Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

The reporter asked Hitler that day, point-blank, why he was antisemitic. “Somebody has to be blamed for our troubles,” he said without hesitation.

But the Lewis operation did more than simply investigate and report. Before long, Lewis and his team scuttled a plot by U.S. Marines to sell guns and ammunition to the American fascists. Lewis and his undercover team could not be credited in public for their part in this operation, but it did earn them the enduring and crucial admiration of high-ranking naval intelligence officers. They also exposed an elaborate inside-job scheme to take control of U.S. military armories on the West Coast. That plan was run by Dietrich Gefken, a German national who had been one of the early organizers of Hitler’s Brownshirts in Munich. After joining the California National Guard and inventorying the cache of rifles, machine guns, and coastal artillery pieces on hand at the San Francisco armory, Gefken had drawn up “the Armory plans, floor plans, location of ammunition and lockers and rifles, the list of addresses of the officers and all that was needed to take over the Armory on a given notice.” Lewis’s spies handed over their evidence of Gefken’s plot to military intelligence officials, who shut it down.

The number of planned victims expanded. As written out in Henry Allen’s hand, the list now included Jack Benny, James Cagney, Eddie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, Samuel Goldwyn, and Louis B. Mayer.

“Extensive demonstrations,” Goebbels called the vicious attacks; he refused to ask for calm for twelve long hours, by which time the mobs had exhausted themselves.

The earthbound placards noted by local reporters seemed both deeply correct and also feeble in the face of the terror and devastation the Nazis had visited on hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings in a single night: “Resist Fascist Terror,” “Boycott German Goods,” “Lift the Arms Embargo,” “Appease Fascism? Why Not Tickle Tigers?”

He saw himself a red-blooded, real-American patriot, a dedicated Christian, a fierce protector of (white) Western civilization.

Roosevelt ran for reelection that year insisting that neither our aid to our allies nor our preparations in case of war should be seen as any indication that we planned to jump in, unless we were truly forced to.

For the all-important 1940 U.S. election, the German Foreign Office would certainly not be remaining neutral. Its agents were working within the halls of Congress and beyond to help install a more pliable man than Roosevelt in the office of the American presidency.

He stated frankly how Hitler desired peace, but Germany must have ‘elbow room’ in Europe for her development, and that the powers must not interfere with Hitler as he reshaped middle Europe to the advantage of the German people.”

General Moseley took his ugly talk to a whole new level in Springfield, Illinois. He was particularly riled because a major radio network had refused to broadcast his speech that day across the nation, citing Moseley’s religious bigotry. The general’s reaction to this mid-twentieth-century version of being canceled was unhinged. “Probably all our names will be taken down and listed for liquidation,” he told his “Christian” audience in Springfield. “But no, the tide is turning definitely in America from coast to coast, and if there is going to be any liquidation, it may be of a very different order.”

The initial seven-man roster of the Dies Committee consisted of Republicans and conservative Democrats. They opposed strikes and strikers and collective bargaining; they opposed federal legislation setting minimum wages or maximum hours for most working people; they also suspected that Roosevelt’s New Deal had mostly been cooked up by socialist or even communist sympathizers in his cabinet. Key “targets” of the Dies Committee, according to a reporter on the case for The Atlantic, included the Department of Labor, the Works Progress Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, the Wages and Hours Division, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Civil Liberties Union, the Workers Alliance of America, the International Labor Defense, and the National Negro Congress.

Metcalfe identified more than 130 organizations in his testimony and noted an interesting similarity in their brand names. “There is a common practice of misusing the words ‘American,’ ‘Patriotic,’ ‘Christian,’ ‘Defenders,’ ” he explained. “That is to mislead the public as to the true principles of those organizations.”

“The fundamental aim must always be to discredit conditions in the United States and thus make life in Germany seem enviable by contrast,” the pamphlet read. “It will therefore be to the best interests of the Reich to cooperate secretly with all persons or groups who criticize the American system, regardless on what ground. The line to be taken in all such cases is to exaggerate the strength of Germany and to contrast it with the weakness of democracies.”

AS CIVIC DUTY goes, it was above and beyond the call; maybe one of the greatest acts of citizenship in twentieth-century America.

Moseley was vague on who exactly this “they” was.

“To represent Hitler only as a screaming madman and a bloodthirsty persecutor, and nothing else, is manifestly unfair, considering his phenomenal public career, his unchallenged political and social achievements, and his position as head of the most important continental European power.” Stop for just a second and let that sink in.

“What are the ideals of German Womanhood?” a leading Bad Guy asks one of the Hitler Youth troops. “To be of service to our führer,” the little American girl answers, “to be the custodian of our children until he should call them to arms.”

Pro-Nazi Americans—and there were plenty in the United States in 1939—picketed some theaters showing the film and vandalized others.

By the summer of 1938, Father Coughlin was all in on explicit antisemitism as the engine of his political crusade, going so far as to follow Henry Ford’s example by serializing the hoary and despicable Protocols of the Elders of Zion in his weekly magazine, which was called, of all things, Social Justice.

Speaking of last straws, the bosses at WMCA, Coughlin’s local radio affiliate in New York, were not Jewish, but they were nonetheless horrified. (They might have been even more horrified if they’d known that Father Coughlin’s ministry likely received financial support from Hitler’s government through Germany’s consulate in Detroit.) The station announced within days that it would no longer broadcast Coughlin’s Sunday lectures unless he submitted the text of his sermons in advance for the station to review.

“More than at any other time we need a strong, virilant [sic], sanctified group of Christian Americans,” Coughlin wrote in a letter to his followers in New York City. “The time has arrived when defensive policies mean giving way to an offensive plan; for the best method of defense is always of offense.” Coughlin started to talk about a Christian Front that could “forefend,” and the movement grew. “The Christian Front,” he exclaimed in one 1938 broadcast, “grows stronger, more courageous, and more determined. The Christian way is the peaceful way until all arguments have failed, all civil authority having failed, there is left no other way but the way of defending ourselves against the invaders of our spiritual and national rights—Franco’s way.” Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s way, as evidenced in his recent fascist military victory in Spain, was the way of the gun. The death toll of “Franco’s way” was in the hundreds of thousands and climbing by 1938, at which point the murderous “White Terror” against the generalissimo’s enemies was only just beginning. Father Coughlin was calling for a Franco-style armed revolt from his followers, with the paramilitary Christian Front in the vanguard.

“Long live our Savior, Father Coughlin,” one acolyte yelled.

“We want strong men. Men to fight for America’s destiny and link it with the destiny of Adolf Hitler, the greatest philosopher since the time of Christ.”

(General George Van Horn Moseley had been taken off the proverbial battlefield, at least temporarily, after his appearance at the Dies Committee hearings had prompted an official investigation by the U.S. military into his activities. The army made clear that Moseley was free to pursue the office of American dictator, but if so, he would be doing it without the benefit of his $6,000-a-year army pension. He elected to keep his pension.)

“I am not content to walk in the footsteps of Christ,” he said. “I will walk ahead of Him with a club.”

Hitler, of course, asserted that this alarming opening act of the full-scale war in Europe was somehow an act of self-defense, that Poland was the real aggressor. Hitler released an official statement to the world in the first hours of the invasion, saying the Poles had “appealed to weapons. Germans in Poland are persecuted with a bloody terror and are driven from their homes.

Readers of Johnson’s reports in Social Justice were told that Hitler’s seizure of Poland (or at least the part of Poland that he hadn’t gifted to his new friends in Moscow) was met with flowers and felicitations by the Poles, and there was certainly no reason for Americans to get their knickers in a twist about it. That confusing nonaggression pact with the Russians notwithstanding, Social Justice readers were assured by their man in the field that Adolf Hitler looked like he would make a damn fine ally in Father Coughlin’s existential fight between the Christians and the communists.

It was what we’d call today an “accelerationist” strategy. Much as white supremacists hope terroristic, spectacular, cruel acts toward racial minorities will provoke retaliation and reprisal to touch off a wholesale race war that they are sure they will win, the Christian Fronters believed America could easily be tipped into a war against Jews and communists in which they themselves not only would end up on the winning side, but would be hailed as a heroic vanguard.

In fact, in response to a questionnaire after the plot was revealed in 1940, more than four hundred New York City cops voluntarily admitted that they had been members of the Christian Front.

Father Coughlin’s first instinct was to cover his own Christian rear end, which he did in a public statement as soon as news of the arrests flashed across the nation. He was very quick to deflect evidence of the support, financial and otherwise, that flowed between his ministry and “this so-called” Christian Front. “For some time they have been praising me, holding meetings in my name, and pretending to collect money for my support,” Coughlin said. “I have roundly disavowed them. Moreover, following Oct. 25 of last year, they sent me a check of some $1,000 which I returned to them in a public manner, telling them that I would not accept any such kind of money and advocating my followers to have nothing to do with such organizations.” (This was a lie, as far as anybody could tell, from the man who had in fact been telling his entire listening flock that it was time to organize themselves into Christian Front militia units and that the time was coming to go “Franco’s way.”)

The woman finally selected to be foreperson of the jury was a middle-aged Brooklyn housewife who told the attorneys this was her first time ever in a courtroom. The prosecutors, alas, had failed to ascertain that she was related by marriage to the lead defense attorney in the case.

He was a snitch. Which was the worst thing you could be in the prevailing working-class, Irish Catholic culture in Brooklyn.

Viebrock, who clearly felt he had little to fear, had been exceedingly loquacious in the days after his arrest, bragging that he was capable of constructing bombs that would be much more lethal than those found in his basement. He also explained to Agent Wacks that right up until their arrests the Fronters were discussing new ways “to incite the Jews and Communists to riot” so good Christians could “then step in and take over the government.”

This was about the time a Christian Front partisan and local priest in Queens made a not-so-subtle comparison, during one of his Sunday homilies, between the crucifixion of Christ and the prosecution (read persecution) of the Brooklyn Boys. “During the entire legal process” of Jesus Christ’s civil trial and execution, Father Edward Brophy claimed, “every detail was in complete and continuous control of the Jews.”

Coughlin’s closest ally in Brooklyn, Father Edward Lodge Curran, wrote to Attorney General Robert Jackson to demand that he investigate the investigators. At bottom, Curran was sure, there was a communist plot inside the Justice Department to destroy these Brooklyn Boys, these good and decent Christian patriots who were just trying to uphold constitutional principles.

America was founded as a Christian country and remained a Christian country to this day, the priest said, because of “genuine, patriotic citizens” like these men.

As a first-term congressman way back in 1917, Lundeen had been a paid contributor to that controversial pro-German, anti-interventionist magazine that started off being called The Fatherland but got rechristened Viereck’s American Weekly when it was revealed that it was secretly funded by the German government. Lundeen made a show of voting against sending U.S. troops overseas in World War I, and he remained a vocal critic of the mobilization even while Americans were dying at the Somme and Belleau Wood and the Marne.

“America for Americans; Europe for Europeans,” Hitler

Lundeen was a man who cultivated a political reputation for caring for the little guy and looking out for the poor, when in fact he took a good portion of his own living out of the financial hides of his least paid underlings.

The expert adman was shaken by the increasing sophistication of the obviously well-financed German propaganda campaign.

“Pro-Nazi hoodlums, German Bundists, Christian Mobilizers and Christian Frontists attacked an orderly street meeting of Fight for Freedom at 59th St. and Lexington Ave. These Storm Troopers tried to push two women off the platform…. In a disciplined formation, they charged the crowd shouting ‘We Want Hitler’ and ‘We want Lindbergh.’ ”

Germany trying to run this kind of massive information operation on American soil, targeting the American public, was one level of threat; elected members of the U.S. Congress helping them do it—that was something else.

Among the franking signatures was Ernest Lundeen, who had been unable to sign anything for the past year, on account of being dead.

Hamilton Fish, beetle-browed, lantern-jawed, entitled by a storied family history in politics, and pugnacious to a fault, went to the floor of the House to defend his wounded honor. He attacked the Post and called its recent reporting “contemptible, dastardly, and lying.”

Leaflets from the Los Angeles headquarters of the National Peace Crusade papered some of Wheeler’s events: “AWAKE, CHRISTIAN AMERICA AND CLAIM YOUR BIRTHRIGHT…Let’s Be Frantically American. LET’S SAVE U.S. FOR US.”

When Fish himself was finally summoned to appear before the grand jury a few weeks later, the congressman went on the floor of the House and more or less begged the body to formally instruct him not to comply. He was very anxious to protect them all from any grand jury invading “the rights and privileges of the House of Representatives.”

The great masses, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus, such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others.” Hitler’s lies spread misinformation that was favorable to Germany and unfavorable to us and our allies, and sowed dissension among the American public not just about the war effort but about our own basic system of government.

The German propaganda operation in America, according to the first U.S. academic study on the topic, identified these kernels of disturbance as “racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life,” and “differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the “frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians.” Germany’s agents were tasked with finding these fissures in American society and then prying them further apart, exploiting them to make Americans hate and suspect each other, and maybe even wish for a new kind of country altogether. A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover. Hitler was counting above all on racism and religious bigotry to carry the day in the United States, and to set the stage for global domination. “The

It soon emerged in the press that there was more to the German scheme, including a big lift from the biggest name in American industry. A secretary working out of the Ford Motor Company in New York gathered what she called “a mammoth mailing list” from the return addresses on fan mail sent to Charles Lindbergh, Representative Hamilton Fish, Senator Rush Holt, Senator Burton Wheeler, and other famed America Firsters. This list was compiled in Ford Motor Company offices by Ford employees working on company time and shipped to a Nazi-funded publication called Scribner’s Commentator, whose editors were pleased to send out whatever material the German Foreign Office and its agents in America sent them.

The Ingalls defense team decried the prosecution as a “witch hunt” and portrayed the celebrity aviatrix as a sort of aeronautical Joan of Arc: righteous and inspirational.