Book Review/Ken Winkes

Hitler Had His Fans in 1930s America

“Prequel,” Rachel Maddow’s account of Fascism’s wide-spread presence in pre-World War II America, would have hit me like a punch in the gut—if I did not follow the news.

But because I do follow it, as I read her book about the extent and influence of Nazi activities in the United States only 80 years ago, I felt more disorientated than shocked.

I knew where I was, but when was I? Eighty-plus years ago in the 1930s or in late 2023? Of course, that is exactly Maddow’s point. History is always the prequel to the present. Time may pass, but not everything is new.

In “Prequel” we meet Nazis who deny their collusion with the German Reich by crying “witch hunt.” We see the pre-Facebook and Fox News German propaganda machine showering Americans with millions of pages of lies about Adolf Hitler’s plans and about the Nazi’s horrific treatment of the Jews. Then, just as now, thousands of weekend warriors donned uniforms and armed themselves to prepare for the coming revolution. And the sons and daughters of recent White immigrants wanted to build a wall.

Prominent Americans like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh vocally supported Hitler’s war aims and antisemitism. While their attachment to Hitler was no secret, Maddow’s far-ranging research introduces us to dozens of other characters who devoted themselves to supporting Hitler and to spreading Nazi lies.

William Pelley’s Silver Legion—they wore silver shirts — which called for the formation of a Christian Commonwealth to overthrow the Franklin Roosevelt administration, claimed to have 100,000 members. The smaller German-American Bund, which was closely tied to the German government, promoted Nazi interests in America throughout the 1930’s. They marched, they rallied, and imitating Germany’s Nazi youth camps, they ran youth camps for good young American Aryans.

At the center of the web of pro-Nazi “influencers” of the day was a German-American writer, George Viereck, who had come under Hitler’s personal spell. Backed by oodles of German money, Viereck became a pipeline for German propaganda, creating some himself and finding a home for others. He and his collaborators arranged the distribution of millions of pro-German pamphlets and articles, some of which found their way into the pages of the Congressional Record.

Of the large cast of characters that Maddow introduces, most eye-opening to me were the senators and congressmen who participated in spreading Nazi propaganda. Not only did they toe the non-interventionist (“Europe for Europeans, America for Americans”) Nazi line in their speeches, writings, and votes, but some even made their postage-free franking privileges available for mass mailings, thereby cleverly billing the United States for its own destruction.

That’s “Prequel”’s central lesson. We did it to ourselves.

The Nazi campaign to promote German interests, to keep America out of the latest European war, and to extoll the cause of White supremacy fell on fertile soil. The divisions that already existed in our nation’s social and political fabric were already there to be exploited.

The sectional scars of the Civil War had not healed by the 1930s. Jim Crow remained ascendant. White superiority was supported by the fraying but still potent “science” of eugenics that assigned Blacks, Jews, Native Americans and Hispanics to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. Godless Communism—said to be the creation of Jews, of course—struck fear into Capitalism’s heart. In many senses, America was already at war—with itself.

Drawing on many recent studies of the period, “Prequel” also contains gripping stories of inspiring American heroes, of men and women who risked their lives and fortunes to save democracy. Those stories, along with occasional snippets of Maddow snark, lighten “Prequel”’s otherwise grim picture of our past.

By superimposing that grim past of Nazi-inspired racism and autocrat-envy onto our imperfect present, “Prequel”’s whirligig time machine occasionally left me uncertain whether I was reading about 1936 or 2023, but its message was always clear: As long as race or religion divides us, our democracy is in great peril.

(“Prequel” by Rachel Maddow. 382 pages, Crown Publishers. 2023.)

Ken Winkes is a retired teacher and high school principal living in Conway, Wash.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2024

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