[Rachel Maddow’s podcast tells the story of American Nazis in
the 1940s. But the era’s real and lasting authoritarian danger came
from the spectacular growth of a national security state.]
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ULTRA VIOLENCE  
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Nelson Lichtenstein
May 23, 2023
Dissent
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_ Rachel Maddow’s podcast tells the story of American Nazis in the
1940s. But the era’s real and lasting authoritarian danger came from
the spectacular growth of a national security state. _

Father Charles Coughlin delivers a radio speech, (Fotosearch/Getty
Images)

 

Early in the twentieth century, the philosopher George Santayana
famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.” But the obverse may also be true. Keen observers of the
present are all too eager to ransack the past for prologues and
parallels to the traumas of our own time. Hardly a day goes by without
someone analogizing the polarizations of the twenty-first century to
the divisions, political and moral, that engendered the Civil War; and
it was not so long ago that in virtually any diplomatic conflict,
memories of “Munich” were hastened to the fore. These are not so
much remembrances of the past as they are artful and selective
distortions designed to make a contemporary point.

Rachel Maddow plays this game in her recent podcast, _Ultra_, a
production of MSNBC. Its impact will soon be greatly multiplied by
Steven Spielberg’s feature film treatment, for which the legendary
Tony Kushner is reportedly co-writing the screenplay. Maddow’s
eight-part series has excellent production values and vivid language,
and it makes skillful use of eighty-year-old newsreel and broadcast
recordings. When it appeared in the fall of 2022, _Ultra_ quickly
topped the podcast popularity charts.

Maddow, with cowriters and producers Mike Yarvitz and Kelsey
Desiderio, tells the story of a fascist plot designed to keep the
United States out of the Second World War and in the process subvert
American democracy by exploiting what the Germans called “kernels of
disturbance”—racial, cultural, and political differences that lead
to “national demoralization.” As Maddow tells her listeners,

This is a story about politics at the edge. A violent, ultra-right
authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships.
Support for that movement among serving members of Congress who prove
willing and able to use their share of American political power to
defend the extremists, to protect themselves, to throw off the
investigation. Violence against government targets. Plots to overthrow
the United States government by force of arms. And a criminal justice
system trying, trying, but ill-suited to thwart this kind of danger.

If this resembles our own time, that is the point. Maddow analogizes
Trump and his contemporary circle of supporters, inside and outside of
Congress, to the Nazi agents of 1940 and their American collaborators,
some of whom were indeed sitting congressmen and senators. But this is
an entirely wrongheaded historical lesson for those fearful about the
state of U.S. democracy today. In the 1940s, the real danger came not
from Nazi-friendly Americans but from the spectacular growth of a
national security state that threatened civil liberties and turned a
blind eye to the power of white supremacy, which flourished for
decades in the American South and beyond.

In the first episode, Maddow sucks listeners in with the dramatic
story of a mysterious airplane crash that took the life of Minnesota
Senator Ernest Lundeen in 1940. Twenty-four others, including a brace
of federal agents possibly tailing Lundeen, also died in the crash,
whose cause is still unknown. Over the course of the podcast, Maddow
explores Lundeen’s extensive collaboration with a Nazi agent, George
Sylvester Viereck.

Funded and controlled by the German embassy in Washington and by Nazi
higher-ups back in the Reich, Viereck wrote speeches for Lundeen and
other legislators, used congressional franking privileges to get them
widely distributed, and may even have encouraged actual military
sabotage, including an explosion that destroyed the Hercules Powder
plant in New Jersey in September 1940, killing more than fifty. On
Capitol Hill, Viereck’s collaborators, aside from Lundeen, included
Democratic Senator Rush Holt of West Virginia; Republican Senators
Gerald Nye of North Dakota and Burton Wheeler of Montana; and
important Congressmen like Clare Hoffman of Michigan and Hamilton Fish
of New York. By 1940, all were “isolationists,” and some
associated with the anti-interventionist America First Committee,
whose leading personality was aviator Charles Lindbergh. America First
saw President Roosevelt as a perfidious politician leading the nation
into war.

In setting the scene, Maddow casts her net far beyond Capitol Hill. In
the late 1930s and early 1940s, social movements we might properly
label fascist were all around. The German-American Bund, which once
filled Madison Square Garden, had several thousand adherents
throughout the Mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, and Southern California.
Broadcasting from his parish in Royal Oak, Michigan, Father Charles
Coughlin reached an even larger audience, more than 30 million
listeners nationwide. Although Coughlin had once been a staunch New
Dealer, he turned against Roosevelt after 1934. In Coughlin’s view,
Wall Street bankers, especially the Jewish ones, and international
communism constituted the Janus face of a secular Satan. Roosevelt’s
tolerance of both seemed to provide the impulse for Coughlin to move
sharply rightward, toward virulent anti-Semitism, admiration for the
new Germany, and hostility to an industrial union movement that backed
the president. Coughlin thought democracy was “doomed” and told
his listeners, “We are at the crossroads. I take the road to
fascism.”

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, Coughlin explained to his
audience that the destruction of so much Jewish property in Germany
came largely in response to Jewish arrogance and power. By this time
the radio priest was advocating the creation of the Christian Front, a
paramilitary formation whose adherents were particularly active in the
Irish neighborhoods of Boston and New York. They posed with rifles
stolen from Army arsenals, stockpiled explosives, and may have had
something to do with the destruction of the giant powder plant in New
Jersey. On the podcast, historian Charles Gallagher tells listeners
that the Christian Front had plans to “overthrow the government of
the United States.” Maddow concurs: “Taking power by violence.
Holding power by force.”

Listeners will find all this sensational (and perhaps familiar), but
such violence, actual or imagined, was of little consequence compared
to what turned out to be the most significant impact of Nazi influence
in the United States: maintaining a restrictive immigration policy for
Jews and downplaying news of the Holocaust. Maddow is uninterested in
the actual speeches Viereck ghostwrote for all those legislators; it
is enough for her to say that they amplified Nazi propaganda. But in
1939 and 1940, the Nazi argument that the Second World War was a
“Jewish war,” a product of guile and manipulation, struck a chord
that resonated widely even in the United States, where anti-Semitism
was by no means confined to right-wing isolationists. Public opinion
surveys taken between 1939 and 1941 found that about a third of the
American population agreed that “the Jews in this country would like
to get the United States into the European war.” Such sentiments did
nothing to prevent American rearmament or eventual
belligerency—those steps were taken on traditional national security
grounds—but they forestalled any coordinated U.S. effort to rescue
European Jewry during the war itself. Roosevelt and other liberals
were fearful that if the war became one to “save the Jews,” they
might spur on a divisive domestic anti-Semitism while giving the Nazi
claims some purchase.

Meanwhile, Maddow vastly exaggerates the homegrown Nazi threat in the
years just before Pearl Harbor. Everything she says about Coughlin,
the Christian Front, America First, Lundeen, and Viereck is true, but
without a larger historical context. Compared with the influence of
the MAGA Republicans in contemporary U.S. politics, the “brown
scare” of the late 1930s and early 1940s—the phrase comes from the
late historian Leo Ribuffo—had much less clout or staying power. In
the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, 147
Republicans—eight senators and 139 representatives—voted to
overturn the results of the 2020 election. And in subsequent months,
virtually every major figure in the GOP, some likely running for the
party’s presidential nomination, questioned the validity of the vote
or the appropriateness of the Department of Justice prosecutions that
have put hundreds of insurrectionists in jail.

In 1940, the number of German-linked isolationists was far
smaller—perhaps four senators and twenty congressmen. After Pearl
Harbor they all supported the war, and several lost office a few years
later. More important, the Republican Party was, on the whole, far
more interventionist and supportive of aid to Great Britain. In the
summer of 1940, Roosevelt appointed two prominent GOP figures, Henry
Stimson and Frank Knox, to his war cabinet, and that fall FDR’s
Republican presidential opponent was not Lindbergh, the
Germany-friendly isolationist and sometime anti-Semite, but Wendell
Willkie. The Indiana Republican was of “pure German descent,” as
the German embassy cabled Berlin, but “Willkie’s nomination is
unfortunate for us. He is not an isolationist . . . he belongs to
those Republicans who see America’s best defense in supporting
England by all means ‘short of war.’”

Indeed, despite all the America First bluster, bipartisan
interventionism, not fascism, soon dominated American politics. After
June 1940, when France fell to the Nazis, the United States rapidly
became what Roosevelt called an “arsenal of democracy” whose
enormous resources shifted the tide of battle. A newly empowered labor
movement was increasingly anti-fascist, and American liberals were
growing far more interventionist. When we consider that Congress
passed Lend-Lease, a peacetime draft, and a gigantic increase in the
war budget—all before Pearl Harbor—the various machinations of
Viereck and his collaborators come to seem petty indeed.

In describing those hostile to American intervention in the war,
Maddow and her podcast collaborators like to tell stories of
corruption and misadventure. But the Bund failed to mobilize more than
a sliver of support among German Americans, one reason the Nazi regime
repudiated the organization in the late 1930s. And Father Coughlin’s
heavily Irish audience was far more anti-British than pro-German.

Meanwhile, almost all of the congressional figures for whom Viereck
wrote speeches, or with whom he otherwise collaborated, were from
places like Minnesota, Montana, Michigan, the Dakotas, and upstate New
York. These areas were populated by many Germans and Scandinavians,
but even more important, they had been a fount of antiwar sentiment
from the First World War onward, sometimes linked to a radical
politics standing to the left of both President Woodrow Wilson’s New
Freedom and Roosevelt’s New Deal. Ernest Lundeen’s vote against
U.S. participation in the Great War as a newly minted congressman in
1917 cast him into the political wilderness for more than a decade. He
returned to Washington in the 1930s still an isolationist, but now of
a decidedly left-wing sort: his most notable legislative effort was
sponsorship of a Communist-backed bill designed to radically expand
unemployment insurance and other social insurance programs. Burton
Wheeler’s career was not unlike that of Lundeen: during the First
World War he was a U.S. Attorney for Montana but refused to prosecute
alleged sedition cases, including those against the radical Industrial
Workers of the World. In the 1920s and early 1930s he proved a staunch
anti-imperialist and pro-labor progressive, but he turned sharply
isolationist and hostile to the New Deal during Roosevelt’s second
term.

A left-wing pedigree hardly constitutes an excuse for the apologia so
many of these ex-progressives offered for Nazi Germany in the late
1930s and early 1940s. But many of the interventionists did not come
to the fight with clean hands either. Wall Street and most of the
Republican establishment was certainly on board for the war, but so
too was the white supremacist South, which was then and would remain
for decades an authoritarian cancer within the American body politic.
Despite their sometime affinity for Nazi racial ideology and
policy—the Nuremberg Laws were modeled in part
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Dixie segregationist statutes—Southern politicians were
interventionist in the years just before Pearl Harbor. The South had
long been dependent on commodity exports that Nazi domination of
Europe threatened to halt, and white Southern identification with
English and Scottish ancestors counted as much in the states below the
Mason-Dixon line as did the German heritage of so many in the upper
Midwest.

The Southern reactionaries understood that the growth of a powerful
national security state would help sustain the region’s Jim Crow
order. Unlike so many European fascists, and a few American ones, who
imagined a “march” on the capital or a coup taking over the
federal government, the white South was already powerfully ensconced
within the halls of Congress and in many government agencies, whose
decentralized operation gave plenty of leeway to the elites who
staffed them at the local level. Southern reactionaries didn’t need
a strategy of subversion; in league with conservative Republicans,
they ran the place.

It was hardly an accident, therefore, that the new law the federal
government used to prosecute homegrown fascists was the 1940 Smith
Act, named after Congressman Howard Smith of Virginia, a decades-long
leader of the anti-labor, anti–civil rights bloc in Congress. A
broadly written statute, the Smith Act forbade any attempt to
“advocate, abet, advise, or teach” the violent destruction of the
U.S. government.

By the fall of 1941, the Department of Justice was preparing
indictments against dozens of pro-Nazi activists, fascist ideologues,
and isolationists with foreign ties. These included Viereck, as well
as William Dudley Pelley, leader of the fascist “Silver Shirts”;
Gerald Winrod, an anti-Semitic evangelist; Lawrence Dennis, a fascist
writer; and Elizabeth Dilling, a strident anti-communist and
pro-German isolationist. Significantly, none of the prominent
politicians who had cooperated with Viereck and some of the other
defendants were included among the twenty-nine individuals who finally
went on trial in April 1944. Indeed, one reason for the long delay
arose from meddling by influential figures like Wheeler, who had a
hand in sidelining both prosecutors the Department of Justice assigned
to the case.

The trial turned into a circus, with more disruptions and delays—and
much contention over which activities constituted subversion and which
were mere expressions of free speech. The months-long turmoil
discredited the legal proceedings and may have contributed to the
presiding judge’s fatal heart attack. A mistrial was declared in
December 1944, and two years later, amid growing Cold War tensions,
the Justice Department dismissed the charges.

But the Smith Act lived on for more than a decade, and it was largely
deployed against the left. During the war it was used to indict the
Trotskyist leadership of a powerful Minneapolis Teamsters local, and
in the McCarthy era it was used to imprison scores of American
communists. Most leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union
condemned the law, whether it was directed against communists or
fascists. Even prosecutor O. John Rogge, a figure celebrated by
Maddow, thought any judgement against the fascist agitators would
probably be reversed on appeal. Indeed, by the late 1950s, the Supreme
Court declared the Smith Act unconstitutional because it failed to
distinguish between incitement or subversion and protected speech
advocating unpopular concepts and programs.

The demise of the Smith Act hardly mattered when it came to the
construction of the national security state, which posed a far greater
danger to American liberties. Today, Trump attacks the “deep
state” and excoriates the FBI and the Justice Department, so the
former FBI agents and CIA officials who appear on Maddow’s MSNBC
show seem like liberal-democratic allies, far removed from the
intrusive and secretive military-security apparatus that was once an
object of progressive scorn and fear. But it is important to
understand the degree to which the brown scare supplied much of the
initial ideological legitimacy for that repressive apparatus. As
historian Beverly Gage recounts in her new biography of FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover, it was in these years that the FBI achieved the
stature that it would carry over into the era of McCarthy, the Cold
War, and the bureau’s own war against the civil rights movement and
the New Left. During the Second World War, the agency quadrupled in
size and established a “custodial detention index” listing the
names of hundreds of thousands of leftists, liberals, unionists, and,
yes, some fascists, who were to be rounded up in an emergency.
Hoover’s FBI also achieved de facto autonomy from any oversight by
Congress, the courts, or the White House. The same sort of divorce
from effective democratic control was characteristic of the military,
the diplomatic corps, the intelligence agencies, and much government
research.

Maddow says nothing about the repressive implications of the Smith Act
or the simultaneous expansion of a secretive and intrusive national
security state. Instead, she concludes her podcast by casting doubt on
the capacity of any investigative or judicial activity, no matter how
well resourced, to stanch an authoritarian movement, homegrown or
aided from abroad. To do that, she says, the nation requires “not
just one thing that works. It has to be everything.” In the 1940s,
this included an actual war against the Nazis, but also anti-fascists
running and winning elections at home, with an army of journalists,
activists, and “citizens of all stripes who came to democracy’s
aid when it needed them the most.” Agreed. But when Maddow devotes
nearly three full podcast episodes to the 1944 trial and its
aftermath, it is not hard to feel a gravitational force field similar
to the one created by the cable-news fixation on Trump’s recent
encounters with various courts and investigative bodies. That is not
where the MAGA Republicans are going to be defeated.

The problem is that MSNBC’s obsession with Trump and his most
prominent right-wing supporters has created a dichotomy between
political “extremism” on the one hand and “normal” politics on
the other. But there is no such thing as normality when it comes to
political culture or discourse, in the 1940s or today, and it is
fruitless to think that defeating the Trumpists is going to return us
to some kind of equilibrium that rescues us from corruption,
subversion, inequality, and racism. Only the most robust sort of
democratic movement, one that directly mobilizes heretofore
marginalized elements of the body politic, has the capacity to defeat
reaction and inaugurate a new set of battles for a new society.

_NELSON LICHTENSTEIN is Research Professor at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of A Fabulous Failure:
The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
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_Dissent is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left.  Dissent is a
501(c)3 non-profit organization. We publish the very best in political
argument, and take pride in cultivating the next generation of labor
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* Fascism
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* America First
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* MSNBC
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* Rachel Maddow
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