained, which is consistent with her inaction in the military sphere and her peace offensive in the ‘talk’ sphere,” wrote Johnson. After Poland, Germany was intent on ultimate victory in “the moral war,” he insisted. That was a war Berlin was also on the verge of winning, he argued. Hitler wished only to conclude peace with the rest of the world, in particular England. England’s far more aggressive aims, on the other hand, could only be pursued through total war, according to Johnson. Who then, he asked, was guilty of fomenting war in Europe?

Johnson asserted that imperial London was unwilling to accept a rival power’s domination of Europe and had therefore responded by insisting upon “the destruction of Hitlerism.” To Johnson’s mind, Germany’s success was a fait accompli. He scoffed at the Allies’ bellicose gestures. England’s social and economic decay and moral decadence appeared in stark relief, he wrote, through this hollow chatter about her intention to wage “an extremely aggressive war against the best armed nation in the world.” The windbags of England, according to Johnson, had nothing but the ability to bluff in the face of a virile Germany’s demonstrated willingness to fight. Bellicose threats backed by inaction, Johnson wrote, offered ample evidence of the pitiful state into which Britain had slumped. America, he argued, should support the formation of a new Europe dominated by the Third Reich.

As Americans debated what, if anything, their nation should do in the European war, and as anxieties mounted about German agents and sympathizers in the U.S., Johnson’s pro-Nazi activities began to attract wider public notice. In September 1940, a lengthy Harper’s Magazine article featured him among leading American Nazis. The F.B.I. followed Johnson and reported to headquarters that Johnson had friendships with several German diplomatic officials and Americans whose activities on behalf of German interests were well known. According to F.B.I. agents shadowing him, plus informant reports, Johnson had developed extensive contacts with the German Propaganda and Foreign Ministries while in Germany and then returned to propagandize on the Nazis’ behalf in the United States. The F.B.I. dossier includes a list of some of the books that could be found in Johnson’s personal library, at his home in Manhattan. They included the Nazi manifesto Signale der Neuen Zeit, by Joseph Goebbels; the anti-Semitic tract Handbuch der Judenfrage, by Theodor Fritsch; Germany’s Third Empire, the 1923 book that first popularized the idea of a Third Reich, by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; and The Radio Discourses of Father Coughlin. Johnson’s friends began warning him about the risks he was running. On F.D.R.’s orders, the Justice Department soon began to scrutinize groups advocating for Germany and against American intervention in the European war. On January 14, 1940, after a lengthy undercover operation, during which an informant was planted in Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, the F.B.I. arrested 18 members of the New York City branch on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. The F.B.I. claimed the men had planned to bomb various Jewish- and Communist-organization offices; blow up theaters, bridges, banks, and other structures; assassinate government officials; and seize stores of arms—“so that,” according to F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, “a dictatorship could be set up here, similar to the Hitler dictatorship in Germany.” Most of those arrested were eventually acquitted, but anyone associated with Coughlin was now under watch as a possible subversive. Lawrence Dennis, Johnson’s intellectual guiding light, became a prime target: he was indicted and charged with sedition, along with 28 others (four more were indicted before the case came to trial). After the death of the trial judge resulted in a mistrial, the government dropped the case. Some of the charged men died before they could be brought to trial. One committed suicide. Alone among those implicated by the F.B.I. and by congressional investigations as possible German agents, Philip Johnson was never arrested or charged.

Philip Johnson with three models that were shown at the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit Early Modern Architecture, Chicago, 1870-1910, which opened in January, 1933. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Fascist? Me?

With nearly all of his American Fascist friends and associates under indictment, the 34-year-old Johnson knew he had to change his spots. He enrolled as a full-time student at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He stopped in twice in September 1940 at the German Embassy in Washington for reasons F.B.I. informants could not explain, but after that his life as an evangelist for Fascism came to an abrupt end.