Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

FUNNY THING HAPPENED the next day. Something that, even for this absurd proceeding, was almost too much to be believed. A group of the sedition defendants had up and started operating what looked like a clerical assembly line. While the trial was in session. They would take an envelope, stuff it with a document, pass it down, hand address it, pass it down, seal it, pass it down, put it in a pile, and move on through the stack. One of the few “regulars” among the reporters still covering the trial noticed that these weren’t any old envelopes the defendants had stacked in front of them. They were congressionally franked envelopes from the office of a Republican U.S. senator: Wild Bill Langer of North Dakota. Langer had not only provided the defendants with thousands of franked envelopes; he had provided them with thousands of copies of that two-hour speech he had made in defense of the “fine Americans” on the Senate floor a few months earlier. The speech was already in the Congressional Record; so he simply made a discount price order from the Government Printing Office, at taxpayer expense, and had them delivered to Judge Eicher’s court along with the franked envelopes. Then he enlisted this weird little secretarial team of accused fascists and Nazi operatives to stuff the envelopes in the courtroom so he could mail that speech out around the country, postage paid by the U.S. taxpayer.