Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism
Courage, dear heat. Distress, yes. Defeat, no.
Hello Friends,
I worry that I’ll drive people away with so much focus on books that look at the country and tell us who we are and how we got here. But at the same time, I am compelled to read these and try to understand them as a way forward. And despite all that’s happened in the last five months (in the last two weeks!), I do believe in a positive way forward. I’m think you might be in the same head space.
Maybe we're prone to think the country is a locomotive without an engineer, racing down a track. And, of course, trains can’t make U-turns. But we are forgetting there’s more than one train, there’s more than one track, there are many stops along the way. We can meet up at the empathy station and move forward from there. (Yes, ‘move forward’ means do the work.)
I’ve been interested in the religious, cultural, and political influences driving our current situation. I’ve read several books on those topics (links near the end of this post). I’m ending these book reviews/discussions with looking at twentieth-century fascism in the U.S. After this week, I’d like to dive into a particularly fun thing to read during the summer—chapbooks, novellas, microfiction. Short stuff.
Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow
Rachel Maddow dives into the rise of authoritarianism/fascism in the United States in the 1930s and how it continued into WWII. She includes the people we often associate with fascism such as Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, and Father Charles Coughlin. But there are also the surprising villains—U.S. Congress members who were working hand-in-hand with fascist organizations and German agents. The country was so focused on communism as a threat that the government ignored senators and representatives who used their offices and their privileges to promote fascism and deliver German propaganda to their constituents, all at the taxpayers’ expense.
And finally, there are the ordinary Americans who fought fascism, those who amassed the evidence while the government slept. Unlikely heroes Leon Lewis, John C. Metcalfe, Henry Hoke, Drew Pearson, and Dillard Stokes were unrecognized at the time. Now, finally, they are receiving acknowledgement for their sacrifices.
In the 1930s, Leon Lewis realized that the Friends of New Germany were working in Los Angeles to build up an army for the day the Germans would take over America. He was a trusted member of the local chapter of the Disabled American Veterans of America (yeah, ‘America’ twice). Since he had helped many other members, working pro bono, he called in some favors. Some of them agreed and became spies and infiltrated the Friends of the New Germany clubhouse and reported back on what they were doing.
They had to work independently and then hand the information over to the military, who then acted to scuttle the plots. The FBI and Herbert Hoover were entirely focused on communism and doing things like creating a 2,000-page dossier on actor Charlie Chaplin. Meanwhile, Lewis and friends gathered evidence of the German government supporting and giving guidance to American fascist groups, illegally smuggling propaganda through the Port of Los Angeles. They foiled a plot by U.S. Marines to sell guns and ammunition to the American fascists. They exposed an inside-job scheme to take control of U.S. military armories in the West Coast. They even foiled a plot to lynch distinguished Jewish men in Los Angeles (you’ll recognize the names).
John C. Metcalfe was a journalist involved in undercover investigations. He reported to the Dies Committee, formed in 1938 to keep tabs on communism in the United States (members of the Dies committee were opposed to strikes, strikers, collective bargaining, minimum wage, maximum work hours …). He turned over many photos from his investigations showing Nazi activity in the U.S. including Nazi camps for children and the recruitment of American storm troops. He also reported on Nazi Germany’s activities in German-American communities. He 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.” …That is to mislead the public as to the true principles of those organizations.’” ( 118-9)
The Warner Brothers also worked to placate the film Production Code Administration (PCA)—which would not allow them to use the terms ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’—so that they could produce the film Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. It’s quite a story. “Confessions of a Nazi Spy rang loud—even melodramatic—alarms about Hitler and his machinations inside the United States, but it was all a true story. The former G-man who led the real-life investigation of the spy ring said as much in the publicity tour that kicked off the movie’s release.” (147)
The most intriguing of the story’s heroes is an ad man named Henry Hoke. He became interested in German propaganda when his son, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, told him that each morning, he found propaganda slipped under his door. Hoke’s dogged investigation led him to discover that the “German Library of Information was mailing nearly 100,000 copies of its weekly news digest, Facts in Review, to the 1940 version of American “influencers”—ministers, priests, teachers, editors,, elected officials. … ” as well as offering “all-expense-paid speaking tours by pro-fascist, isolationist Americans.” (207)
One concerned German American sent Hoke 25 separate pieces of mail he had received, originating in different locations in Germany, in a single month. One thing that struck Hoke about the German propaganda campaign was the technical confidence of Nazi copy writers. Each mailing was a simple, straightforward attack on a single subject: President Roosevelt’s war preparation, or the Jews, or the Catholics, or America’s licentious freedoms, or the British. Sometimes the mailings included messages from the newly formed isolationist group the America First Committee. Sometimes they included reprints of quotations by famous American firsters, like Charles Lindberg, who had just told a rally of 40,000 people at Chicago’s Soldier Field, that it was time to make a deal with a new master of Europe, Adolf Hitler: ‘An agreement between us could maintain civilization and peace throughout the world as far into the future as we can see.’ (210)
Eighteen months into investigating, using his own funds and draining the finances of his consulting business, Hoke and his team figured out that Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald P. Nye, two of about a dozen legislators who leaned fascist, were sending the Nazi propaganda of the Steuben Society out of their offices using ‘franked’ envelopes.
The ‘frank’ is a congressional privilege: Every member of Congress is given an allowance to cover the costs of sending communications to their constituents over their signature (their ‘frank’), free of postage cost. “It’s another thing altogether for them to give that free-mail privilege away to groups funded by hostile foreign governments, to use Americans’ tax dollars to pump into the United States propaganda authored by that foreign government.” (216)
This story gets crazier and crazier, with employees of the Ford Motor Company compiling mailing lists (later used by U.S. Congress members) of appeasers, anti-Semites, pro-Nazis and fascists from fan mail addressed to isolationist members of Congress and to Charles Lindbergh.
Honestly, the story of Henry Hoke and the franking scandal is alone worth the price of the book. It comes to involve an investigative journalist, Dillard Stokes, who plays an important role in exposing the involvement of Congress members in the Nazi propaganda operation. This leads to the arrest and eventual imprisonment of one of the story’s arch-villains, known German agent George Sylvester Viereck. 1
“Viereck and other Nazi agents doled out cash to myriad publications in the United States, whose editors and publishers then helped the Germans consolidate a mailing list of friendlies and potential friendlies that may have reached into the millions.” (xxvii) However, this is only one of the traitorous things Viereck did as a German agent.
There are so many characters in this drama, and Maddow seems to know that the story will become unwieldy. She begins with a list of the cast of characters in order of appearance. She ends with an epilogue that details what ultimately happened to each of them. The players didn’t all work in coordination with one another, so there are many threads in the fascist weave. I think the best way to read Prequel is to think about how the fascists hoped to take over the government, the techniques they used, and the ways they were able to influence congress members. And to then ask ourselves: How is this relevant today? Do we see a version of this repeating itself in a more contemporary key?
Decapitating Bolsheviks, in Hitler’s calculus, required ridding Germany of the ‘alien in their midst’—the Jews. When Viereck [German immigrant, American citizen, Nazi agent, a major presence throughout Prequel] suggested to the younger man that perhaps his sweeping antisemitism might displace many great artists, scientists, manufacturers, and generally esteemed citizens, Hitler disagreed: ‘The fact that a man is decent is no reason why we should not eliminate him.’ (xxiv)
‘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.’ (xxv)
‘Democracy is doomed,’ said Coughlin. ‘This is our last election. It is Fascism or Communism. We are at a crossroads …. I take the road to Fascism.’ (59)
Try replacing ‘Germany’ and ‘Nazis’ with ‘Russia’ and ‘Putin’ here: “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.” (238)
A reader might find the complete lack of governmental action in the face of mountains of evidence depressing. While Germany was paying agents to influence congress members, and congress members were abusing the privileges of their office to disseminate German propaganda, the United States’ entry into WWII ended the fascist hope, at least for a few generations. But as we look at the rise of authoritarianism today, we certainly don't want a world war to come to our rescue. And yet, the book is a reminder that it is the people themselves who are the foundation of a democratic system. At this moment, while legislators are happily tossing their constituents under the bus (well, except Lisa Murkowski, who is ‘agonizing’ while throwing Americans into the road), I find Prequel heartening. In the 1930s and 40s, ordinary Americans never stopped working to secure evidence of wrongdoing; they never stopped working to retain their rights.
It’s hard work. We have no choice but to do it. The big question for me is whether the work for democracy (holding legislators accountable, moving through the courts, protesting, canvassing and working to elect better guardians of the Constitution) will hold back authoritarianism for 16+ months, until the midterm elections.
Other books about the state of America that I’ve recently discussed:
Cowboy Apocalypse by Rachel Wagner
Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America by Bridget Read
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking over America by Talia Lavin
And one example of an America doing wonderful things in the world:
John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis
If schadenfreude is your thing, you’ll be happy to know that while Viereck was in prison, his wife left him, sold all of his possessions, and donated the proceeds to Jewish and Catholic refugee groups.
This is fascinating. I need to read something hopeful on how “ordinary” Americans overcame serious challenges to democracy. I think this might be the book. Thanks for this post.
Thank you for all of this! (Currently reading Everything is Tuberculosis. I love John Green.)