Editing Rex Stout (section)

===Public activities===
In the fall of 1925, [[Roger Nash Baldwin]] appointed Rex Stout to the board of the [[American Civil Liberties Union]]'s powerful National Council on Censorship; Stout served one term.<ref name="McAleer"/>{{Rp|196–197|date=October 2013}} Stout helped start the radical Marxist magazine ''[[The New Masses]]'', which succeeded ''[[The Masses]]'' and ''[[The Liberator (magazine)|The Liberator]]'' in 1926.<ref>{{cite book |last=Aaron |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Aaron |date=1992 |title=Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=smr4WKZNUEMC&q=rex+stout+clarence+darrow&pg=PA102 |location=New York |publisher=[[Columbia University Press]] |page=102 |isbn=9780231080385 }}</ref> He had been told that the magazine was primarily committed to bringing arts and letters to the masses, but he realized after a few issues "that it was Communist and intended to stay Communist", and he ended his association with it.<ref name="McAleer"/>{{Rp|197–198|date=October 2013}}

Stout was one of the officers and directors of the [[Vanguard Press]], a publishing house established with a grant from the [[Garland Fund]] to reprint left-wing classics at an affordable cost and publish new books otherwise deemed "unpublishable" by the commercial press of the day. He served as Vanguard's first president from 1926 to 1928, and continued as vice president until at least 1931. During his tenure, Vanguard issued 150 titles, including seven books by [[Scott Nearing]] and three of Stout's own novels—''How Like a God'' (1929), ''Seed on the Wind'' (1930), and ''Golden Remedy'' (1931).<ref name="McAleer"/>{{Rp|196–197|date=October 2013}}

In 1942, Stout described himself as a "pro-Labor, pro-[[New Deal]], pro-Roosevelt left liberal".<ref name=Manly>{{cite web |url=http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Harold%20Dies%20Committee%20Files/Dies%203-Ring%20Gray%20Binder/Dies%20Binder%2030.pdf |title=Manly, Chesly, 'Writer's War Board' Aids Smear Campaign. |publisher=[[Washington Times-Herald]], June 4, 1942. The Harold Weisberg Archive, Digital Collection, [[Hood College]] |access-date=2013-10-25}}</ref>

During [[World War II]], he worked with the advocacy group Friends of Democracy, chaired the [[Writers' War Board]] (a propaganda organization), and supported the [[Declaration by United Nations|embryonic United Nations]]. He lobbied for [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] to accept a fourth term as president. He developed an extreme anti-German attitude and wrote the provocative essay "We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail"<ref>"[http://www.nerowolfe.org/pdf/stout/activism/war-time/1943_01_NYTimes_We_shall_hate_or_we_shall_fail.pdf We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail]" (PDF), ''[[The New York Times]]'', January 17, 1943, with response by [[Walter Russell Bowie]] and reply from Rex Stout; at The Wolfe Pack. Retrieved 2013-10-18.</ref> which generated a flood of protests after its January 1943 publication in ''The New York Times''.<ref name="Townsend">{{cite book |editor1-last=Townsend |editor1-first=Guy M. |editor2-last=McAleer |editor2-first=John J. |editor3-last=Sapp |editor3-first=Judson C. |editor4-last=Schemer |editor4-first=Arriean |date=1980 |title=Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography |location=New York and London |publisher=Garland Publishing, Inc.|isbn=0-8240-9479-4 }}</ref>{{Rp|95}} The attitude is expressed by Nero Wolfe in the 1942 novella "[[Not Quite Dead Enough (novella)|Not Quite Dead Enough]]".

On August 9, 1942, Stout conducted the first of 62 wartime broadcasts of ''[[Our Secret Weapon]]'' on [[CBS Radio]]. The idea for the counterpropaganda series had been that of Sue Taylor White, wife of [[Paul White (journalist)|Paul White]], the first director of [[CBS News]]. Research was done under White's direction. "Hundreds of Axis propaganda broadcasts, beamed not merely to the Allied countries but to neutrals, were sifted weekly", wrote Stout's biographer John McAleer. "Rex himself, for an average of twenty hours a week, pored over the typewritten yellow sheets of accumulated data ... Then, using a dialogue format – Axis commentators making their assertions, and Rex Stout, the lie detective, offering his refutations – he dictated to his secretary the script of the fifteen-minute broadcast." By November 1942, Berlin Radio was reporting that "Rex Stout himself has cut his own production in detective stories from four to one a year and is devoting the entire balance of his time to writing official war propaganda." ''Newsweek'' described Stout as "stripping Axis short-wave propaganda down to the barest nonsensicals ... There's no doubt of its success."<ref name="Townsend"/>{{Rp|121–122|date=October 2013}}<ref name="McAleer"/>{{Rp|305–307}}

In September 1942, Stout defended FDR's policy of sending Japanese-Americans to concentration camps in a debate with the Socialist civil libertarian [[Norman Thomas]]. Stout charged "that Japanese-Americans include more fifth columnists than any other comparable group in the United States." When Thomas condemned the military's role as a "disgrace to our democracy" and comparable to "the powers of totalitarian dictators," Stout responded that moving "Japanese-Americans inland hardly constitutes Totalitarianism."<ref>{{cite book | last=Beito | first=David T. | title=The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance | edition=First | pages=185| location=Oakland | publisher=Independent Institute | year=2023 | isbn=978-1598133561}}</ref>

During the later part of the war and the post-war period, he also led the [[Society for the Prevention of World War III]] which lobbied for a harsh peace for Germany. When the war ended, Stout became active in the [[United World Federalists]].<ref>Steven Casey, "The campaign to sell a harsh peace for Germany to the American public, 1944–1948." ''History'' 90.297 (2005): 62–92. [http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000736 online]</ref>

[[House Un-American Activities Committee#Dies Committee (1938–1944)|House Committee on Un-American Activities]] chairman [[Martin Dies, Jr.|Martin Dies]] called him a Communist, and Stout is reputed to have said to him, "I hate Communists as much as you do, Martin, but there's one difference between us. I know what a Communist is and you don't."<ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/29497223/ |title=CLAP-TRAP Some Quips That Flew In From the Air Front |date=26 April 1945 |publisher=[[Amarillo Globe-News|Amarillo Globe-Times]], April 26, 1945 |access-date=2013-10-26}}</ref>

Stout was one of many American writers closely watched by [[J. Edgar Hoover]]'s FBI. Hoover considered him an enemy of the bureau and either a Communist or a tool of Communist-dominated groups. Stout's leadership of the [[Authors Guild|Authors League of America]] during the [[McCarthyism|McCarthy era]] was particularly irksome to the FBI. About a third of Stout's FBI file is devoted to his 1965 novel ''[[The Doorbell Rang]]''.<ref>{{cite book |last=Mitgang |first=Herbert |author-link=Herbert Mitgang |date=1988 |title=Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors |location=New York |publisher=Donald I. Fine |isbn=1-55611-077-4 |url=https://archive.org/details/dangerousdossier00mitg_0 }}</ref>{{Rp|216–217, 227}}{{efn|For more information, see the articles on [[Where There's a Will (novel)#The FBI and "Sisters in Trouble"|''Where There's a Will'']] and [[The Doorbell Rang#The FBI and The Doorbell Rang|''The Doorbell Rang'']].}}{{efn|In its April 1976 report, the [[Church Committee]] found that ''The Doorbell Rang'' is a reason that Rex Stout's name was one of 332 placed on the FBI's "not to contact list", which it cited as evidence of the FBI's political abuse of intelligence information.<ref>{{cite book |last=Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities |date=1976 |chapter=E. Political Abuse of Intelligence Information, subfinding c, footnote 91 |title=Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II |chapter-url=https://archive.org/stream/finalreportofsel02unit#page/239/mode/1up |publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office |page=239 }}</ref>}}