Title: Prequel
Rating: 5 Stars
In the pantheon of American mythology, one of the biggest is that of the Good War. I’m talking of course about World War II. This is when we Americans all stood up against the threat of fascism and defeated it. It was, many believe, the last time that we were united as Americans.
What if I told you that, before the start of the war, many Americans not only thought that Germany was basically unbeatable but that Hitler had a lot of good ideas, especially around his treatment of the Jews?
The 1930s was a pretty messed up time in the US. In my last post, I wrote about the Business Plot. Several prominent businessmen, aghast that Franklin Roosevelt had the audacity to implement social programs intended to feed, clothe, and provide jobs to starving Americans, tried to initiate a military coup and assume power. Now that I’ve gotten old and have been reading histories for decades, I’d previously read about it. I’m guessing that a pretty small percentage of Americans have ever heard of it.
Similarly, I’d surmise that a small percentage know about this chapter of our history. Maybe a good number do know that there was a major pacifist movement in the US in the years before WWII. Some probably even know that our then national hero, Charles Lindbergh, was one of those pacifists. He went on nationwide tours to convince Americans to stay on the sidelines.
That might seem innocuous. However, does it still seem innocuous when you learn that many of these pacifist organizations received their funding from Nazi Germany? How would you feel about Lindbergh if you knew that, in his speeches, he said that it was Jews that was trying to drag Americans into the war?
This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Nazi Germany figured out, early on, that, if it was going to be successful in a European war, it was critical for the US to remain on the sidelines. It was willing to take pretty drastic steps to keep the US out of the war. This included embedding agents into our country, recruiting and funding US citizens to serve as front men, seducing US congressmen to their cause, and spreading millions of dollars in their fight to keep the US out of the war.
This story talks about that, but the focus of the book is on the fascists among us. There were influential people that legitimately wanted the US to have its own home grown Hitler. There were people absolutely convinced that there was a Jewish cabal secretly running this country that needed to be liquidated.
Some of this I already knew. Much of it I didn’t.
Let’s start with Henry Ford. Ford was a rabid antisemite. He bought a newspaper pretty much for the sole purpose of disseminating antisemitic thoughts. Most notoriously, in this paper, he printed, in full, the book Protocol of the Elders of Zion. For those lucky enough not to have heard of it, this is a book that describes a plot for Jewish global domination. He did this even though by the time he published it, it had already been debunked.
After the Nazi party rose to power, its leaders began to look around for ideas on how to handle its Jewish population. As shocking as it sounds today, the Nazis drew much of their inspiration from American laws. Specifically, they eagerly researched our laws regarding eugenics and, even more so, our Jim Crow laws. The fact that the US, despite having a Constitution that bestows citizenship and apparent equality for all, could have laws that disenfranchises and discriminates against a specific class of people proved to be an almost exact fit to the aims of the Nazi party.
Sure, Germany had its thuggish Brown Shirts. Italy had its equivalent Black Shirts. The US never had anything like that, right? Well, let me introduce you to the Silver Shirts. Formed by a man named William Dudley Pelley, by the mid 1930s they were a large force. In many ways, they were the QAnon of their time. Instead of Deep State Democrats, their paranoid focus was on the Jews. They believed that the Jewish conspiracy included things like vaccinations to weaken people, corrupt youth through teaching, destroy family life, create indecent art and literature, and undermine religion. Sound familiar? All that’s missing is a JFK Jr reference. They were well supplied with weapons, including plans to mass produce a nasty club known as a “kike killer”. Lovely people.
Although Germany invested a lot of money in their activities against the US, it turns out that some enterprising US politicians found a way to stretch its money even farther. From the earliest days of our republic, US congressmen had franking privileges. Basically, anything that was read in to the Congressional Record could be reprinted at very low cost. Once reprinted, the congressional franking privilege meant that any member could mail out the printed copies for zero cost. Now, they can only mail it to their constituents. However, there is a loophole in that if a congressional committee orders the reprint, then it could be mailed nationwide for free.
Nazi agents, specifically a long time German agent named George Viereck, cultivated close relationships with like minded congressmen. He would write a pro-Nazi speech and have a congressmen or a senator read it into the record. Once read in the record, it could be reprinted and mailed out to potentially millions of Americans, all at the US taxpayer expense. By the time that WWII started, there were some two dozen congressmen that were happily mailing Nazi propaganda to US citizens.
There were several congressmen that were more notorious than others. First of all, there was Hamilton Fish. If you recognize the name, it’s because there are Hamilton Fish’s going all the way back to 1808 (they’re currently up to Hamilton Fish V). There are multiple generations of Hamilton Fish’s that served in Congress. Well Hamilton Fish III was deep in with Viereck. His Chief of Staff later went to prison for perjury during the franking scandal.
Ernest Lundeen was a US senator also caught in the franking scandal. It was believed that many of the speeches that he gave were actually written by Viereck. When the franking scandal hit, he knew that he was in trouble and was in a panic. Luckily(?) for him, shortly after that he died in a very mysterious plane crash. Immediately after the crash, his widow entered his congressional office apparently for the sole purpose of scooping up all of Lundeen’s correspondence with Viereck. Nothing to see there, I’m sure.
Lundeen was a piece of work in other ways. Usually a senator’s congressional staff is steadfastly loyal to their senator. In his case, not so much. He required each of his staff to kick back a percentage of their salary to him. For instance, if a secretary made $150 a week, every week they’d have to give Lundeen an envelope containing $15 in cash. As they made more money, they’d have to kick in more. There was apparently not a lot of sad faces in his office when they learned of his death.
The final politician that I want to talk about is Wild Bill Langer. He also was caught up in the franking scandal, but it’s his back story that I found fascinating / amusing. He was governor of North Dakota. While governor, he got caught up in a kickback scheme. He was charged (federally), convicted, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. Langer rejected the conviction, rejected the court order removing him from office, declared martial law, declared North Dakota’s independence from the US, and barricaded himself in his office. After his supporters threatened to shoot his lieutenant governor, Langer resigned. Despite all of that, he later was re-elected governor and then elected to the US senate. That is an interesting career!
In case it’s not obvious, the book is entitled Prequel because Maddow believes that we’re living in similar times. Instead of Nazi Germany, we have Russia actively trying to manipulate us to undermine democracy. Around the world, it appears that fascism, in one form or another, is on the move while democracy seems in danger of failing. Perhaps we can learn from a previous time in our history where such a threat seemed on the rise.
Much like Maddow’s previous book Bagman, much of the information in this book had already been discussed in a podcast series. In this case, the podcast was named Ultra. Despite already having listened to Ultra, I still thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.
dorkenstein 