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The first words Viereck wrote of the man would prove prophetic: “Adolf Hitler must be handled with care. He is a human explosive.”
“The Peace Treaty and Bolshevism are two heads of one monster,” Hitler insisted. “We must decapitate both.” Decapitating Bolshevism, in Hitler’s calculus, required ridding Germany of the “alien in their midst”—the Jews. When Viereck suggested to the younger man that perhaps his sweeping antisemitism might displace many great artists, scientists, manufacturers, and generally esteemed citizens, Hitler disagreed: “The fact that a man is decent is no reason why we should not eliminate him.”
“Propaganda helped us to power,” Joseph Goebbels announced at the Nazi Party congress in 1936. “Propaganda kept us in power. Propaganda will help us conquer the world.”
Hitler explained the plan in typically blunt terms: “Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself.”
Lawrence Dennis, proud to be known as “the intellectual godfather of American fascism”; his mentee Philip Johnson, later a celebrated modern architect; William Dudley Pelley, who, after founding the Nazi wannabe Silver Shirts, dreamed of being America’s own Hitler; the raging white supremacist and antisemite George Deatherage, who vowed that “religion that does not stay within the accepted bounds of Christian morality shall be suppressed.”
James True, who had professed his admiration for the book burners in Nazified Austria because “filthy books have been published by the hundreds, under the guise of science or ‘liberalism’ for the debauchery of youth. Quite naturally the first move of the Aryans was to destroy this mental poison. Soon, we predict, we shall have similar book burnings in this country.”
The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former American military officers who stood ready to lead.
Back in 1932, on his return to New York from the Hitler Youth rally that stirred his soul, young Philip Johnson’s dream was to bring Hitler-style fascism to America.
drafting civil and criminal codes that placed all persons of Jewish heritage outside the privileges and protections of the state. Toward that latter aim, one particular foreign country offered a road map of sorts. And so, in 1933, the German Foreign Office dispatched a young man named Heinrich Krieger to the University of Arkansas School of Law.
“Awful it may be to contemplate, but the reality is that the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example of race law,” James Q. Whitman wrote in his landmark 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model. “Nazi lawyers regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law.”
The Pittsburgh Courier—then the nation’s most widely circulated African American newspaper—published an editorial in 1933 titled “Hitler Learns from America.”
Das Rassenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten (Race law in the United States), Krieger laid out his case that “race protection” had been a crucial motivator in the construction of America’s tiered system of justice.
The architect of Coolidge’s 1924 immigration restrictions was a wealthy eugenicist lawyer who went on to form the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, whose slogan was “Keep America American.” In 1936, a leader of the group was given an honorary doctorate by a Nazi-affiliated German university for his advancement in North America of racial eugenics—the fake science of preserving racial purity.
the same American Coalition of Patriotic Societies would lead the charge to block Jewish refugees from coming to America. The
(“The Constitution follows the flag,” Secretary of War Elihu Root famously quipped when the court announced its unreasoned decision, “but doesn’t quite catch up with it.”) These islands and their likely ungovernable and unassimilable “alien races” belonged to the United States, the court opined, but were not a part of it.
On the morning of September 8, 1935, according to reports, Huey was back in Baton Rouge, busy whipping votes in a special legislative session he had called. He was about to jam through a bill making it illegal—punishable by fines and imprisonment—for federal officers to exercise any authority in Louisiana that was not explicitly granted by the Constitution of the United States. In blunt terms, Huey was threatening that any federal government officials coming into the state of Louisiana would risk arrest and imprisonment for doing so.
“The broadest and boldest defiance of Federal authority since the Civil War,” wrote a reporter for the United Press syndicate.
However, the Post went on, “in the career of Huey Long is epitomized the essential weakness of democracy—the pathetic willingness of the electorate to trust a glib tongue and a dynamic personality. Quite justifiably he was called a forerunner of American Fascism.”
it’s no wonder that whenever Lawrence Dennis came to Washington to, say, make a speech at the Shoreham Hotel ballroom—“Is Fascism in the United States Inevitable?”—German diplomats would invite him to dinner to flatter him and fill him in on all the latest exciting happenings in Berlin.
his most recent book, The Coming American Fascism. “Until Mr. Dennis arrived on scene,” one reporter noted at the time, “American fascism did not have a prophet.”
One big appeal of fascism, if nothing else, was its unapologetic embrace of cruelty. Cruelty toward others, coupled with hypersensitivity toward any slight to oneself.
Spot on.
Lawrence Dennis put on a clinic in name-dropping (Keynes “had a very high opinion of me”); elitism (“Social order requires government and administration by a ruling class or power-exercising class which must always be an aristocracy of management, however selected…. For the masses, the school is a necessary process to enable them to read signs and advertisements”);
To strip Jews of citizenship and property rights, they didn’t need overt laws that just came right out and said that. “Why don’t you treat the Jews more or less as we treat the Negroes in America?” he asked.
after his failed Louisiana sojourn to try to attach himself to Huey Long, and then Long’s assassination, Johnson had gone to work for Father Charles Coughlin, the “radio priest” whose national audience at the time numbered in the tens of millions.
“All those blond boys in black leather”
If Roosevelt is elected, Coughlin reportedly warned near the end of the election season, there were going to be “more bullet holes in the White House than you could count with an adding machine.” “Democracy is doomed,” said Coughlin. “This is our last election. It is Fascism or Communism. We are at a crossroads…. I take the road to Fascism.”
“I spent hair-raising evenings in the parlors of middle-class citizens who worshipped a man named William Dudley Pelley,” Sevareid wrote. “To his followers—supposedly 6,000 in Minnesota—Pelley is the coming saviour for the nation. They believe he is the man to do what Hitler has done in Germany.”
Love and harmony were nice and all, but for pure motive force, hate trumps. His weekly the Silver Legion Ranger provided readers with somebody to hate—the Jews, who were busy planning world domination.
“shirt of silver with the great scarlet L emblazoned on your banner and over your heart, standing for love, loyalty and liberation.”
Ford “attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists,” a close friend wrote in his diary after witnessing a late-night, round-the-campfire diatribe. Ford whined about “New York Jews” and railed about “Wall Street Kikes.” He even ordered his engineers to forgo the use of any brass in his Model T automobile, calling it “Jew metal.” “Wherever there’s anything wrong with a country, you’ll find the Jews on the job there,” Ford said.
the Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion. The pamphlet was the work of rabidly antisemitic Russian fabulists furious at the Bolsheviks’ toppling of the old tsarist aristocracy. The tsarists portrayed the Russian Revolution as not merely a local affair; it was the early innings of a plot by a cabal of all-powerful Jewish schemers to take over the world. The Protocols was billed as the product of a surreptitious note taker at a top-secret meeting wherein these Jewish puppet masters had drawn up their strategy and tactics in detail. There was no secret meeting, obviously, and
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The German edition of Ford’s book had landed in the hands of one particularly gifted propagandist. When Adolf Hitler’s political-treatise-wrapped-in-an-autobiography, Mein Kampf, was published in 1925, the author appeared to lift not just ideas but entire passages from Ford’s own publications. The Mein Kampf first edition extolled Ford by name, singling out the American automobile baron for his steadfast courage
When a reporter from The Detroit News showed up at Nazi Party headquarters in Munich in December 1931 to interview Hitler for her “Five Minutes with Men in Public Eye” series, she was surprised to find, hanging on the wall behind Hitler’s desk, a large, framed portrait of America’s most famous antisemite. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler explained to the newspaperwoman. The reporter asked Hitler that day, point-blank, why he was antisemitic. “Somebody has to be blamed for our troubles,” he said without hesitation.
“The American Nationalist Confederation has been created as a matter of national emergency,” read the organization’s Constitution, Aims, and Objectives, “in order to provide a political, as well as a defense medium, for the mass of the Christian American people who refuse to subscribe to the Jewish-Communist domination now in force in the existing Federal Government—and throughout the Nation as a whole.” The Confederation, which claimed offices in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Houston, Miami, Savannah, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, had adopted as its symbol the Nazi swastika.
North Carolina’s Robert Rice Reynolds, who had just that week granted an interview to Hitler’s mouthpiece newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, headlined “Advice to Roosevelt: Stick to Your Knitting.” A sample of Reynolds’s reasoning: “I can see no reason why the youth of this country should be uniformed to save the so-called democracies of Europe—imperialistic Britain and communistic France…. I am glad to be able to state that I am absolutely against the United States waging war for the purpose of protecting the Jews anywhere in the world.”
More than twenty million U.S. citizens identified as German Americans in 1940, courtesy of a century of immigration.
The membership of the Militant Christian Patriots, the American League of Christian Women, the Christian Constitutionalists, the Defenders of Christian Civilization, the Christian Mobilizers, the Silver Shirts, the German American Bund, and Deatherage’s own Knights of the White Camelia, a brother organization of the Ku Klux Klan, were falling in line under the colors—and the swastika emblem—of the American Nationalist Confederation.
Major General George Van Horn Moseley. Forcibly retired from the U.S. Army at the end of September 1938, General Moseley had gone on a tear against Roosevelt administration policies. “Not since the days of the secession has the future of America hung by so narrow a thread,” he claimed in his retirement statement, which was printed in its entirety in newspapers across the country. The peril, Moseley asserted, came from within.
Moseley had played a key role in launching the U.S. Army’s violent attack against American World War I veterans protesting in Washington for bonus payments they had been promised but never paid. Moseley proudly took credit for the part of that operation that resulted in the veterans’ possessions being set on fire, burning out their wives and children who were encamped with them.
Moseley’s frustration was apparent. “The handwriting on the wall is clear as a bell,” he sputtered. He was frustrated with the committee, with Congress, with the White House, which was hamstringing the fight against the Reds. “The first thing I would do if I was in the White House, gentlemen,” Moseley testified, “I would issue an order immediately discharging every Communist now in the Government of the United States, and everybody who is giving aid and comfort to a Communist. I would then release the United States Army from the present position which it is in.”
“I believe in watching our breed in America very carefully,” he told the committee. “I believe the Jew is an internationalist first; he is a patriot at home second.”
Confessions of a Nazi Spy. When the movie premiered on April 27, 1939, Warner Bros. had prepared for outrage, protests, and even violence. Studio bosses took the precaution of hiring hundreds of plainclothes security guards to ring the Beverly Hills Theatre that night, all of them on the lookout for saboteurs.
In late 1938, when four German Americans were charged with spying on U.S. military installations and defense contractors, Warner Bros. had bought the rights to the story even as the prosecution of the alleged spies was still transpiring. The studio sent screenwriter Milton Krims to New York to observe the trial. There was little doubt of the guilt of the accused, but the drama of it all was still stunning: this espionage plot went all the way to the top of the Nazi-led government in Germany, implicating Göring, Goebbels, and even Adolf Hitler himself.
“It marked the moment when millions of moviegoers began to realize the full enormity of what was happening in Europe and what that might mean for the United States,” Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones writes in The Nazi Spy Ring in America,
The leader of one Christian Front splinter group, Joe McWilliams, claimed to be assembling “the meanest, the toughest, the most ornery bunch of German soldiers, Italian veterans and Irish I.R.A. men in the country. I’m going to have the greatest collection of strong-arm men in the city.”
One hot summer night at the end of August 1939, a rally led by McWilliams at Innisfail Park in the Bronx reportedly drew fifteen thousand people. “For size and sheer dramatic color,” an undercover reporter wrote, the rally “was unprecedented in the annals of New York.” There were uniformed members of the German American Bund, and McWilliams’s Christian Mobilizers,
George Deatherage subbed for the absent general that night in the Bronx and delivered a stem-winder. “I am not content to walk in the footsteps of Christ,” he said. “I will walk ahead of Him with a club.”
The isolationists in America were in the majority in 1939, they were vocal, and they were enterprising.
thousands of leaflets printed up by the Women’s National Committee to Keep U.S. Out of War. “Never before in history have American women been so aroused and determined to keep their children out of war,” the leaflets read. “American women do not intend to have their men again sent to die on foreign soil.”
U.S. Congress, at the request of President Roosevelt, repealed the Neutrality Act of 1937, giving license to the U.S. government and private military contractors to provide cash-and-carry weaponry to Great Britain and France. The United States had finally started to take a side in the accelerating conflict in Europe against Adolf Hitler and Germany. The interventionists harrumphed that it wasn’t enough. The isolationists grumbled that it was way too much.
