Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States

by Bradley W. Hart

The darkest underbellies of American society were at the heart of all this: anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, and greed were the fundamental forces that drew these groups together.

And we're going to ignore completely the anti-imperialist progressives, becuase that doesn't fit the narrative.

Pelley’s sudden interest in Native Americans stemmed from a supposed divine realization that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been taken over by Bolsheviks. Native Americans were therefore natural allies for his political movement because they too were supposedly victims of the Jewish conspiracy Pelley saw everywhere. Among the many problems with this eccentric plan was the fact that Pelley did not actually know many Native Americans. His efforts to reach out by referring to himself as “Chief Pelley of the Tribe of Silver” and writing articles in prose that could have been lifted from the stock characters of Hollywood Westerns gained few supporters.

One Native American ally Pelley did manage to recruit was a mixed-race Portland attorney named Elwood A. Towner who soon took on a bizarre role. Adopting the “Indian title” of Chief Red Cloud, Towner began attending legion and Bund meetings up and down the West Coast and drew sizable crowds as he wore a stereotypical feather headdress and clothing covered in swastikas.

With a higher degree of personal discipline, Pelley might well have become the leader around which the far right could coalesce. With his ideological flexibility, flair for the dramatic, and ability to harness religious language (even in his own unique way), Pelley could have been formidable. As it turned out, he was merely a flash in the pan who ended up being exposed as an unscrupulous fraudster.

That....sounds familiar....

This was a radical move. Coughlin was now effectively calling for the US government to be replaced with a new regime of his own design that would take radical steps to end the Depression. The analogues with Hitler’s economic policies were obvious.

No, they're not. The sixteen points, which this lazy writing prompted me to inquire about, seem fairly bland save their pointed attack against the beast from Jekyll Island, the "Fed".

Coughlin liked the Republican because he had introduced a radical agricultural relief bill that called for the Farm Credit Administration to buy up the mortgages of foreclosed farms and reissue the debt at much lower rates.43 The Roosevelt administration viewed the proposal as dangerous economic meddling and ensured its defeat in Congress.

This is a bit like Hitler declaring a law invalid because it smacked of too much antisemitism.

Within three months of his speech that day, and with whispers about the senator’s Nazi sympathies growing, his scattered remains would be recovered in a Virginia field. The question marks surrounding his death remain to the present day.

That statement is a very strange way to say "he died in a plane crash".

American businessmen with holdings in Germany had a vested financial interest in making peace, especially with the Royal Air Force starting to bomb German factories that might soon include their own. Remarkably, even after the war’s start American corporate bosses tried to maintain a sense of normalcy in relations with their German divisions. Ford’s Dearborn office continued to communicate with its Cologne factory, and even sent new equipment to the plant in 1941 to boost production for the German military.