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Who Paid For Millions of Fascist Pamphlets in the US in 1940?
Nazi Germany did, explained in ‘Prequel’ by Rachel Maddow
A year ago, I listened to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, Ultra, which told the story of a U.S. plot to promote German propaganda during WWII. Nazi agents in the US, including George Sylvester Viereck, asked U.S. publications to provide mailing lists of potential Nazi supporters.
A couple weeks ago, Maddow published the book-length version of the story, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. This is history everyone should know because it illustrates how lies are funded and spread.
The 1936 Election in the United States
In 1936, diplomat Lawrence Dennis published a book, The Coming American Fascism. One contemporary journalist called Dennis the first “prophet” of “American fascism.” Germany was impressed with him.
Never mind morality, Dennis said; fascism is just about getting things done. (“That a very large number of people might get chewed up in the works of that machinery,” Maddow comments, “was either beside the point for Lawrence Dennis, or exactly the point.”) Seeing how U.S. anti-Black racism was often not legislatively explicit yet impacted people’s lives, Dennis believed the Nazis ought to be able to loosen how they codified their antisemitism without diminishing their antisemitic results.
Then there was Father Coughlin, who in 1936 thundered, “This is our last election. It is Fascism or Communism…I take the road to Fascism.” He spoke from a platform designed by the architect Philip Johnson.
William Dudley Pelley, a presidential candidate that year, proudly compared himself to Hitler and demanded that all Jewish and Black Southern Americans be immediately imprisoned on reservations. He also alleged that FDR was a secret Jew. Pelley had a following in Minnesota.
FDR won. Coughlin’s preferred candidate, William Lemke, got fewer than 1 million votes nationwide.
