Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

by Rachel Maddow

“Propaganda helped us to power,” Joseph Goebbels announced at the Nazi Party congress in 1936. “Propaganda kept us in power. Propaganda will help us conquer the world.”

The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former American military officers who stood ready to lead.

In the lead-up to World War II, the U.S. Congress was rife with treachery, deceit, and almost unfathomable actions on the part of people who had sworn to defend the Constitution but who instead got themselves implicated in a plot to end it.

And unlike most populist pols, the Kingfish, as he liked to be called, had an actual track record of getting things done. In the six and a half years since he had taken power in his home state, the forty-one-year-old Long had delivered twenty-five hundred miles of new paved roads, forty bridges, free textbooks in the public schools, free night schools to teach more than 100,000 illiterate adults to read, and state hospitals to serve everybody in Louisiana, whether they possessed the means to pay their medical bills or not. The state’s voter registration increased by 76 percent in a single year after Long forced the Louisiana legislature to repeal the poll tax. He also raised taxes on corporations doing business in the state, especially on the oil companies that had dominated the state legislature for decades. It was an almost unbelievable record of accomplishment—practical help for regular people, at a time when all the regular people of this country were desperately in need of some practical help. The political story behind how he did it was either exciting or terrifying, depending on the cut of your ideological jib. The bare truth of Huey Long’s Louisiana miracle is that he was able to get it all done because he effectively did away with any competing political interests in the state, not to mention any checks and balances on his own power to rule. Long’s signature innovation in American power politics was bringing the whole state of Louisiana under the control of his po...

“Awful it may be to contemplate, but the reality is that the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example of race law,” James Q. Whitman wrote in his landmark 2017 book, Hitler’s American Model. “Nazi lawyers regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law.”

When he had become president in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt was still in full cry on the topic of race. His fellow (white) citizens lacked a proper appreciation of the perils at hand, he harangued audiences large and small, or the “courage” to do something about it. White Americans were mixing their genes too freely with other folks, inviting “race suicide.” Roosevelt badgered white women to have more (100 percent pure) white babies. This was “warfare of the cradle,” Roosevelt would say, and “fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country.”

Teddy Roosevelt was a standout, but Krieger had no shortage of material to work with from a long line of U.S. presidents. 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. “The two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government,” asserted Jefferson, who lived in fear of a slave revolt. Krieger could also point to American presidents of more recent vintage. 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?” Immigration restrictions, Coolidge wrote under the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, were a necessary first step in walling off white America from “the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless or the improvident.” These types, he implied, could be identified by nationality and skin color. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons,” Coolidge wrote. “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend…. The unassimilated alien child menaces our children.”

The architect of Coolidge’s 1924 immigration restrictions was a wealthy eugenicist lawyer who went on to form the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, whose slogan was “Keep America American.” In 1936, a leader of the group was given an honorary doctorate by a Nazi-affiliated German university for his advancement in North America of racial eugenics—the fake science of preserving racial purity. When Hitler’s final solution hit full pace in Europe, th...

The chair of Public Law in Munich, home city of the Nazi Party, praised Coolidge’s restrictive immigration quotas as exemplary law, writing in a 1933 article that Coolidge’s approach “represents a carefully thought-through system that first of all protects the United States from...

In other words, Americans had found ways—on matters of race—to use the law to justify just about anything they wanted to do. Leave the egalitarian, idealistic language on the books, but interpret that language however you need to, to justify any policy that just feels right. The Nazis were in love with this idea. It meant you didn’t have to spell out your eliminationist plans in black and white; you just needed to act on those plans, with compliant and complacent lawyers writing artfully around the worst of your intentions and with courts providing assurance that they would get what you were going for intuitively and the law wouldn’t get in your way.

To strip Jews of citizenship and property rights, they didn’t need overt laws that just came right out and said that. “Why don’t you treat the Jews more or less as we treat the Negroes in America?” he asked.

Pelley believed Hitlerite fascism could be replicated in America for one simple reason. Unlike Pelley’s failed spiritual movement, this new political juggernaut was fueled by the most powerful of human emotions. Love and harmony were nice and all, but for pure motive force, hate trumps.

The German edition of Ford’s book had landed in the hands of one particularly gifted propagandist. When Adolf Hitler’s political-treatise-wrapped-in-an-autobiography, Mein Kampf, was published in 1925, the author appeared to lift not just ideas but entire passages from Ford’s own publications. The Mein Kampf first edition extolled Ford by name, singling out the American automobile baron for his steadfast courage in the face of ongoing assault by strikers, or commies, or bankers, or media moguls, or some combination thereof. Jews all, no doubt. “It is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union,” Hitler wrote. “Every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions; only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.” Hitler had already mulled sending some of his “shock troops” to major American cities to aid in Ford’s possible run for president in 1924.

When a reporter from The Detroit News showed up at Nazi Party headquarters in Munich in December 1931 to interview Hitler for her “Five Minutes with Men in Public Eye” series, she was surprised to find, hanging on the wall behind Hitler’s desk, a large, framed portrait of America’s most famous antisemite. “I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler explained to the newspaperwoman. The reporter asked Hitler that day, point-blank, why he was antisemitic. “Somebody has to be blamed for our troubles,” he said without hesitation.

McLaglen told Slocombe, Allen, and the local tsar of the anticommunist White Russians, George Doombadze, that perhaps synchronized firebombings would be more dramatic. McLaglen was sure he could get whatever dynamite they needed from his friends inside local police departments.

Deatherage wasted no time in bringing von Gienanth up to speed on the current state of the Nazi-friendly movement in the United States. After five years of fits and starts, the train was finally starting to couple up boxcars from Boston and New York and Asheville and Wichita and Seattle and Los Angeles. The membership of the Militant Christian Patriots, the American League of Christian Women, the Christian Constitutionalists, the Defenders of Christian Civilization, the Christian Mobilizers, the Silver Shirts, the German American Bund, and Deatherage’s own Knights of the White Camelia, a brother organization of the Ku Klux Klan, were falling in line under the colors—and the swastika emblem—of the American Nationalist Confederation. The plan was for a centralized fascist confederation with a national headquarters and well-armed, well-trained paramilitary cells in crucial port cities like Boston, New York, Washington, Miami, Savannah, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

And here was where von Gienanth was able to provide the American fascist a little encouragement. “It looks to me from what I read in the papers and the information I have,” said the German attaché, “that probably there is ten times more [antisemitism] now in the United States than there was in Germany before Hitler’s rise to power.”

There is no direct evidence that George Deatherage relayed the German embassy’s advice—and von Gienanth’s judgment about the power of American antisemitism—to the man Deatherage was recruiting to lead his movement, General George Van Horn Moseley. But it also doesn’t seem like the general needed much prodding along those lines. Out on the hustings, after his retirement from the military, he liked to warm up his crowds with a hearty defense of the Second Amendment—at least for the righteous. “Remember, today the right to carry arms must not be abridged,” he told a luncheon group in Indianapolis, to loud applause. “In taking the rifle or weapon from the Communists, from the [union members who belonged to the Congress of Industrial Organizations], and the murderers, we must not abridge that right of the patriotic Americans to bear arms. Remember that, in all history, before an internal enemy attempts to destroy his victim, he first disarms him by the operation of law.”

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.”

“Do you remember what Hitler had said?” Hoke wrote. “ ‘America is permanently on the brink of revolution. It will be a simple matter for me to produce unrest and revolts in the U.S., so that these gentry will have their hands full with their own affairs.’

Lindbergh was not alone. His speech in Des Moines about “the Jewish” came at the same time that General Moseley was making his public case to sterilize any Jewish person immigrating to the United States. It was also when Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, a North Carolina Democrat, was calling for federal legislation to close our borders to European Jews, despite the widespread knowledge by then that they were being rounded up—men, women, and children—and murdered by the Nazis. They were going to be “seeping into this country by the thousands every single month,” Reynolds said, “to take the jobs which rightly belong” to Americans. “I wish to say—and I say it without the slightest hesitation—that if I had my way about it at this hour, I would build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of the earth could possibly scale or ascend it.”

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 wholesome aversion for the Negroes and the colored races in general, including the Jews, the existence of popular justice [lynching]…scholars who have studied immigration and gained an insight, by means of intelligence tests, into the inequality of the races—all these strains are an assurance that the sound elements of the United States will one day awaken as they have awakened in Germany,” Hitler said.

Maloney’s terse and declarative twenty-eight-page indictment was based on almost seven thousand pages of grand jury testimony from more than 150 different witnesses. It charged the defendants with “intent to interfere with, impair, and influence the loyalty, morale, and discipline of the military and naval forces of the United States.” Germany’s propaganda scheme targeting the United States went far afield from military bases and installations, of course, but Maloney believed this was the charge that would stick. And also get the word out. Without naming or indicting them, Maloney in his court filings described how members of Congress had helped the Hitler government launder Nazi propaganda and send it, in bulk, to American soldiers, sailors, and marines as well as to the public at large.

This much was certain: Germany had agents at work inside the United States; armed American fascists were being actively supported by the Hitler government; members of Congress were colluding with a German propaganda agent to facilitate an industrial-scale Nazi information operation targeting the American people; critical U.S. munitions plants were blowing up in multiple states. And the Justice Department, at last, was going to act to take it all apart. At least it was going to try to.

Here at home, World War II vibrates with such moral intensity for Americans that it’s hard to picture, hard to believe, hard to conceive, that there were Americans—let alone lots of them—who thought not just that we should stay out of the war but that if we did decide to fight, then joining the Axis powers would be the better bet. That happened, though, and that, too, is the history of America’s fight against fascism.