The Real Message of "Don't Be A Sucker"
What a pragmatic US propaganda film from 1945 can teach us today
Every now and then, I see an excerpt from a post-war US propaganda film pop up in my feed. In the slice usually shared of “Don’t Be A Sucker” (1946), we see a man on a platform preaching hate toward immigrants and Black persons, claiming that both groups have denied real Americans their entitlement to jobs and prosperity.
But our focus isn’t really on him: it’s on a young man in the crowd, who seems interested in what the hatemonger is selling; and on an older man who notices this young man’s interest in the demagogue. Together, they listen as the speaker’s list expands to include more groups supposedly stealing from real Americans, and the young man seems to go along with this rhetoric until the Freemasons are named.
This shakes him because he’s a Freemason, and the old man beside him highlights this point: hate speech matters when it affects your minority, but not until then.
The two walk to a bench to discuss this further, as the young man processes everything he’d bought into before the Freemasons were mentioned. “What about the other people?” he wants to know—to which the Hungarian immigrant replies that there are no “other people”, only “American people”, and that he’s seen before the impact of rhetoric that tries to convince citizens to view their society in any other way.
This excerpt of “Don’t Be A Sucker” resurfaced in a big way in US culture after 2016, when anti-fascist resistance rose in lockstep with the emboldened alt-right seen cheering the rise of the former US president. And that makes sense, because there’s something importantly unsettling about the reminder that charismatic speakers spouting hate, and being listened to when they do, is by no means a new threat in the US. Although some test audiences back in the 1940s doubted the realism of the demagogue in this US Army Signal Corps production, the US had just gone through a long period of attention to the hateful radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest with some 40 million listeners at the height of his fame, who traded in antisemitic hate speech and personally advanced the blood-libel pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his weekly magazine, Social Justice.
(So no, unfortunately such hatemongers were a familiar sight and sound back then.)
But I do find it a shame that more people aren’t familiar with the whole film, because there is another, deeper message in “Don’t Be A Sucker” that is often lost today.
Granted, I understand why the piece can feel a little dated. When it starts, you’re first introduced to boxing, boozing, gambling, and carousing with loose women, so you know that this piece was geared toward a male audience. This also means that it leaves out the role that women have historically played in cultivating fascism, too.
Nevertheless, what happens after that bench scene between the Hungarian immigrant and the easily beguiled US youth is of critical importance—and maybe more so than the lesson we just gained while listening to a demagogue rile up his local audience.
What the friendly old man does next is walk his young acquaintance through the build-up of the Third Reich on an ideological level. His narrative doesn’t cleanly align with chronological history, but that’s to be expected for a production of this nature: it’s been simplified to focus on the psychological allure that pulled some effortlessly into the Nazi Party, and made it so hard for those who tried to speak out.
But there are two key lessons in this story, which we seem to have forgotten today.
The first is the fact that this topic needs to be discussed at all.
It might seem so easy, from our distance in history, to imagine the 1940s as a time when everyone surely understood the dangers of fascism. The war had consumed US citizens, hadn’t it? The news had been full of grand and terrible reports for years!
So why should a young man in the mid-1940s need a history lesson on the build-up of events in Europe that led to World War II?
That’s the terrible danger of reading history, though: everything we study about the era tends to homogenize knowledge, giving the impression that everyone at the time was as fully up-to-speed as we get to be, when reading about the topic today. As if there weren’t also info silos in the 1940s, and many people just going about their lives with staggering world events consigned to the periphery—good for conversation in a pub or at a dinner table, maybe, but not necessarily as pressing as the work of finding a good job, appeasing one’s boss, finding a missus and managing a home with her, making sure one’s parents were keeping well in their increasing age, and dealing with difficult siblings and neighbours and local nuisance politicians to boot.
Yet we need only look around us today, and realize that info silos exist now as well—and despite the fact that we have so much more everyday information at our disposal about the rest of the world. Yes, yes, there are raging wars halfway across the globe (for many of us), but we also have the stress of mounting bills, family dramas, medical crises (and the labyrinth of institutional red tape they present), and various political and environmental disasters looming on our own horizons. We have our own bugbears, passions, and diversions to keep us from anything resembling common cause—and that makes us all vulnerable to divisive rhetoric of one kind or another.
Which leads us to the other extraordinary part of this mid-20th-century production: its pragmatic understanding of the socioeconomic underpinnings of extremism.
Honestly, if you tried to share this film’s empathetic depiction of how everyday Germans went along with Nazism, you might find yourself in slim company today. We’re so used to depicting Nazis as caricatures—a faceless nemesis with absolutely no common threads with the rest of humanity—that we often miss critical data necessary to recognize the pragmatic factors that lead people to extremism in the first place.
Consider the core story used for our film’s depiction of the rise of mass Nazism. I know the portion of script that I’ve transcribed is long, but it’s rich in narrative detail. Obviously, the profile of the five young men mentioned at the outset are fictional representations meant to simplify things immensely (two to represent scapegoats, and three to represent working and middle-class suckers), but together they highlight the sort of quotidian lives that can very quickly be swept up in grand ideological designs:
The Hungarian Immigrant: Five young men that I knew were standing in the crowd listening to the Nazi speaker. Eric was a Catholic. Anton, a student of mine, was a Jew. Heinrich owned a small hardware store. Karl was a farmer. And Hans was an unemployed metal-worker.
Nazi Speaker: To our true Aryan Germans, I say it is time YOU inherited the nation which rightfully belongs to you. To you alone belongs the glorious destiny of the Greater Germany. The Nazi Party will provide land for the farmer, work for the worker, and profits for the small businessman. Who is getting these things now? The Jew. The Jew has stolen our nation and our birthright. Who makes all the money and takes our jobs? The Jew! He must be shunned! He must be ostracized! He must be eliminated. And the Catholics. We don’t want our great nation run by a foreign church. We Germans will know what to do with these people when the time comes. They and their faith must be destroyed! Then there are the Freemasons. In Germany, we have no place for secret societies. There may be only one society, and that is the Nazi Party! There will be no secrecy about that, in the new Greater Germany.
HI: One by one, he attacked each minority, and he split them off one from the other. These men were all fellow Germans when they came here today. Now they were split into rival groups, suspicious of each other, hating each other. They were being swindled—all of them. But the man who was really being fooled was Hans. He was pure German, according to Nazi standards. To him they promised everything, and he fell for it.
NS: You who are true Aryan Germans may share the glorious destiny of our Fatherland. You are the pure-blooded! The master race! It is your divine right to rule! And the Nazi Party stands ready to put you into power. It is for you to command our Germany and someday the entire world.
HI: That’s how Hans became a superman. They gave him a uniform and pumped up his ego. He wasn’t just a little fellow out of work anymore. He was a member of the master race. His wife didn’t quite understand. Even though he was a superman, there wasn’t any food in the house. Stupid woman. Didn’t she realize that the Nazis were going to make jobs for everybody? There would be plenty of food and clothing, and a new house. Everything they wanted! The glorious future of Germany was to be theirs, and their children would some day rule the world. …
Hans had swallowed the bait all right. And these were the men who baited the hook. Why? So that Hans could come to power? Of course not. So they could come to power. They would merely use Hans to help them get there. He would do the dirty work for them. Hans and thousands of others like him, all playing a sucker’s game. They gambled with other people’s liberty, and of course they lost their own. A nation of suckers. Hitler needed these people. There was lots of work to be done.
…
A lot of my German friends wondered what had hit them. How did it happen? Where did it start? It started right here [CUT TO: the scene with the Nazi Speaker], and this is where it could have been stopped—if those people had stood together. If they had protected each other, they could have resisted the Nazi threat. Together they would have been strong, but once they allowed themselves to be split apart, they were helpless. When that first minority lost out, everybody lost out. They made the mistake of gambling with other people’s freedom.
Now let’s see how those bets paid off:
Karl the Farmer was gambling on a better life for himself. What he got was extra hours of backbreaking work, as much as a hundred hours a week. He was forced to stay on his land and produce what he was told to produce, because now Hitler was preparing for war.
For Heinrich, who owned the hardware store, the bet didn’t pay off either. One hundred and four thousand small businesses were closed in two years.
And for Hans, conditions hadn’t improved any. He had a job now, in the munitions factory, but he worked long hours for little pay. The working conditions grew increasingly bad. And even though he didn’t like the job, he wasn’t permitted to leave it. [Title cards add: “20% increase in work hours per week”, “1932: 34 deaths per thousand workers; 1938: 62 deaths per thousand workers.” “It is strictly forbidden to leave one’s job.”] There still wasn’t enough food in his house. Hitler said you couldn’t have butter and cannon. So Hans didn’t have butter.
And when Hitler decided the time was right, Germany went to war. Not by declaring war, but by a carefully prepared sneak attack. Once again, Hitler needed Hans to do his dirty work. … But in the crucial test of war, Hitler’s race theories didn’t pay off. … For the misguided Germans who had swallowed the Nazi bait, the Nazi game did not pay off. The continent of Europe was strewn with millions of German bodies—pure Aryan bodies. Karl the Farmer was left in the snow outside of Moscow. Heinrich stayed in Italy, at Salerno. And Hans, who was going to rule the world, got only a little patch of Normandy that he could call his own.
In the above summation, I’ve included title cards that offer statistics for the US viewer: concrete counters to claims made by the Nazi Party to the working man.
The inclusion of such data in this production is telling, because it reflects a film team cognizant of its audience: a nation of similar workers, with similar working-life problems, who could very easily be hoodwinked by similar promises of easy solutions and a much better life—if the Other was vanquished; if the land was returned to its rightful owners and no others.
Watching the whole of “Don’t Be A Sucker” is a sobering reminder, then—but not just that we’ve always had to be on the lookout for rhetoric that supports violent myths of ethno-national destiny. Today, as in the mid-1940s, it is so easy for us to exist in info silos: to be so caught up in our personal issues and everyday routines that we might even miss key sociopolitical lessons from conflicts happening in our lifetimes.
And the one real change, between then and now?
Back in the 1940s, it seems it was still easy to speak pragmatically about the material conditions that underpinned everyday humans buying into the lie of Nazi propaganda.
Today, though, as we struggle with hatemongers nursing theories of ethnic superiority all around us, we need to remember that it is not an act of complicity with violent groups to identify the socioeconomic and psychological factors on which their recruitment hinges. Only when we become more literate in human behaviour, and can recognize what makes some of us more vulnerable than others to the sucker’s game, can we ever hope to counteract the pervasive role of hate in our societies writ large.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
P.S. For further reading on this accord, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Milton Mayer’s excellent They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955), which offers a deep-dive into how everyday German citizens rationalized the gamble even if they were dubious of many of its claims. This is an important, if chilling reminder of how easily most societies could and will walk into the same trap today. Excerpt here.