[MUSIC FADES IN]
Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, Rachel Maddow on America's history fighting fascism.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Basu: Hi, Rachel. Shumita here. Nice to meet you.
Rachel Maddow: It's really nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this.
Basu: Oh, thank you for your time.
[INQUISITIVE MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: You know Rachel Maddow from her show on "MSNBC" where she offers her commentary on current affairs and politics. But she's also a serious history buff.
Maddow: There's a reason, I think, to learn this stuff, and it has some. has some real fireworks.
Basu, Narrating: Last year, Rachel came out with a podcast, called "Ultra" about the rise of fascism in the U.S. during the World War II era. Now she's out with a book that takes an even deeper dive into that particular chapter of U.S. history. It's called "Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism."
Maddow: I do think that it's worth being real about the fact that we had an ultra-right, nationalist, antidemocratic, pro-fascist, in some cases, pro-Nazi movement that was of considerable size and considerable influence here in the United States in the lead up to World War II.
Basu, Narrating: Some of the themes might sound eerily familiar -- insurrectionists who try to overthrow the government, popular figures who use their platforms to spread disinformation, foreign agents who use members of Congress to disseminate propaganda. And through it all, government employees and regular Americans working tirelessly to do the right thing, to keep American democracy on track.
Rachel argues that knowing this history can teach us how to respond to threats to democracy happening today.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Basu: So, let's start by just defining fascism because it's a word that gets thrown around a lot. Democrats call Republicans fascists. Republicans call Democrats fascists. I'm sure that some of your critics have called you a fascist, Rachel.
[MADDOW LAUGHS]
Basu: So maybe we can just start by defining what it is and what it is not.
Maddow: Yeah, fascism is not a generic epithet that is appropriate to everybody with whom you disagree in politics. Fascism is a thing that has a history. It's a variety of authoritarianism, and it's actually a little bit hard to define in a way that I think all academics would agree on. But the basic idea is that you've got a unified government, culture, media and economy all unified under the authoritarian leader. And so, the idea of fascism as opposed to other forms of authoritarianism is that it is a real, like, ultra-nationalism, where the people are defined almost in a sort of mystical way. Um, the leader is defined as almost, in some cases, sort of mystically ordained, but being all powerful and concentrating all authority in him, and it is almost always a him.
Basu: So, help place us in the timeline, or at least where you've decided to start your timeline in this telling. What is happening in this chapter of American history, of world history? What dynamics are at play?
Maddow: You know, when we look back at this time now, the big story is that the Nazis were over there, and we were the good guys over here. We went over there, beat them in battle and thereby dispatched those forces from the earth. While that is true at a top level, the other story that is true is that the same dynamics that had put Germany in the hands of Hitler and had put Italy in the hands of Mussolini and Spain in the hands of Franco, all of those sort of winds that were blowing around the world were also blowing here. And there was both an isolationist movement and a profascist movement here, and they intersected in important and, I think, some pretty dangerous ways. Isolationism was a big, big category of the American public. As of 1940, something like 83% of the American public did not want us to fight in World War II. And at the same time, these sort of pro-fascist, um, anti-Semitic, antidemocratic movements intersected with isolationism in a way that was, I think, surprising and dangerous. People like Henry Ford who was the most famous industrialist in the country. Charles Lindbergh was a consensus national hero, probably the most famous man in America other than the president. Charles Coughlin was the most influential media figure in the country, maybe in the country ever in the history of the United States. And they were all not only preaching that we shouldn't get into World War II, but that in effect, that we ought to side with Hitler if we were going to side with anyone. And it was a powerful, powerful and radical movement.
Basu: Do we have a good understanding, a good sense of the scale of the pro-fascist movement in this period?
Maddow: Well, it's a really good question and a very contested one. One thing that I think is important in general in political science is to look at the combination of two things when you're talking about extremism. How radical is the position? For example, does the position implicate violence or intimidation?
And what is the reach of that radical position? How, um, many people are listening to people preach those terms? How connected is it to people who have real political power? Those are different forms of reach, and it's the combination of radicalism and reach, I think, that helps measure dangerousness. So, when it comes to isolationism, that was, you know, let's not get involved in World War II. As I said, that was a huge movement. That was a huge proportion of the U.S. population. What proportion of that population was listening to Henry Ford saying, "This is the Jews trying to get us into the war," listening to Charles Lindbergh who said, "We should side with the Germans because among other things, aviation is God's gift to white people, and we should therefore join with white Germans and stand up against the hordes of color in the world and fight the white man's war with Germany, not against them"? How many of those people were listening to Coughlin saying, "We need to go the Franco way. I take the side of fascism"? It's hard to know how much that radicalism sort of held onto Americans who didn't want to get into the war for lots of reasons. But those were three of the most influential men in the country.
Basu: Yeah. Say a little bit more about some of those figures you just named. Maybe you can start with Henry Ford. I mean, remembered, right, as an innovative automaker, um, titan of American industry, but also very public and proud, I would even say probably, anti-Semite.
Maddow: Yeah. Henry Ford is probably the most prolific anti-Semitic propagandist in the history of the world. In 1918, he bought a newspaper called the "Dearborn Independent," and not long after, he started a weekly series in the "Dearborn Independent" that effectively serialized or adapted portions of an anti-Semitic tract that was called the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion." And that was a hoax and a forgery, and it was designed to stir up anti-Semitic hatred. Ford reported on it in his newspaper as if it was a true thing even after it was very authoritatively debunked. And he did a 92-part weekly series serializing, effectively, the "Protocols." And in so doing, he popularized that tract, which is a very dangerous thing. But he also had incredibly wide distribution. He took this local failing newspaper and then distributed it to huge mailing lists, distributed free around the country. He also put it out through all Ford Motor Dealerships all around the country if you wanted to buy a…
Basu: Yeah, he would literally throw a copy into each car, right? Yeah.
Maddow: Yeah, and it was just this… It was full of just this anti-Semitic poison. He then gathered all those essays into book form. It was a four-volume set called "The International Jew." He not only published it in the United States. He published it internationally in more than a dozen languages. He published it in German in Germany. In the first edition of "Mein Kampf," which was Hitler's autobiography, sort of manifesto, he praised Ford by name. An American reporter went over to visit Hitler and, uh, interview him in Munich in the 1930s, and, um, was shocked to see that Hitler actually had a portrait of Henry Ford on the wall behind his desk.
Basu: Yeah.
Maddow: I didn't… I knew something about Henry Ford's private anti- Semitism, what I assumed was private anti-Semitism. I did not realize what an influence he was globally in terms of weaponizing anti-Semitism into a global movement that turned eliminationist against millions of Jews all over the world.
Basu: Another major figure in this vein of that time that you've written about in the book is Father Charles Coughlin. And it's hard to overstate just how wide his reach was. I think it's hard to appreciate that today. But can you tell us a bit about him?
Maddow: Coughlin, at the height of his powers as he got towards the end of the 1930s, was reaching something like 30 million Americans every week. And this is at a time when we didn't have 200 million people in the country.
Basu: And this was through his radio, his radio presence, right?
Maddow: It was a radio. It was a pseudo religious program, um, but it was just… It was very political.
[START ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Charles Coughlin: The Jews of America cannot afford to be identified with communism or with communistic activities. They are asked to disassociate themselves from the atheistic Jews who espouse communism.
[END ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Maddow: He wanted a fascist revolution in the United States, and beyond that and beyond this reach where he's reaching maybe a quarter of the population every week in these very radical sermon slash radio programs, he also organized his followers into armed militia groups. He founded a group called the Christian Front.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: This group, the Christian Front, formed paramilitary cells all over the country. They recruited members from the National Guard and police forces and were able to amass a huge arsenal of weapons.
Maddow: And in January of 1940, the FBI believed they were about seven days away from a plot that was going to start with firebombing a bunch of politically sensitive sites in New York City and kidnapping and ultimately murdering a dozen members of Congress. And they arrested them. They put them on trial for sedition.
Basu, Narrating: The case against the Christian Front was not successful. No one was convicted. But Rachel says the trial revealed just how serious this threat was to the American public.
Maddow: They did expose that, for example, that these men had stockpiled a large number of bombs and that they had stolen U.S. military machine guns. So, knowing that, knowing that those were sort of their aims, I think, was a bit of a wakeup call even though their prosecution was not successful.
Basu, Narrating: Another movement that attracted a lot of pro-fascist voices at the time was the America First Committee. This was very different from the Christian Front. It looked more like a typical political organization, and its main goal was to advocate for the U.S. to stay out of WWII. You know, Put-America-First isolationism. It had more than 800,000 members at its peak. And Charles Lindbergh was a leading voice.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[START NPR ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Charles Lindbergh: I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America First Committee has been formed.
[END NPR ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Maddow: So, the America First Committee was… I think we'd recognize it as a familiar sort of mass political organization. But it did have these elements of, I think, danger and radicalism. There's this one character who I write about in the book. Her name was Laura Ingalls, and it sounds like Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Basu: But is not Laura Ingalls Wilder, yes.
Maddow: It's not Laura Ingalls Wilder, although they were eighth cousins. [LAUGHS]
Basu: Were they really? Oh, that's interesting.
Maddow: Which is really weird. It's totally random.
Basu: So there is a relation. Not the one you expect, yeah.
Maddow: So the "Little House on the Prairie" relationship is quite distant to this, but it is there. Laura Ingalls… Um, after Amelia Earhart, Laura Ingalls was the most famous female pilot in the country and indeed in the world. And being a pilot at this point was like being a Kardashian and a, and a presidential child at the same time. Like, pilots were really the celebrity heroes of their day. And Laura Ingalls was this incredibly well-known, dashing figure. She set all these world records for, you know, the first woman to fly solo here and the first person to fly a solo round trip here, and she was just… Eventually, she was so famous that when she got a parking ticket, it was a story in the "New York Times." I actually had my "New York Times" archive privileges cut off because I was trying to capture every mention in the "New York Times" over a two-year period of Laura Ingalls. And there were so many that I got a call from the "New York Times" telling me I was cut off until the following May.
Basu: Concerned. [LAUGHS]
Maddow: Yes. But Laura Ingalls… What happened to her is that she became a paid agent of the Gestapo. She was working for the Nazis here undercover. She was prosecuted as such. And in her trial, what emerged was that the head of the Gestapo in the United States told her that the most valuable thing that she could do for the Nazi cause in America as a Nazi spy is that she should continue giving speeches for the America First Committee because there was nothing else more influential than that for the Nazi's purposes.
[PENSIVE MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: The German government found another way to influence American public sentiment through a massive mailer propaganda operation. It was spearheaded by a German American named George Sylvester Viereck.
Maddow: He was the senior most American propaganda agent working for the Nazi government in the lead up to World War II. He took his orders from the foreign office, and he was a very gifted propagandist.
Basu, Narrating: Viereck regularly traveled back and forth to Germany, and he came up with a way to spread pro-Nazi propaganda in America through members of Congress.
Maddow: He persuaded a number of senators and congressmen, two dozen of them in all, that they should let him write their stuff. And he would get material from the Nazi government in Berlin. He would either redraft it himself, or they would draft it in… for an American audience in Berlin. He would have a member of Congress put their name on it, and then, he would put it out in their name either directly as a publication or as a speech or something that would be inserted into the Congressional record.
Basu, Narrating: This was particularly valuable because once something was in the Congressional record, the government would agree to print it at a steep discount, and any member of Congress could mail it out for free.
Maddow: So, there'd be no stamp on the envelope. It would just… Where the stamp would go, it would instead have the signature of the member of Congress or the senator. And it's called the congressional franking privilege. It still exists today. But this Nazi agent, Sylvester Viereck, he essentially wired it so that it was a pipeline for literally millions of pieces of Nazi propaganda to be funneled through the United States Congress through obliging, isolationist members of Congress and out to American households by the ton.
Basu, Narrating: Now, part of the way this scheme was eventually exposed was thanks to an American citizen named Henry Hoek.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Maddow: The Henry Hoek story is absolutely one of my favorites. It's one of the reasons that I wanted to write the book in the first place is because I feel like Henry Hoek is such a paragon of normal American citizen who did not enlist in the Marines, did not decide that he was going to be a hero. But nevertheless, sort of heroism came knocking for him. He had a little trade publication about direct mail advertising. This was a sort of avant-garde business technique at the time. When his son went off to the University of Pennsylvania and started receiving lots of pro-German propaganda that he didn't understand and he complained to his dad about it, his dad decided to look into it a little bit. He went to other college campuses and realized that this sort of propaganda was circulating not just at Penn but all over the place. And then he started looking around and realizing that it wasn't just at universities. That it seemed like every dentist office was receiving this material, and public-school teachers appeared to be on a mailing list to receive this material and every insurance office. And who's sending this stuff out? And he happened to be an expert in direct mail. And so, he just happened to have the skills to trace that to its source. And it included these great, you know, kind of spy novel techniques. Ultimately, he followed this… what he recognized to be expensive, well-funded, well-run, sophisticated propaganda through the mail operation. He traced it to its source and then traced it into the U.S. Congress and sort of blew the whistle on it just as a private citizen, and that exposure from that private citizen opened the eyes of law enforcement in a way that ultimately got George Sylvester Viereck charged as a foreign agent and ultimately led to the Great Sedition Trial of 1944.
Basu: Yeah. And I mean, that's sort of the big culminating event in this, uh, history, as you write it, the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. Tell us a little bit about who, who was being charged there? What were they being charged with? Who was ultimately held accountable?
Maddow: So, it's a fascinating story. You know, since January 6th, we've had a few seditious conspiracy trials that have been successful, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. And that itself is an unusual thing. In 1944, the government put 29 different people on trial all at once all in the same courtroom, charging them with being part of a conspiracy with the German government in Berlin to overthrow the U.S. government by force, to replace our democratic system of government with an authoritarian, pro-Nazi system instead. And the trial went on for seven months. It was 29 defendants, 26 defense counsels, lots of reporters, lots of U.S. Marshals, lots of prosecutors, lots of bystanders. There was no air conditioning. It was a… It was a very hot, very chaotic, long trial that was completely out of control from day one. And seven months into it, the judge died, and that ended up causing a mistrial, and ultimately, the Justice Department chose not to re… re-up that trial. And all of the people who had been put in the dock in that prosecution sort of just melted back into the sauce at the American ultra-right.
Basu: Well, as we know, and as you mentioned, I mean, clearly, we saw a different outcome happen in this past year with, um, with some members of the Oath Keepers. Clearly a different outcome than the 1940s, and yet, what has it meant for today's far-right movement?
Maddow: That's interesting, and I'm not sure that this is a story that's yet over. I'm not sure that we can say definitively because I think we're still in the middle of this a little bit. But in the 1940s, when the Christian Front was put on trial for sedition and then the 29 defendants in the Great Sedition Trial were prosecuted, while they weren't convicted, there was a sort of public education value to the trials themselves. People learned what exactly these folks were trying to do and to whom they were connected. A lot of these groups, you know, describe themselves as uber patriots, as super patriots, as super American, and all their iconography is very patriotic, very pro-America. That was really punctured, I think, by what was revealed in the trial about what their designs were on America and why they felt the need to work with the Nazi government overseas to try to change us into something more like that. So, there is a value, I think, in these prosecutions in terms of fighting this as a movement.
It's not just a collection of individuals. These movements arise from time to time. And, um, it's part of what people come to know about them.
Basu: You know, it's interesting because ultimately, the people who were in Congress at that time, who were found to be complicit in some of these schemes, many of them were voted out by American voters. And this is sort of where the parallels to today start to fall apart for me, at least, because I'm thinking about what you're saying about, you know, just in terms of public education and, and the value of that, and I'm thinking about the January 6th Committee hearings that we saw play out very publicly here in the U.S. It just doesn't seem like a lot of American voters, or I should say probably Trump supporters who are voters, are going to vote out politicians who supported what happened on January 6th anytime soon. And I mean, not all, but many election deniers won their races in 2022. What does it mean for us today? Where, where are we today?
Maddow: Well, again, I think we're still in the middle of it, and so, we don't know. I do think it is helpful to know this history from when we have been up against an antidemocratic, ultra-right movement in the past, that when journalists did good work exposing what these groups were doing, when individual activists infiltrated these networks and these plots to expose what was happening, when prosecutions were brought, all of those things brought public attention and exposure that I think these groups would not have wanted to what they were doing. There's a reason that groups like this tend to operate in secret. To see in 1944, 1945, 1946, to see members of Congress voted out who, who were associated with this stuff, it's interesting because a lot of their names are not familiar to us now. But at the time, they were household names. They were the most influential members of Congress. Hamilton Fish, for example. His name was Ham Fish, which is hilarious, and you'd think we'd remember that. It's very much a name that's lost to history. But he was like 24 years in the House of Representatives before he was finally voted out in a campaign that centered almost entirely on his Nazi ties. Gerald Nye was a U.S. senator who was considered absolutely to be presidential material. Again, one of the most famous politicians in the country, voted out after his ties to this Nazi plot were exposed. Burton Wheeler, who was probably the best friend in the United States Senate of Senator and then Vice President and then President Harry Truman. Burton Wheeler was incredibly influential, and he was voted out after two decades in Washington. And that is heartening to me. But, you know, there's another piece of the sort of members of Congress part of this that I think is important and to me is another kind of flashing red light, which is Burton Wheeler, one of the senators who I just mentioned who was implicated in this, he was in the middle of this plot. He was very troubled that the Justice Department was prosecuting a bunch of people for this plot. And he leaned on the United States attorney general to fire the prosecutor who was leading the investigation and leading the prosecution. He did that, successfully not once, but twice. He got two different prosecutors removed from this case because of his pull, because of his political power in Washington. And that to me is a big cautionary tale here that the Justice Department needs to be protected, and prosecutors need to be protected from political pressure when powerful people are implicated in what they're pursuing in the courts.
Basu: You know, Rachel, I've heard you talk in the past about how the podcast that you did on this topic last year called "Ultra," season one of "Ultra," was partly motivated by a question that you had about the simultaneous rise of far-right politics today and the rise in Holocaust denialism, and whether there is a relationship between these two things. And I wonder if now, having done the work of the podcast and now this book, if you've developed an answer to that question. How are you thinking about that now?
Maddow: Um, yeah, that, that was the origin of my sort of research in this field, trying to figure out why [SIGHS] the resurgence of Holocaust denial was happening now. Holocaust denial is terrible in so many different ways. But one of the things it is, is strange. It's just a… It's a weird belief. Um, there's so much evidence not only now, but going back 80 years in terms of what happened there. Why is it that people deny it? What's the purpose of it? What's the political function of it? And so, I was looking for the, the origins of American Holocaust denial. And I can trace it back as far as, I think, 1948, maybe 1946. I think it's particularly easy to see when you look at those origins that this wasn't something that people literally believed to be true. It is something that they propounded to the public because it had a political function. They wanted to rehabilitate the idea of national socialism and the type of race-driven, fascist authoritarianism that had been defeated in the battlefield in World War II, and the Holocaust was too hard to explain. And so, the way to explain it, while trying to rehabilitate Nazism, was to say that the Holocaust was a lie, or that it had been exaggerated, or that it didn't happen. And I do feel like with the anti-Semitism that we are seeing today, it's both worth tracking in its own regard because it does mean real danger for Jewish Americans. But it also is a sign of antidemocratic ideation. You need to have some idea of a dangerous minority in order to make people believe that democracy is weak. We can't have a democracy in which everybody gets a say because there is this dangerous, disfavored out group that's trying to kill all of us, or trying to hurt us, or trying to hurt our children. And the purpose of our government needs to be to protect us from them, not to have us participate in group decision-making with them. It's just a… It's a necessary part of turning people against democracy. Anytime anybody's telling you there's some disfavored out group out there that's out to get you and out to get your kids, what they're really telling you is that they're out to get your vote.
Basu: Toward the end of your book, you talk about how many administrations in the United States have been inclined to just move on from the ugly moments in our history. Talk a little bit about what the impact of that has been and what's your pitch as to why we shouldn't just look away from shameful periods in our past.
Maddow: Well, I mean, in general, I believe that it's better to know than to not know. In a case like this, I feel like the thing that's helpful here is not just recognizing that we've had it bad before in terms of threats on the ultra-right. The reason this, I feel like, is really helpful as history is because Americans before us faced something even more challenging than what we are facing today, and they won. The things they did to expose these groups and oppose them succeeded. And that should buoy us, I think. So that's just, I think, the utilitarian reason for it. But also, I just think morally, pretending that bad things didn't happen, it atrophies your ability to confront them when they come around again. And some of the examples that I cite in the book include, you know, very recent examples, not prosecuting anybody for the torture of American prisoners, American detainees in the post-9/11 wars. I don't think that helped us as a country. I understand the instinct to want to move on, to think about the future and to let the past be past, but, um, destroying the evidence of that is not the same thing as making that not have happened. It happened, and facing up to it is part of contending with it and making sure that it doesn't happen again.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu: Well, Rachel, thank you for speaking to me about it. I appreciate it.
Maddow: Shumita, this was a great conversation. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time.
Basu, Narrating: You can find Rachel Maddow's book, "Prequel," on Apple Books. If you're listening in the Apple News app, we've teed up an excerpt from Rachel's book to play for you next. Keep listening.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]