In 1933, The Pittsburgh Courier published an editorial entitled 'Hitler Learns from America'. So how and why was fascism on the rise in the United States from the Great Depression to the Second World War?In this episode, Don speaks with Rachel Maddow, host of 'The Rachel Maddow Show' on MSNBC. Together, they explore the influence of propaganda, key figures of American Fascism, and the Great Sedition Trial of 1944.Rachel's latest book is 'Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.'Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AMERICANHISTORYYou can take part in our listener survey here.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What sparked the rise of fascism in America?
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Just a note from me. Before we get started, this conversation has been recorded before our recent presidential election. Here in Detroit, row upon row of shiny black vehicles exit the assembly line in steady succession. Simple, affordable, and durable, with a lightweight body and uniform shape.
In 1908, the Ford Model T, one of the first vehicles to be mass produced, comes to represent American engineering innovation, a landmark achievement and a cultural icon for the modern world. But this is not the only assembly line to be owned and operated by Henry Ford. A decade after the Model T came into being, in 1918, Ford buys his hometown newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
Then, two years later, on May 22, 1920, he publishes a four-volume set of pamphlets and articles taken from the newspaper, entitled The International Jew, The World's Problem. The first edition flies off the presses in the hundreds of thousands. It will later be translated into 16 languages. It blames the Jewish population for pretty much all of the world's problems.
Labor unrest, Bolshevism, financial strife, and war. Ford distributes half a million copies to his network of dealerships and subscribers, spreading anti-Semitic hatred across the country, a message reflected and admired by the burgeoning National Socialist Movement in Germany, a movement which it is rumored Ford also bankrolls.
This is not the start or the end of a deep relationship between the Nazi Party and a willing swath of the American public. Don Wildman But it's her 16-year-long running eponymous program on MSNBC, The Rachel Maddow Show, that has made her a household name. And today we get to discuss her most recent book, Prequel, An American Fight Against Fascism. Welcome, Rachel Maddow, to American History Hit.
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Chapter 2: Who was Henry Ford and what was his role?
It is a delight to have you here.
Don, it is such an honor. I am a fan of yours, and I am a devoted listener, and I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.
Well, let's conclude the interview with that, please. Listen, prequel, a great book. I listened to it in one long drive. Oh, great. Wow. To your voice telling me the whole story. It tracks the extraordinary rise of American fascism out of the Great Depression up to World War II. We should take a moment here for a definition.
Fascism, from Merriam-Webster's, "...a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation, and often race, above the individual, associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and suppression of opposition."
The word comes from the Latin facis, or bundle of sticks, often wrapped around an axe, which was the symbol of strength and authority in ancient Rome. So fascism is all about Mussolini and the fascists of 1920s Italy. Okay, back to the interview. The subtitle reads, An American Fight Against Fascism. But boy, there were a whole bunch of Americans who wanted to bring it to these shores.
Why so, and why at that time?
You know, at that time, fascism, you know, before World War II, fascism didn't have the same association that it does for us now. Before we saw what the fascist dictatorships left in their wake during World War II, I think a lot of Americans were legitimately fascist-curious fascists.
In 1940, when Charles Lindbergh's wife wrote a book about fascism being the wave of the future in the United States, it was the best-selling book in the country that year. One of the most prominent American public intellectuals at the time was a man named Lawrence Dennis, who was an overt supporter of fascism and thought that that would be America's next chapter.
It was seen as being modern and efficient and something maybe worth trying. That said, once we knew more about what it was about, there were Americans who, as late as the day that Japan attacked us in Pearl Harbor, believed that we should be trying to do something more along the lines of Hitler's government in Germany.
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Chapter 3: What does fascism mean in the historical context?
George Sylvester Feerick was a literary celebrity at the time. He was, oddly, he was the pioneer of gay vampire fiction, which has become a thing in our modern life. But he was, I think, the first person in the English language to ever try something like that. He was an accomplished poet. He made a name for himself doing interviews with famous men. He was a
who was a Kardashian of the literary set at the time. He also had been an agent for the Kaiser during World War I, operating in the United States, trying to turn America more toward the Kaiser's point of view. And in World War II, he was the highest paid German agent in the United States. And he headed a multimillion dollar, actually massive,
Very slick, very sophisticated propaganda effort that targeted Americans directly through a number of front groups and intermediaries. And most controversially, it targeted Americans through members of Congress. He infiltrated Congress in a way that used congressional offices to send millions of pieces of German-authored and pro-Nazi propaganda to the American public.
There's a lot about this time that America is having a big role in. I mean, the psychology of advertising has really set in culturally in this world, how to manipulate people's minds. Propaganda, of course, had been part of the world before this, but now in the 20th century, it's become this sort of refined technique, and they are understanding how to use it in all regards, especially politically.
One of the heroes of prequel is a man named Henry Hoke, who is H-O-K-E. And he's not a famous person at all. He wasn't even a famous person at the time he died. His obituary had no reference to any of the heroic work that he did in this field. But he was a direct mail advertising expert. He, in fact, had a trade publication that was about direct mail advertising.
And when his son went off to college, he went to UPenn, he told his dad he was unhappy at school. And one of the reasons he was unhappy is that he was unsettled by how much pro-German, anti-Semitic propaganda he was getting as a college student. And his dad looked into it with this very specific area of expertise that he brought to bear.
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Chapter 4: How did propaganda influence American attitudes?
And he realized that what his son was seeing was the tip of an iceberg where not just college students, but and insurance agents and captains of finance and all sorts of different professions were being targeted by a big, seemingly centrally organized German propaganda operation with incredibly sophisticated tactics. Mm-hmm.
And he, as a citizen, unraveled it and ultimately followed the trail of it to the U.S. Congress, just as a citizen, just as somebody who understood persuasion and the modern arts of it in that time. He had no military background, no foreign policy background, but he, more than anyone, more than any other American, exposed what the Germans were doing.
Well, every story has a protagonist and antagonist, and that's what we find throughout your book, is these amazing people who are heroes and villains, but no story survives without them. Another story, Hitler's Mein Kampf, written in 1933 when he was jailed. He cites in that story of his American advancements in eugenics as central to creating a people's state, in quotation marks.
The racist laws, Jim Crow in America, very inspiring him. Hi, it's me again. We have not yet done an episode on the Jim Crow laws. It's on the list. But for now, let me just explain and refresh. Jim Crow is a term for the segregation laws, rules, and customs, which arose after Reconstruction ended in 1877.
These laws, rules, and customs, some of which lasted all the way into the 1960s, removed the rights granted to African Americans by the Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, and stated to establish and protect the rights of formerly enslaved people and promote equality in the United States ever after.
Basically, these Jim Crow policies in Southern states usurped the constitutional protections granted Black people by the federal government. All right, back to Rachel. For Hitler, America was primed for fascism, wasn't it? For many people.
Hitler said that America was permanently on the brink of revolution. He thought that it was impossible to have a stable pluralist country where lots of different types of people all got a say in how things were governed. But he also was very inspired by American racism.
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Chapter 5: What was the significance of the Great Sedition Trial of 1944?
And James Q. Whitman wrote a seminal book about this, a short and beautifully written recent book called Hitler's American Model, which is about one specific slice of that.
The Nazis sent a bright German law student to the University of Arkansas Law School to do a comprehensive study of Jim Crow and about how Black Americans could be technically citizens under the 14th Amendment, but also subjugated and exploited politically. and dominated by the white majority.
And that pseudo-legalistic justification for the type of second-class citizenship that Hitler wanted to impose on Jews and other non-Aryans or other sub-citizens in his mind was part of the way that the Germans justified the Nuremberg Laws.
It's part of the way that they thought that they could be seen not as an outlaw regime, but as a regime that, much like America, had a legalistic framework that justified what they were doing internally.
It's a fascinating chapter that you tell about the emergence of the protocols of the elders of Zion, which you can still find all over the web. It's incredible. But it all really gets publicized through Henry Ford's newspaper.
Yeah, and I did not know this about Henry Ford before I got deep into this research. I knew that he was an anti-Semite, but I sort of thought that it was a private thing. I thought it was his private prejudice, a peccadillo. He was, I think, inarguably the most effective and most prolific anti-Semitic propagandist in the English language ever.
You mentioned Mein Kampf earlier in the first edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler singles out Henry Ford by name as the American to look up to. Hitler kept a portrait of Henry Ford in his office because he admired his anti-Semitism. As the proprietor of the Dearborn Independent, Ford serialized the Protocols of the Elders of Zion even after they were exposed contemporaneously as a hoax and a forgery.
He serialized them He promoted them. He gathered his essays about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into a four-volume book that he had printed in multiple languages. It sold very well in Germany. And he did more than anyone to spread toxic, murderous, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, not just in the United States, but worldwide.
And Henry Ford has a lot of different legacies, but that, I think, is maybe foremost among them.
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Chapter 6: How did anti-Semitism intertwine with fascism in America?
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
At PwC, we build for what's next. So you can get there now. So you can protect what you built. So you can create new value. PwC. So you can. PwC refers to the PwC network and or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity.
This book has momentum. It pushes forward just like your podcasts do in a very skillful story way. So there are many ideas discussed as we are doing here, but it really pushes through with these great characters who are really fighting the good fight and the bad fight in other regards. How did they see this happening? Like, how was it going to happen?
Was there going to be a bloody revolution in the streets or would this be politically manipulated like Hitler becoming chancellor, etc. ?
were different plots, and they all look completely improbable in retrospect, as does every failed plot ever. Once it doesn't work, it looks like it never was going to work.
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from the past about fascism?
But for example, one of the plots that I discuss in the book that was exposed by some of the citizen activists who infiltrated these groups was that after the 1940 election, which FDR, they fully expected to win, that he was going to get reelected,
They wanted people who were against FDR, they wanted people who opposed that almost inevitable political outcome to rise up in multiple states all at the same time at a prearranged time and to start fires, to shoot up buildings, to commit murders, to commit kidnappings in a way that created a national sense of emergency.
The reason they wanted to do it all at once is because they believed if you could create a sense of national emergency, it would result in... National Guard being called out everywhere.
They believed they had enough sympathy, pro-fascist sympathy, among National Guardsmen and local law enforcement that it would eventually become a situation where a state of emergency was declared nationwide and they, as the sort of anti-communist vanguard, would be invited to form a new government. And that was the contours of the national plot for the post-1940 election period.
It was also the theory behind the Christian Front plot in 1940 in New York, where the FBI believed they were seven days away from enacting a plot that would involve the kidnapping of multiple members of Congress and setting off bombs all over New York City, which again they thought would set off an emergency and they'd be invited to join with the junta, essentially.
A bit of anarchy in there always helps stir the pot, doesn't it? There's so many of these iconic figures. I was so surprised by Philip Johnson's story. He was, in my childhood and growing up, such an iconic architect, the AT&T building on Madison Avenue. I mean, but he's one of those many who are just drawn into this fold. It's incredible how active he was.
Philip Johnson, very, very celebrated American architect, among the most celebrated architects. I feel like he's the antidote to me, I think the canard, that the only people to whom fascism appeals are people who are economically dislocated or alienated or don't have any social power. Philip Johnson had all the money and all the power in the world. He was born to an incredibly wealthy family.
He was Ivy League and incredibly well-connected and fascist to the core. He founded a group called the Gray Shirts, which was meant to be like the black shirts in Italy. He journeyed to Louisiana to try to attach himself to Huey Long, who he saw as the best candidate for America's Hitler until Long was assassinated. Then he attached himself to Charles Coughlin, who was the
famous radio priest who had a quarter of the country listening to him at the height of his powers, who was overtly fascist. Johnson's writings from the time are astonishing. He wrote explicitly about needing to racially cleanse the United States of Black people and immigrants and Jews. And it's just astonishing that we remember him mostly as an architect.
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