★★★★★ 4
Fascinating details from the past but not really a “prequel”
Format: Hardcover
Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” recounts the efforts of pro-fascists in the United States, aided and manipulated by Nazi Germany, to keep America from actively opposing Hitler as well as to plot ways to turn America into a fascist country. The struggle to defeat those forces began in the early 1930s led by private citizens who, on their own, went undercover to join fascist groups and try to alert various government agencies about what was happening. A relatively small number of fascists gathered weapons to prepare for an insurrection. In the last chapters of the book, Maddow describes a 1944 trial in which the Justice Department brought sedition charges against some 30 defendants, most of whose activities she covered in previous chapters. The trial was chaotic, interrupted by frequent outbursts from the defendants and their lawyers. When the judge suddenly died one night of heart attack and a mistrial was declared, the Justice Department did not seek a new trial. The war against Hitler was nearing an end, so there was no push to revisit the past to pronounce judgment on those whose activities on the home front ultimately did not affect our victory over the Nazis.
Since the ending is rather anticlimactic, Maddow, at times, may try a little too hard to make things sound more dire than they really were. Although elsewhere she has described Westbrook Pegler as an “extreme” right wing columnist and “pseudo-fascist,” she quotes him at the end of her chapter on Huey Long as averring that, in Louisiana, Long was “gradually copying the Hitler state.” Long was certainly a corrupt, authoritarian politician, but his populist politics had their origins in his upbringing in Winn Parish, where the Socialist Party carried the day in the 1912 election. Had he lived and had he run for president in 1936, he might have drawn enough votes from FDR to give the election to a Republican candidate, but he had no use for Nazism. (I live in Louisiana where, until 1973, we observed Huey’s birthday as a state holiday.)
Maddow seems to imply that there was something nefarious about the death in 1940 of Senator Ernest Lundeen in a passenger airplane crash that occurred during a thunderstorm. Lundeen, who had close ties to a top Nazi spy, may have been under investigation, but nothing indicates that his presence on the flight had anything to do with the crash. The cause was never determined, but, based on the way the plane headed forcibly into the ground, a likely explanation is that it was caught in the kind of thunderstorm microbursts that we now know has caused similar crashes.
Though, for me, the book seems to promise a bit more than it actually delivers, I did learn a lot about the ties of right wing politics to Nazism during that era.
I was aware that Henry Ford was a fanatical antisemite, but, until I read Maddow’s book, I did not know that his efforts extended to publishing a ninety-two part series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that appeared in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that he owned, with copies distributed to every Ford dealership. It was published in book form as “The International Jew” and widely circulated in Germany. Hitler praised Ford in “Mein Kampf” and, according to one account, had a portrait of Ford displayed on the wall in his office when he was visited by an American reporter.
I was aware that the Nazis studied segregation in the American South for guidance in drafting their own race laws, but I didn’t know that Nazi Germany dispatched an attorney to the University of Arkansas School of Law to acquire first-hand knowledge.
I was aware that Father Coughlin was a demagogic opponent of FDR, but I was not aware of the ferocity of his antisemitism or his ties to various pro-Nazi fascists.
However, I was really totally unaware of the way actual Nazi agents in league with pro-Nazi Americans were able to get congressmen and senators to distribute Nazi propaganda, typically inserted into the Congressional Record and then sent to millions of Americans for free using the congressional franking privilege. On the other hand, I doubt that propaganda delivered in that manner was very effective. Pages from the Congressional Record could not compete with the message delivered by the 1939 Warner Brothers film “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” the first anti-Nazi movie produced by Hollywood, based on actual events that Maddow describes.
Nothing pro-fascists did in the United States affected our entry into the war against Germany. We went to war when Hitler himself declared war on us four days after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany certainly posed a military threat, but there wasn’t much danger that fascist politics would actually prevail in the United States.
The political situation is very different today and, though I, like Maddow, admire the “smart, brave, determined, resourceful, self-sacrificing [anti-fascist] Americans who went before us,” I think the political challenges we face today are much more dire.
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Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2023
