Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

George Sylvester Viereck (he went by Sylvester, which sounded more continental), was himself a pillow-lipped and self-professed sensualist who said he worshipped Wilde as one of his three life models, alongside Napoleon and Christ. “Wilde is splendid,” he wrote. “I admire, nay I love him. He is so deliciously unhealthy, so beautifully morbid. I love all things evil! I love the splendor of decay, the foul beauty of corruption.”

The first words Viereck wrote of the man would prove prophetic: “Adolf Hitler must be handled with care. He is a human explosive.”

“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.”

“Our strategy is to destroy the enemy from within, to conquer him through himself.”

Nazi Germany poured money and manpower into dividing the American polity, hoping to keep the United States and its arsenal of democracy out of the war in Europe.

There was also 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.”

Congressmen and senators used the special privileges of government office to aid and abet Viereck and the Nazi cause; they colluded with Viereck to produce and distribute more than three million separate pieces of pro-German mailings. Many of these tracts were written by Viereck himself or by the Hitler government in Berlin, and then published in America under the bylines of the willing congressmen.

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.

The even more incendiary fact was that these would-be insurrectionists enjoyed an astonishing amount of support from federal elected officials who proved willing and able to use their share of American political power to defend the extremists, to derail the Justice Department’s efforts to thwart or punish them, and to shield themselves from potential criminal liability when they were found out. In the lead-up to World War II, the U.S. Congress was rife with treachery, deceit, and almost unfathomable actions on the part of people who had sworn to defend the Constitution but who instead got themselves implicated in a plot to end it.

Nietzsche’s siren song was really just one blaring note, and hard to misapprehend: The mass of men was a sorry lot whose most useful quality was the ability to conform to rules others wrote for them. But, the celebrated nineteenth-century German scholar posited, there was a small squadron of elites, of demigods, of Übermenschen (in English, roughly “supermen”) capable of molding the world and all its human glories because they refused to be bound by convention or morality or man-made law.

Bolder still, though, was Huey Long. Here was both a very American personal success story and a glimpse of what post-democracy strongman rule might look like in the United States, signaled not by a uniformed march on Rome or a Reichstag fire but by a governor who became senator while simultaneously keeping the governor’s job, breaking the spine of democracy in his state with the help of a cadre of brass-knuckled bodyguards, engineering kidnappings of his enemies, and defeating or sidestepping multiple impeachments and indictments and investigations, all while soaking up adoration at a muddy rural rally with farmers or in a roaring ballroom full of tuxedoed and gowned admirers, his vast and disparate audiences too in love with his charm to much care what he actually meant. Somehow simultaneously cherubic and menacing in appearance, Huey Long was a populist, a rule breaker, a shockingly gifted orator, and a thug. He once commanded National Guard troops to mount an actual true-blue armed military assault on the municipal government of the largest city in his state. The man launched an armed invasion of New Orleans!—and got away with it. The best contemporaneous biography of Long in Louisiana was subtitled “The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship.”

Long’s signature innovation in American power politics was bringing the whole state of Louisiana under the control of his political machine. He took total control of all elections in the state. Also all appointed offices. He stacked every level of state government and even local government with people who answered only to him. He used bribes and threats to simply take anything he wanted, including from the state legislature. And he reaped the rewards—not just the policy outcomes he dictated as if handed down by a king, but tribute, sent up to said king by every penny-ante official in the state who owed him their job. And they all did. He ran Louisiana like a mob boss. Everybody kicked up to him. He had a piece of everyone’s action. And even the credible accusations of kidnapping and attempted murder that followed him around never quite stuck. He had the police and the prosecutors sewn up tight, too.

“I am the Constitution,” Long said. “There may be smarter men than me, but they ain’t in Louisiana.”

They also laid out their new party’s platform, which consisted in its entirety of “direct action” and “more emotionalism” in government. No policy at all, just feelings. And action!

If you were a young German attorney looking to make your mark in the all-powerful Nazi Party in 1933, turns out Fayetteville, Arkansas, was a surprisingly auspicious place to be. As part of their crusade to make daily life intolerable for German Jews, the Nazis by then had started enacting a double-edged plan: generating menacing political and cultural cues that encouraged widespread, consistent, and murderous intimidation of Jewish citizens by fellow Germans while also 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.”

“Fascists is Jim Crow peoples, honey.”

He was able to conduct a comprehensive study of more than thirty states whose laws and courts forced Black Americans into second-class citizenship, as well as U.S. federal law governing immigration, Indian treaties, and treatment of people in America’s new territorial acquisitions.

A crowning achievement in the march of “civilization,” Roosevelt had opined in his book The Winning of the West, was the white triumph over the vast Native population in North America. The conquered peoples, Roosevelt asserted without any actual knowledge, lived an existence “but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of the wild beasts.” (Hitler also took note of that empire-building march with the U.S. cavalry as the spear’s point. Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand,” he said, “and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”)

When he had become president in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was still in full cry on the topic of race. His fellow (white) citizens lacked a proper appreciation of the perils at hand, he harangued audiences large and small, or the “courage” to do something about it. White Americans were mixing their genes too freely with other folks, inviting “race suicide.” Roosevelt badgered white women to have more (100 percent pure) white babies. This was “warfare of the cradle,” Roosevelt would say, and “fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country.”

“There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children.” 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. When Hitler’s final solution hit full pace in Europe, the same American Coalition of Patriotic Societies would lead the charge to block Jewish refugees from coming to America.

Puerto Ricans, for example, the justices explained nonsensically, were “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” Which is exactly as dumb as it sounds.

In other words, Americans had found ways—on matters of race—to use the law to justify just about anything they wanted to do. Leave the egalitarian, idealistic language on the books, but interpret that language however you need to, to justify any policy that just feels right.

These musclemen were not merely for show, as they had demonstrated with increasing frequency—often against reporters who worked for what Long sometimes called the “lyinnewspapers.”

NEWSPAPERMEN AND POLITICAL observers weren’t sure what to make of Huey Long’s strange and unexpected death, and they were even more divided on how to sum up his life. Huey Long was a deeply corrupt public figure, hungry for power and money, and remarkably adept at accruing both. But the single idea he rode to political power—that America needed to confront economic inequality and injustice head-on—had enormous appeal.

Lawrence Dennis was both an outspoken proponent of Hitler-style authoritarianism and an avowed isolationist, opposed to American involvement in foreign wars, especially any war in Europe against Hitler. Simultaneous advocacy of these two copacetic positions was clearly no coincidence, but Dennis portrayed it as if it were.

The Mussolini government, having been given a pass by world leaders when it seized Ethiopia by military force just a few months earlier, was clearly tightening its alliance with Hitler and “wanted America to stay out of” any future war in Europe.

“When this reaches you, you will be in Deutschland,” she wrote, “right in the heart and pulse of that wonderful nation where men are he-men and women are so womanly…. Be nice to all the Germans for me and especially to those brave women who are making babies for Hitler and being slaves so happily and willingly to their men.”

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.

Dennis, would-be Übermensch, often described himself as a man who operated outside the realm of passion—which suggested an extreme lack of self-awareness or a deep need to hide his true self.

We all know that heaven is not gained by half measures!

The American clergyman reported that government officials in southern Bavaria, and even in Berlin, were refusing to renew the passports of Jews living in Germany. “If Germany wants us to leave,” said one Jewish rabbi in Berlin, “they should make it possible for us to go.”

They made sure Dennis understood where their interests met his, and that was in keeping America on the sidelines of any war in Europe. At one point, and this has been corroborated by both Dennis and his contacts in Germany, Dennis suggested that the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews was not advancing that critical mission. It looked bad. Maybe they didn’t have to be so straightforward about the whole business, he suggested. 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.

“The Madam Perkins,” Coughlin intoned, “with her three-corner hat—one corner for communism, one for socialism, and one for Americanism.”

“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.”

“Hate and fear bind the members together,” Sevareid had written.

William Dudley Pelley, like a slug, left behind him a visible, mucoid trail by which we can still know him today.

Pelley was fearless about using his own compulsive resentments as a tool and a weapon. He sharpened them into something dangerous and lethal and then manufactured it for mass consumption (and for profit)—at the very moment when millions of Americans were looking for somebody to blame, and to punish, for the terrifying want and woe that had been visited on them in the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

He was raised in a deeply Methodist household in the stony hills of Massachusetts and Vermont, with a wealth of religious fervor and forced piety—and little else.

But Pelley sensed that the story needed an even more dramatic twist. So he cooked one up. The visitations, he began to insist, had changed him in one other fundamental way that he hadn’t previously mentioned: he had become a human radio receiver, able to “tune in on the minds and voices of those in another dimension of being.” He would sit for hours, he claimed, three or four times each week, furiously taking dictation from the learned souls of the Fourth Dimension. “I have in some cases taken down ten-thousand-word lectures on abstruse aspects of science, physics, cosmology and metallurgy,” Pelley wrote. “I have taken down a 400-page book on Political Economy so advanced in context and knowledge that it has surprised authorities on the subject who have perused portions of it.”

Pelley believed Hitlerite fascism could be replicated in America for one simple reason. Unlike Pelley’s failed spiritual movement, this new political juggernaut was fueled by the most powerful of human emotions. Love and harmony were nice and all, but for pure motive force, hate trumps.

“Read Hitler’s autobiography,” Pelley would tell his closest aides, “and then compare it with my life and note the similarities between us.”

PELLEY ANNOUNCED FOR the presidency of the United States in 1936, of course, and his candidacy was predictably muddleheaded. There was a lot of talk about protecting the U.S. Constitution, though basically all his policy proposals were blatant violations of this document: the chief executive would be given dictatorial powers; the United States would become a corporation, and every (white Christian) citizen would be both a common and a preferred stockholder.

The really disheartening thing, to Sevareid, was that his series seemed to increase the number of locals who sympathized with Pelley’s adherents.

Sevareid received so many threats of physical violence, by telephone and by letter, that his brothers showed up at his apartment, with their guns, and offered to provide protection. Sevareid waved them off, explaining that these blusterers talked a big game but were too chicken-hearted to make a real attack. Here is the one time when Sevareid might have underestimated the ugly truth of America’s committed fascists.

The latest nationally distributed fascist News Bulletin (vol. 1, no. 14) included instructions on how to construct a DIY kit for the “Firy [sic] Swastika.” “Burned between the hours of nine in the evening and eleven at night,” the Bulletin explained, it “will have the same effect on the reds and their sympathizers, including Jews, as it had on the Negro and the carpetbagger…. A high spot, overlooking the town or city, should be chosen, where it can be easily seen…. The press should be tipped off, if possible in advance or immediately after the Swastika is set afire. The idea is to have as many pictures of it as possible broadcast throughout the nation.”

Lewis was “devoted to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, world repair.”

Prominent public figures such as Woodrow Wilson, Clarence Darrow, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Jennings Bryan joined the fight, calling Ford’s vile utterings “un-American” and “un-Christian.”

Hitler had already mulled sending some of his “shock troops” to major American cities to aid in Ford’s possible run for president in 1924.