Rev. Frank Woodruff Johnson (Elizabeth Dilling): The Octopus (1940)

THE OCTOPUS By Rev. Frank Woodruff Johnson
October 1940

An attack on the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League and the feared subversion of the US by Communism (or in Rabbi Weiss's word he considered its equivalent: "Judaism").

I'm out of the asylum on a long weekend pass and unearthed some more Pearls beyond Preiss.

The author of this book was in fact Elizabeth Dilling*, who had adopted the pseudonym of Rev. Frank Woodruff Johnson having previously gone "au naturel" in her writings and been smeared as "anti-semitic" (a canard as meaningful as being "anti-semolina," in the words of Douglas Read).

Very detailed, documented sources on all the personalia of political and industrial disruption.
Many names of US and British personages and their connections and allegiances.
The prelude to the US's involvement in WW2 envisioned.

The labour of researching this book (237 pages ex-index) must itself have been colossal, even discounting the collating and writing.

Why no equivalent scholarly books today? There are Hoffman II / Jones writing massive tomes on Judaism in the abstract or from the historical perspective, but the current day detail of political sensitivity is noticeably absent from them; in the case of Jones's magnum opus, even Blood Libel / Jewish Ritual Murder is not engaged, neutrally, partially or otherwise.

Initial seeding: approx. 1-1/2hrs.

* From Elizabeth Dilling: "The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today" (4th edition 1983)--

Foreword

Elizabeth Dilling Stokes was born, raised, and educated in Chicago. After attending the
University of Chicago she married, and for many years devoted her life to her children, social
activities on the North Shore of Chicago, and being a concert harpist. After hearing of the great "humanitarian experiment" in Soviet Russia, she traveled there in 1931, and was able to go
behind the scenes. She was shocked at the forced labor, the squalid living quarters, and
deplorable living conditions, and the atmosphere of fear created by the Soviet dictatorship.

She was most shocked by the virulent anti-Christianity of the atheist Communist regime.

Following her return to the United States she lectured and wrote about what she had seen,
realizing from the opposition which immediately arose that a substantial Marxist movement was
active in the United States. In 1934 her first book The Red Network was published, and exposé
of the persons and organizations furthering Red causes in the United States. In 1936, her second
book, The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background, was published.

Almost immediately after these books were published, she was attacked as "anti-semitic,"
although she had actually offered her anti-Communist services to Jewish organizations, and
knew nothing of organized Jewish involvement in the Marxist movement. After researching and
studying, however, in 1940 she published her third book The Octopus, which dealt with these
subjects.

After World War II commenced, Mrs. Dilling became convinced that, despite President
Roosevelt's protestations that not one American boy would ever again fight on foreign soil, there
was a movement afoot to involve the United States, with the result that a substantial part of the world would be communized later. In 1941, she led a Mother's March on Washington to oppose
the "Lend Lease" bill, proclaimed to help keep us out of war by its sponsors, but proving the last
step for our involvement. The bill passed by only one vote. A few months later, the United
States went to war.

In 1944, Mrs. Dilling's views involved her in the now infamous mass "sedition" trial. The
case was ultimately dismissed by a Federal Court as "a travesty on justice."

She was later remarried to Jeremiah Stokes, a Christian anti-Communist writer, and she
continued to write and lecture in behalf of Christianity and Constitutional Americanism, first
publishing this book in 1964.

Mrs. Dilling Stokes died in 1966 at the age of 72.