Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

(Which was disruptive, but not as vicious as the outlandish rumors she circulated that Eleanor Roosevelt had infected the president with gonorrhea.)

At a later hearing, Dilling’s attorney husband complained to the judge about the unfairness of it all, claiming he had heard rumors that the Department of Justice was preparing a massive new indictment of any Republican anywhere who had voted against Roosevelt. Going back to 1932!

People are saying.

The congressmen and senators instead chose door number two: try to burn the whole thing down.

ON DECEMBER 8, 1942, Representative Clare Hoffman of Michigan (whose frank had been used by Charles B. Hudson’s America in Danger! to mail out antisemitic poison) invoked a point of personal privilege on the House floor, shutting down all legislative business in the chamber. He then took a full hour to defend himself and other members who were being investigated and questioned by federal prosecutors. Hoffman’s integrity, his patriotism, his exemplary character, had been called into question, he claimed. He was deeply hurt. The way Representative Hoffman saw it, the sedition indictment itself was an act of religious bigotry; the defendants were poor, persecuted Christians.

Hoffman then introduced a resolution calling for a special committee to investigate DOJ for its overreach and demanded that Dillard Stokes and his editor at The Washington Post be called before the new committee and compelled to testify. He even wanted to haul in the famous Nazi-bashing newspaper columnist Walter Winchell for questioning. “Is it not true,” Hoffman said on the floor that day, “that Walter Winchell, the gossipmonger, Peeping Tom, the digger into garbage cans, and the purveyor of rot; William P. Maloney, pettifogging special attorney for a grand jury; and Dillard Stokes, alias Jefferson Breem, alias Quigley Adams [sic], he of the perverted mind, acting together, sought to create, and did create, the false impression that Members of Congress were disloyal and unpatriotic and, by doing so, frightened some Members of Congress into silence?”

They continued to demand an investigation of the investigators.

In this historical era of the Department of Justice, alongside whatever heroics may attend to its prosecutors and investigators, there is also this broken bone, sticking out like a compound fracture. In the middle of this controversial, high-profile case, William Power Maloney was removed as prosecutor because of pressure from members of Congress who themselves were implicated in his investigation.

The Washington Post published a blistering editorial criticizing Biddle’s decision: “In this case the public could have been sure that Mr. Maloney would have pulled no punches, whether the evidence incriminated a conspirator or embarrassed one of his friends in Congress. Maybe that was why Congressional friends of the defendants hated and feared this prosecutor and publicly harassed Mr. Biddle with windy threats of investigation, with boasts of what they would do to the Department of Justice unless they got Mr. Maloney’s scalp. Now they have it.” — THINGS GOT WORSE for Maloney in the coming weeks. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5–2 decision, overturned the conviction he had won in the Viereck case. The majority found that the main fault was in the murkiness of language in the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Viereck, they decided, had possibly complied with the letter of the law by registering himself as an “author and a journalist” in the pay of Germans, even though he didn’t mention his voluminous German-funded work in Congress on a propaganda scheme dreamed up and directed by the Nazi high command. The court’s majority opinion basically missed the entire point of Viereck’s endeavors and his paymasters, but it didn’t stop at the nearest exit, where it could have; the opinion also made a frontal attack on William Power Maloney and his personal exuberance. “In his closing remarks to the jury, [Maloney] indulged in an appeal wholly irrelevant to any facts or issues in the cas...

Langer had been convicted of a bold pocket-lining kickback scheme while serving as governor of his state back in 1934. He was hit with a federal charge, convicted, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Governor Langer pronounced his federal criminal conviction illegitimate, rejected the court order removing him from office, declared martial law in the state, attempted to declare North Dakota’s independence from the United States, barricaded himself in his office, and refused to leave. After his supporters filled the streets of Bismarck and called for the shooting of his successor, the lieutenant governor, Langer finally gave up the governorship and then managed to win an appeal of his conviction. He was re-elected governor in 1936, and won a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1940. When he got to Washington, his fellow senators weren’t sure whether they should seat him. A special committee made an investigation into his whole corruption, martial-law, secession, armed-revolt thing and found that Langer’s path to the Senate was definitely problematic. The phrase “moral turpitude” was used. The investigating committee found that Langer had exhibited “continuous, contemptuous, and shameful disregard for high concepts of public duty” and was therefore unfit to serve. The full U.S. Senate took the findings under advisement, but in the end they decided that a little coup here or there didn’t necessarily render a man unfit to serve in the highest legislative body in the nation.

Langer, whose reputation preceded him and whose own insurrectionist past had quite nearly precluded him from being seated in the Senate. Langer “was not someone who practiced the fine art of reason and compromise,” says historian Nancy Beck Young. “His style was aggressive and in your face. And he saw this as a headline-grabbing moment.

The senator spoke for more than two hours. He cast the defendants who were being held in the D.C. jail as “political prisoners.” The trial was a “legal farce” and a “preversion [sic] of justice.”

“Adolf Hitler said,” Rauschning explained in his testimony, “the United States was threatened with a bloody revolution. He said he would be able to make this revolution come to pass. He explained the methods by which he would be able to paralyze the national unity of the United States and the power of resistance in this country…. He said the cleavages in the [American] population could be widened to disunite the country.”

“The great issue was to liberate the world from the poison of democracy, with its degenerating doctrine of liberty and equality.”

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.

Judge Eicher wasn’t looking to invite any further harassment and antagonism from Capitol Hill, where supporters of the sedition defendants had already started serious talk about impeaching him.

Rogge and his investigators in Germany had also found the field of Nazi fanboy (and fangirl) collaborators in America to be much wider than was previously known.

THIS INSTINCT CUTS across historical eras, and it cuts across political parties. It is our long and continuing American tradition to carefully avoid reckoning for the grandest of American sins, especially when they involve alleged (or actual) illegal activity by government officials.

While he had described at Swarthmore the basic outline of the Nazi plot against Roosevelt, Rogge had not, per his boss’s instructions, quoted from some of the remarkable top-secret cables a German operative in America sent back to the Foreign Office in Berlin during the 1940 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Like the one explaining how a Nazi influence campaign helped secure the anti-interventionist plank of the Republican Party’s official platform, vowing to keep America out of foreign wars: “The success of the isolationist Republicans in the field for foreign policy was made possible in part by the promotion campaign authorized by telegraphic instruction No. 666, of June 17. This fact is reflected, for instance, by the circumstance that the…principles of the Republican platform on foreign policy were taken almost verbatim from conspicuous full-page advertisements in the American press (e.g., New York Times, June 25, p. 19), which were published upon our instigation.”

O. John Rogge’s westbound flight ran into a patch of rough weather on the way to Seattle on the night of October 25, 1946. His airplane had been forced to touch down in Spokane a little after midnight to wait out a thunderstorm. Rogge was stuck in the Spokane airport long enough for an agent from the local FBI office to race over and ask him to confirm his name. When Rogge did so, the agent handed him a missive hot off the DOJ telex machine: O. John Rogge’s employment at the U.S. Department of Justice had been terminated. Effective immediately. As in, right there in the airport. The FBI agent asked the now former special assistant to the attorney general to hand over any official DOJ documents and materials he had on his person. Rogge patted his pockets and said all he had was his (expired) DOJ parking pass. The agent took it, turned on his heel, and that was that.

THIS WAS BURTON K. WHEELER’S second DOJ scalp: William Patrick Maloney back in 1943, before he could bring his sedition indictments to trial; and now Maloney’s successor, O. John Rogge, before he could release his DOJ report on sedition to the public. Attorney General Francis Biddle acceded to Wheeler’s demands the first time. Now it was Attorney General Tom Clark, as well as President Truman. Whatever else there is to say about Montana’s senior senator, the man had pull.

Also, it’s worth saying, the U.S. Department of Justice is not supposed to work this way. Even a senator with Olympian influence should not be able to arrange the firing on demand of a prosecutor leading a federal investigation in which the senator himself is adversely implicated. But in this episode in American history, it happened. Twice.

“When I was first preparing the report I was under the impression that the Attorney General, for the future security of the United States, was going to make the report public,” Rogge told his audience in Seattle. “After all, the study of how one totalitarian government attempted to penetrate our country may help us with another totalitarian country attempting to do the same thing…. I think the American people should be told about the fascist threat to democracy.” Rogge went even further a few days later, publishing an exposé in the ardently antifascist ad-free daily newspaper PM. (PM had been the first paper to report on the Viereck propaganda scheme involving members of Congress.) Rogge’s article detailed the toxic stew of authoritarianism, armed militia madness, antisemitism, and collusion with a foreign government bent on destroying American democracy that nearly boiled over before World War II. And might again in the future. His

There were also a raft of calls—from private citizens, civic organizations, and elected officials—demanding the release of Rogge’s 396-page report in full. But Truman stuck to his guns. He kept that report hidden from the American public. Worse than that: he never took the time to say why he had done it. He may well have had a noble motive for this decision, but he didn’t ever tell the American public what exactly that might be.

“Well,” replied Rogge, “I operated on this basis: that if democracy’s going to work, if our assumption is correct that people can make wise choices on issues, it can only be if they know the inside story…. I thought the American people were entitled to the facts on Nazi penetration.”

IN THE BATTLES that form the moral foundation of America, it is sometimes painful to contend with the stories of Americans who chose the dark side in those fights. But they have histories, too. And legacies.

When Dennis’s first wife divorced him in the 1950s, he lamented to a friend that he couldn’t understand her pique; the women he’d had affairs with, he explained, had always quite liked him: “What jolts me is that over sixty-two years in which I had lots of affairs and nearly a dozen women one time or another who seriously wanted to marry, I never had a single one turn on me…. This is the first time a woman ever turned on me. The only logical motivation must be spite. But why?”

In the years since his death in 1965, Pelley’s writings—both the fascist, antisemitic ones and the ones about the afterlife and aliens—have enjoyed fairly robust circulation, particularly on the conspiratorial far right.

Elizabeth Dilling resumed her antisemitic organizing while World War II raged and then became a leading voice of the ultra-right’s bold new invention—Holocaust denialism. She claimed that President Eisenhower was a secret Jew (“Ike the Kike,” she called him) and that his successor, President John F. Kennedy, was pushing the “Jew Frontier.”

Bizarrely, at the beginning of the Tea Party movement in 2010, then Fox News host Glenn Beck tried to revive interest in Elizabeth Dilling, enthusiastically promoting her books on his highly rated cable news programs and radio show. Dilling, he said, had been “doing what we’re doing now.”

Unfazed, Mrs. Lundeen found another way to stay in Washington. She married another U.S. senator, this one from Oregon, a high-ranking Ku Klux Klansman.

Norma went on to give speeches at racist rallies organized by Gerald L. K. Smith, the protégé of Huey Long’s who had eulogized Long at his funeral back in 1936. Smith preached something he called Christian Nationalism—a segregationist, white supremacist doctrine—and joined Elizabeth Dilling as a pioneer of American Holocaust denial. Smith ran for president in 1944 on the America First Party ticket, which called for the sterilization and deportation of all American Jews.

Star journalist Allen Drury used the erratic and cantankerous Langer in his 1963 book, A Senate Journal, to illustrate the Senate’s unsettling capacity for growing and empowering mean old weirdos.

“Langer’s filibuster collapsed this afternoon…. If his ideas have any value, no one will ever know it, for he presents them at the top of his lungs like a roaring bull in the empty chamber, while such of his colleagues as remain watch him in half-amused, half-fearful silence, as though in the presence of an irresponsible force they can neither control nor understand.”

really don’t believe in hate. So now I don’t hate Roosevelt—but frankly I despise him.”

Lewis’s contemporaneous reports from his spy operation, preserved at California State University, Northridge, now offer historians a window into one man’s remarkable, daring, harrowing contribution to the task, and the honor, of repairing the world: tikkun olam.