Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

The town was hardworking, interdependent, egalitarian, and small-d democratic; its politics ran conservative. Sevareid described his fellow townsfolk as exhibiting limitless charity toward friends and neighbors and a thoroughgoing wariness of outsiders.

he still took it on faith “that [President] Herbert Hoover was a great man, that America was superior to all other countries in all possible ways, that labor strikes were caused by unkempt foreigners, that men saved their souls inside wooden or brick Protestant churches, that if men had no jobs it was due to personal laziness and vice—meaning liquor—and that sanity governed the affairs of mankind.”

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. His very well-funded propaganda mission in the United States was twofold: to try to keep the United States from getting into World War II, and also to soften us up, to mess with us, to make us less effective as a country, by finding and exploiting what the Germans called “kernels of disturbance” in the United States.

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.