"The New York Times" on August 11, 1940 featured three editorial cartoons using the term. John Langdon-Davies, a British journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War, wrote an account called "The Fifth Column" which was published the same year. In November 1940, Ralph Thomson, reviewing Harold Lavine's "Fifth Column in America," a study of Communist and fascist groups in the U.S., in "The New York Times," questioned his choice of that title: "the phrase has been worked so hard that it no longer means much of anything."