Several times in her article, Alice Hamilton implicitly implies that a movement like the Nazi youth movement would not be possible in the United States. While I do not see an imminent danger of a totalitarian movement becoming popular on American soil, one should always guard against the idea that such a thing could never happen here. For someone (and I forget who at the moment) famously said that the tragedy of National Socialism was not the tragedy of Germany, but of Humankind.
Hamilton mentions that the posting of the twelve theses in an American university would be met with vigorous discussion, certainly not the muted acceptance characteristic of the German university of which she speaks. The sweeping implicit generalization that Germans are by nature accepting of racism is as potentially dangerous as any propaganda method in Hitlerjugend Quex as it encourages the reader not to think about his or her own potential for the acceptance of hate. The effect is for the reader to think: “those Germans are so easily duped” rather than “I wonder if, in a similarly politically hostile environment, American students would be able to make a courageous stand against widely accepted beliefs.”
A similar situation arises in Hamilton’s comment about book capturing and burning. Of course these things are “stupid, ugly and primitive,” but they do not look so to all Americans inherently. Yes it is true that such hostility to learning is not traditional in the United States, but it should be noted that while Hamilton was writing, the US Post Office was routinely seizing copies of James Joyce’s Ulysees because it was deemed ‘obscene’. Thus while her argument about youths taking power in Germany may be valid, Hamilton’s ill-advised writings about American superiority are not that different from certain elements of Nazi propaganda, since they discourage critical thought.
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