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The documents in the left-behind briefcase—as showcased in the pages of The World—showed vast financial transfers by the German government into a long list of private U.S. bank accounts and detailed discussions among German officials about their efforts to keep American public opinion aligned against the United States joining the world war, to hamper our ability to help our allies, and to generally mess with us in the meantime.
There’s a cracking letter in the files of former president Teddy Roosevelt from around this time in which Roosevelt tells Viereck that if he’s so much more supportive of Germany than of the United States, then perhaps Viereck is being a bad citizen of both, so maybe he should renounce his American citizenship, piss off back to Germany, and join the German army, which would at least make him useful to one of the two countries.
According to records discovered after the war was over, the German Foreign Office rained down on Americans more than 1 million leaflets and postcards, about 2.5 million pamphlets and magazines, and 135,000 books just in the single summer of 1941.
Yes, he went to Harvard, but although he entered with the class of 1927, he did not receive his bachelor of arts until three years after most of his classmates, in June 1930.
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.
Johnson picked up a lot of tabs, which often got him what he desired.
He became the head of the Department of Architecture at MoMA, perhaps in part because he could furnish his own salary. He also paid the salary of his personal assistant, and the MoMA librarian, and the publicity director he hired on, Alan Blackburn, who was one of Johnson’s few intimate friends from boarding school and Harvard.
In April 1934, Frankfurter published one of the first articles detailing the early consequences of Hitler’s Aryan-only policies, which included stripping many Jewish professionals of their positions in academia, law, and medicine. “There is no doubt,” Frankfurter wrote, “that the Jew in Germany is doomed.”
She initially appeared distraught and confided to her young friend that she was afraid that the ugly scenes playing out in Germany “might happen here in America.” But she gradually talked herself out of anxiety.
The Communist Party of the United States of America (still, before 1935, taking its marching orders and funding from Moscow) was in that tiny, vocal, and active fringe.
When he became a senator, Long called for a federal tax on all that accumulated wealth, and not just a progressive tax but an exponential tax.
Depending on the speech, depending on the exact audience and setting, the details of his proposed wealth tax were malleable.
By the end of its first year, Long’s Share Our Wealth Society counted nearly eight million active members, in more than twenty-five thousand separate local clubs across America.
A less cynical man could look at Long’s signature policies and call him a figure of the left; for a Lawrence Dennis, what was much more important about Huey was his gleeful grave digging for American democratic norms.
He was losing sway at the Museum of Modern Art, where Lincoln Kirstein had started warning its key trustees, including Nelson Rockefeller and his mother, that the museum was in danger of being “tarred with the Fascist brush.”
Kirstein laughed it off at the time, but what he could not shake for years was the memory of Johnson’s nastiest remark to him: “He told me I was number one on his list for elimination in the coming revolution.”
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.
Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, might have castigated Sylvester Viereck as a German agent who should bounce back to Berlin instead of hounding his fellow Americans here, but in his broader view of the human condition Roosevelt saw white Americans and white Germans as allies in an ongoing war between the races in which the white (Anglo-Saxon) man was bound to fight against all comers: Blacks, the Irish (at least until he needed the Irish vote), Slavs, Latins, and Asians.
Both Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln had expressed hopes that all people of African descent living in the United States would one day be shipped overseas.
Woodrow Wilson in 1913 had resegregated the federal workforce by law, purging Black Americans from the best and best-paying government jobs. Calvin Coolidge in 1924 had signed into law radical restrictions on immigration, but not before publishing a stinging little essay in Good Housekeeping magazine titled “Whose Country Is This?”
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.
At Fayetteville, he turned out to be an incisive observer, and his research ultimately identified the central tension in American race law and life: How do you legally privilege white men as a “ruling race” in a land in which the written Constitution—and quite explicitly the Fourteenth Amendment—guarantees equal protection of the law to all, regardless of skin color?
Krieger understood this would be a bit of a revelation to legal scholars and practitioners in Germany, where they operated within the limits of civil law—a mechanical system in which the written statutes and codes were not at all fungible. In the United States, where common law held sway, judges had (and have) more room to maneuver.
Exhibit A was a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the Insular Cases, handed down in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.
(“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.”)
The Germans were even more livid when a local New York City magistrate released all but one of the flag maulers without sanction from the notorious holding prison the Tombs and then used the occasion to lecture Adolf Hitler and company.
“One of [Senator Long’s] people said to me, I’ll never forget this, ‘How many votes do you control?’ ” Johnson remembered.
By the dog days of summer 1935, Johnson was contemplating whether to take the advice of Long’s secretary, who had told him to ship out to his hometown in Ohio and try a run for Congress under the Share Our Wealth banner.
Huey Long was a deeply corrupt public figure, hungry for power and money, and remarkably adept at accruing both.
“That Huey built roads and bridges and provided free schoolbooks nobody will deny, but nobody knows how much they cost or how much money was stolen in the process,” wrote one nationally syndicated columnist.
Dennis’s biographer Gerald Horne would later write that in that moment America’s most outspoken fascist “symbolically melted into the Nazi mass.”
Dennis was already well known to officials up and down the line at the German embassy in Washington, where they maintained a growing file of newspaper clippings by and about the erudite American.
Kennan hosted Dennis for meals, took him on the party circuit, and updated him on the current state of the pseudoscience we would eventually call Kremlinology.
It was part of what made Dennis the leading spokesman for fascism in America in 1936, and also an exemplar of why certain people found comfort in authoritarian ideology. 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.
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”); and feigned insouciance (“I’m not very emotional anyway, and I couldn’t share the American pro-British and anti-German” feeling).
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.”
“The anti-communist line got the capitalists, the anti-Versailles line got the army and the nationalists, the anti-Semitic line got the masses as well as the classes.”
Philip Johnson, as the former head of architecture exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, had been among the few unreserved champions of this strange new style of building, so Tague was happy to talk shop with him. He assumed the brothers Keck would feel obliged to do Johnson a favor, if that’s what Johnson was here for.
But even so, the president kept the appointment. He considered Coughlin a loose cannon, rolling loaded around the ship of state.
For one thing, Hitler’s rally makers made sure to keep a tight hold on all background elements. Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, for instance, was ringed by forest, and the stadium in the city was a closed set.
His candidacy was mostly a vehicle for Coughlin, who was Canadian-born and thus unable to run himself.
Coughlin could move a crowd, for sure. But that power turned out to be redeemable only by the holder; it was non-transferable, even to Coughlin’s handpicked designees.
“One of the Silver Shirt leaders, a retired businessman, led me into his kitchen and opened his cupboards to show me the stocks of canned goods he had accumulated against the day of the Communist uprising, when he expected to barricade himself in his upper duplex,” Sevareid remembered. “He raised a quivering finger and in a quavering voice informed me: ‘If it be God’s will that I fall as a martyr to the cause at the hands of these beasts, I shall die here, in my Christian home, defending my dear wife to the end.’ They were quite mad.”
Sevareid had written. “Anti-Semitism is the outstanding feature of the Silver Shirts. Absurd as it may seem, to them the [first] World war, the present war in Spain (from where the Jews were expelled in 1492) and all the wars of the world were deliberately inspired by Jews…. In the minds of [the Silver Shirts] all Jews are Communists and all Communists are Jews. If one points out certain known Communists are definitely Nordic, their answer is—‘Well, he must have a Jewish mind.’ ”
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. In place of capitalism, Pelley proposed a new economic system in which both supply and demand would be strictly and perfectly controlled by government officials.
Below Pelley himself—who liked to be called Chief—the Silver Shirts had commanders, chamberlains, quartermasters, sheriffs, censors, adjutants, pursers, bailiffs, marshals, advocates, scribes, and almoners.
The really disheartening thing, to Sevareid, was that his series seemed to increase the number of locals who sympathized with Pelley’s adherents.
He even ordered his engineers to forgo the use of any brass in his Model T automobile, calling it “Jew metal.”
The U.S. Congress had recently, by legislation, cordoned off discrete protest-free zones—each with a radius of five hundred feet—where it was unlawful to wave signs or placards or the like “designed or adapted to intimidate, coerce, bring into public odium any foreign government, party, or organization, or to bring into public disrepute its political, social, or economic acts or views, or to intimidate, coerce, harass, or bring into public disrepute any diplomatic or consular representatives, or to congregate…and refuse to disperse after being ordered to do so.”
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:
