Fascism in America

The rise of fascism in America in the 1920s & 30s looked just like the rise of fascism in Germany at the same time- scapegoating, the dissemination of false information, the attempted erosion of democracy… Dan is joined by Rachel Maddow, host of the chart-topping Ultra podcast and The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC to explore how Nazism infiltrated the highest political offices in the US government, but also the unsung American heroes who risked everything to stop it. Rachel's latest book is Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. Produced by Charlotte Long, Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:02Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping, it's not whipping out your wallet to pay, it's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019, that's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favourite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 1:51Speaker 02

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• 2:24Dan Snow?

  A foreign dictator, intent on conquering swathes of Eastern Europe, is intervening directly in American politics. His agents are channeling money to American influencers to spew racist bile. His talking points are even shared by corrupt elected officials in Congress. The Justice Department investigates, but there are howls of political interference. Individual agents are targeted and slandered. Democracy itself is under threat.

• 3:00Dan Snow?

  Opponents of democracy, well, they portray it as corrupt, effeminate, a system run by dithering, committee-bound hacks, which need to be swept away and replaced by, you know, a robust, muscular, one-man rule capable of grappling with real problems. I'm talking, obviously, about the 1930s and 1940s of the United States of America. In the build-up to and during the Second World War, Hitler's agents sought to destabilize American democracy. Ideally, they'd wanted to keep America out of Hitler's European war, and they found willing mouthpieces to advance this agenda in the United States. Lots of us have been hearing about this piece of history recently,

• 3:44Dan Snow?

  and there is one person responsible for that, responsible for sharing this story and amplifying it. That person has talked about this history because it is a warning. It is an example to us in a world that's certainly changed, but a world in which our strengths and weaknesses, our ambitions, our hatreds and fears have perhaps not changed quite as much. We are still entertained. We're still motivated, inspired, scared by the words of our fellow humans, by what we read and what we listen to. We vote. We stand for office. We lead, and most of us follow,

• 4:28Dan Snow?

  while trying to forge the best course for our families, communities, and nations. And that's what people have been doing for centuries. It's certainly what people were doing in the 1930s and 40s. And that's why it still matters.

• 4:45Dan Snow?

  That one person I mentioned, that person who has brought us this tale is Rachel Maddow. She's one of the most articulate, engaging and brilliant guests I have ever had in this podcast. She has spent the last few years looking about her and thought what the world really needs now is a fantastic deep dive into an overlooked episode of history. And for doing that, she will forever be a kindred spirit. Her stunning podcast, the results of that study and thought, Ultra, seasons one and two are just a must-listen, really, they must listen. Some of the finest public history that I've ever stumbled across. Her book is now out covering some of that terrain as well. Prequel, An American Fight Against Fascism. This is Dan Snow's history hit and Rachel Maddow joins me on the podcast to

• 5:30Dan Snow?

  talk to me about the attempt to overturn American democracy and how, when the chips were down, its citizens, enough of them, rallied around to defend it. Enjoy.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  T minus ten.

• 6:03Dan Snow?

  Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Dan, I'm absolutely delighted to be here. I am a subscriber. I am a huge fan. I'm incredibly nervous to talk to you because I think you're fantastic. I love the show.

• 6:14Dan Snow?

  We won't get into it, but it's mutual. Trust me, it's mutual. Rachel, coming to your work, your podcast and your book, I am stunned to see the extent of, well, you could only really describe it as Nazism in the streets, the homes and the minds of Americans in, well, the 1930s and early 40s.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  It's, I think, easy to forget because one of the big moral cornerstones that America has, one of the ways we like to think of ourselves in the world, is our role in World War II. And granted, we were late in joining, but we did our part in defeating fascism and making the world safe for democracy. And that's part of how we think of ourselves as It's just foundational to who we think we are. Now, it is uncomfortable and is somewhat undermining to that foundation to recognize that as late as sort of deep into 1940, more than 80% of the American public did not want us to get into World War II. And by this point, the war between Germany and Britain and Germany and the rest of Western Europe

• 7:16Speaker 04

  was very well joined and still the vast majority of Americans did not want us to get involved. And some of that was isolationism, some of which was coming from lots of different places. But a considerable slice of it was coming from Americans who thought, well, if we were going to get involved, we should be on the other side because they admired Germany. The best selling book in 1940 in the United States was written by Charles Lindbergh's wife, Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wrote a book in 1940, which was all about how fascism was the future and fascism was going to be the glorious next chapter in American governance. And shouldn't we all get on board?

• 7:57Speaker 04

  And it was a sensation because Americans liked the idea in significant numbers, including very famous people like Charles Lindbergh becoming spokespeople effectively for the idea. And so that part of our history is uncomfortable to remember, but it was a mass movement. It was major political figures, major media figures, and it was armed paramilitary groups who were all pushing in that direction until very, very late in the game when Pearl Harbor happened.

• 8:26Dan Snow?

  Well, Rachel, let's break it down. How do you overturn American democracy in the 1930s? Let's talk about it.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  In the mid 20th century, in the early mid 20th century, in the lead up to World War II, in the United States, there was a big, very influential effort to try to turn America away from a democratic form of government to something more like what Germany was experiencing at the time. And it had a very big media component, the most influential, arguably the most influential of all time, American media figure, a man by the name of Charles Coghlan, who was a priest, the radio priest, they called him. He had 20 to 30 million Americans listening to him weekly at a time when we only had 130 million people in the population. He was overtly pro fascist in his ideology. He said, I take the road of fascism.

• 9:17Speaker 04

  But he also went so far as to organize his listeners into paramilitary cells to arm themselves to get ready for the violent overthrow of the US government. And some of them got to work on that project in a very concerted way and faced sedition charges in US courts for doing so. They were not the only group violently trying to do that. There was also a mass mobilization, mostly through a group called the America First Committee, which was very influential and had some of the most well-known and richest and most important people in the country as some of their leading lights.

• 9:47Dan Snow?

  So already you're identifying information, right? Communication. So in this case, audio, how times change, radio. And then it's hate speech, it's nationalist ideas, but it's also amplifying foreign talking points. I mean, enemy, if you like, and strategic adversaries of America would wish are planting ideas into the American mainstream conversation.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  That is, I think, the least remembered and one of the most important parts of that experience of rising fascism, pro authoritarian movements in the United States, and importantly, the fight against them. It is very much forgotten, even among historians of the era, I would say, that Nazi Germany had a huge multimillion dollar, very sophisticated foreign propaganda operation in the United States in the lead up to World War II. And it involves stuff being sent directly from Germany, but it had also involved a lot of front groups that appeared to be American groups or appeared to be benign, non-political groups that were flooding the United States with propaganda.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  But they also had their most senior, most highly paid agent of any kind in the United States in the lead up to World War II was their propaganda agent. And one of the ways that he succeeded at flooding the American public with huge amounts of German-produced propaganda, pro-Nazi propaganda, anti-Semitic stuff, divisive stuff. One of the ways he succeeded is that he had two dozen members of Congress on his payroll, helping him launder all this stuff through the United States government at taxpayer expense. Which is bananas, but it happened. He went to prison for it, but no members of Congress ever did.

• 11:30Dan Snow?

  And we should say at taxpayers' expense, it's actually hard to believe, but it was in your recent series that like the stamps were paid for by the American taxpayers going through the congressional offices and being kind of bombed out to constituents.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Yes, we have a constitutional privilege for members of Congress called franking that they're allowed. It makes sense. You're allowed to send your constituents, or in some circumstances, just any American, information about what's going on in Washington. And it's defined very broadly. And usually that's a good transparency and government thing. It should be literally free for members of Congress to communicate with their constituents about what's happening in their government. But this very smart propaganda agent for the Nazis in the 19, late 1930s, early 40s, figured out that you could use that to bulk mail, literally millions of pieces of German-produced propaganda under the frank, under the free postage privileges of members of Congress, provided that you gave them a little kickback for doing it.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  And it was a fire hose of propaganda about which there was no equivalent on the anti-fascist side.

• 12:32Dan Snow?

  So we've got a nexus of information, some of it derived from an overseas rival. We have corrupt politicians working with those broadcasters to push that information out to constituents. What worked? What is the nature of that information? I was so interested in your most recent series. You talk about degeneracy, this idea that the republic is degenerate. And it's a constant refrain you hear from those who cleave to the right, cleave towards fascism, despotism, is that everything is, you could say today, it's woke, it's soft, it's degenerate. Was this something powerful back then?

• 13:08Speaker 04

  Yes, it was a remarkably modern sounding message. To those of us in the 21st century looking back at it now, in 1939, 1940, it feels like it's ripped from Twitter. The message, as summed up by one of the American prosecutors who brought this to trial as a criminal matter, as a foreign influence operation, was to not only make Americans feel like Germany's Victory was inevitable, that the Germans were very strong and that there was no way there was going to be beaten. It was to also sow doubt in the American public's mind about the wisdom of our own alternate form of government. The reason the Germans were going to win is because they had a better idea about how to organize society.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  And our democracy was corrupt and soft and our so-called leaders were actually puppets of special interests, which was sometimes explicitly defined as the Jews and sometimes that was implicit. But the idea was that there are special interests, foreign interests, insidious internal enemies who have made mincemeat of our so-called leaders. They've got them doing whatever they want. And this used to be a great nation. We're no longer a great nation. We've been weakened by our internal enemies and what we really need is a stronger, more efficient, more streamlined, more modern form of government, just like they've got in Germany. And that's why Germany is so strong.

• 14:32Speaker 04

  You can make a kind of argument that way that on a superficial level sounds patriotic, but obviously just one level below that, it's an argument for ending the American system of government and choosing fascism instead.

• 14:43Dan Snow?

  It's also an argument, isn't it, for ending American engagement with the world?

• 14:48Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 14:49Dan Snow?

  Why was isolationism, well, from the German point of view, it was quite clear, but why was isolationism pulling up the drawbridge, retreating from global engagement? Why was that attractive? Why did that work?

• 15:00Speaker 04

  It's a really interesting question, particularly, I think, because of the recurring nature of the fights over isolationism versus engagement. In a widely circulated interview, widely circulated in the United States, an interview that Hitler did in 1940, he coined a slogan that he hoped would catch on, and it did catch on with some American isolationists. And it was "America for the Americans, Europe for the Europeans."

• 15:25Speaker 04

  The idea being just, you know, mind your own business and we'll mind our own business. That's probably the way it should be. And you hear echoes of that every time isolationist arguments come up. And the strategic import of it for Germany is obvious. Probably the single most important thing that Germany could wish for in the world would have been, particularly once the war was underway, that the United States not get involved. And although we were belated entrants to World War II, I think fairly decisive once we got there, it wasn't what they wanted. Why did that resonate with Americans? Why did Americans want the same thing? Some of it, I think, was coming from a good faith kind of place. I mean, World War I had not been over for very long. The United States had played an important role in World War I.

• 16:06Speaker 04

  And in some ways, an idea had taken hold among the American public that that was a war that we fought as a favor to our allies and not because we had anything at stake. And I, I think there's also, again, some good faith, some sort of healthy impulses toward that. I'm a person who's been very critical of a lot of America's modern wars during my own lifetime, but those good faith arguments, I think, were very much sublimated by the other arguments that were driven by pro-fascists and by the Germans that included, the only reason you want to get into this war is because the Jews are manipulating you into this. This is a war just for the Jews. The only reason you want to get into this war is because the British are tricking you into it and they're an empire and you're still subject to their imperial whims.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  And if you really want to be independent, you should break free of those British tyrants. I mean, there's all sorts of much nastier, much nastier tone to it. But some of it, I think, it comes from a good faith place.

• 17:01Dan Snow?

  Yeah, I agree. So we've got a sort of fire hose of misinformation, some of it enemy propaganda. You've got a sort of essential critique, the country's going to the dogs. There are more robust, more manly ways to run a country. There are paramilitary groups bringing direct action, intimidation, physical and ideological, I suppose, politicians who sold their souls. You've mentioned the Jews there. Let's talk, that's antisemitism is essential in this period. Is scapegoating a minority? It's trying to create another? Why, why do we see this again and again?

• 17:38Speaker 04

  I hesitate to jump in here with anything that sounds like hubris, because this is a field where there are a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me, who have devoted their lives to understanding this. And so I don't want to put myself forward as an expert. But for me, as an observer of this, both in our contemporary world and also in history, I feel like there are sort of four things that you look for when a country is in danger of losing its democracy. And the first one is very obvious. It's when the technical, literal part of your democracy comes under stress. Are people able to vote? Do their votes cast discounted? Do people believe that elections are real and that it isn't rigged? And that it is, in fact, the way that you make decisions about the future of your country? That's one.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  You watch for violence entering the political sphere. You watch for paramilitary groups or violent gangs associated with certain political functions. It makes normal politics seem scary, keeps normal people out of politics. You watch for disinformation, for attacks on the whole idea of truth. It sounds like an esoteric thing, but it's very tactical. If you can make people not believe that there's any knowable truth in the world, what are they supposed to believe in instead? Their gut, their prejudice, whatever the leader who they do trust tells them is the reality of the world. It makes people much more manipulable and makes them willing to do things they might not do if they had their wits about them. But the other one is scapegoating, attacking a disfavored group or a minority coming up

• 19:05Speaker 04

  with conspiracy theories about how they're secretly powerful and they're really to blame for what's wrong in society. They're a secret elite that's out to destroy all that's right and good. They're evil in an almost superhuman or maybe subhuman way. Everybody else needs to be protected from them and normal measures against them won't work because they're so powerful and insidious. And that is always there as countries are at risk of losing their democracy. And the foremost myth of those is antisemitism.

• 19:39Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dad's Notes History. Here's Rachel Maddow telling me how to defend American democracy. More coming up.

• 19:47Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

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• 21:01Speaker 01

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• 21:50Speaker 02

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• 22:29Dan Snow?

  So if we go back to 1940s, 1930s and 40s America, you've got this very joined up, very well funded, very committed effort to overturn democracy in all these different ways. I'm very struck by one other element which feels familiar, which is the sort of weaponization of the judiciary. And not perhaps in the way that some people talk about it today. But when the American government did try and move against these foreign agents or try and bring suits against these people, you point out the judiciary, members, the individual investigators, judges, the judicial apparatus in itself was attacked viciously. It was delegitimized. It was said to be biased. It was rigged. The attack on institutions feels important, too.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that in the detective novel version of this and the sort of oversimplified version of these kinds of histories, you might think that the criminal law could be a silver bullet that would just end this, right? We all like to think that there's one solution to problems like this. It does make for a much tidier narrative. It's not a silver bullet. It's not that tidy. But it's a really interesting tension. In the American system of government, we have really robust protections for not just free speech, but association, meaning joy. Joining with other people for a political purpose. You have a constitutionally protected right in the United States to say the worst things you can possibly imagine. And to associate with the worst people for the worst reasons. It's a feature of our constitution, not a bug.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  That said, you don't have the right to commit crimes. And that tension in our system has made for a lot of drama and suspense. When it comes to putting people on trial for things like sedition. It's really hard to get a conviction of somebody in the United States for bad political behavior.

• 24:17Dan Snow?

  Tell me now, why democracy survived in the States? Who are the heroes? Because this is something that you go through in your book. You identify these people who I think no one will ever have heard of. And we may all owe the liberal democracies of the late 20th century. We may all owe a huge amount to these individuals. How do you take this on? Because you've painted quite a scary picture here.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Well, the answer is that it's not any one thing. There isn't any silver bullet, that you do have to do everything. But even in the case of the judiciary, I think there's ways to find heroes. And there's ways to find, if not optimistic, at least constructive lessons from the past. So when the justice system did act against the Nazis propaganda agent in the United States. When the sedition trial, the great sedition trial of 1944, which is kind of the centerpiece of the book, was actually brought in court. One of the benefits of that, these prosecutors who brought these cases had to be incredibly brave. They were two lead prosecutors in the great sedition trial were fired for political reasons,

• 25:18Speaker 04

  for taking on people who are too powerful, who were involved in these controversial cases. But it did have the benefit of alerting the American public to what was going on and bringing a lot of this information into the public sphere. And one of the consequences of those acts within the criminal justice system is that a lot of the really bad members of Congress who were involved in this stuff, they didn't go to jail, but almost all of them got voted out, including very, very powerful members of Congress, people who were like household names and potential presidential candidates, they got voted out. That seems important. The other thing that happened is that journalism did a lot of good journalists at great danger to themselves, and in some cases, at the cost of their careers, did a lot of the same work to expose these things. But then you also had some individual American heroes who made great strides against these

• 26:03Speaker 04

  folks just by being individual citizen activists, by investigating the work of Nazi infiltration into the United States and into the US political system, the militant paramilitary violent groups that were doing things like stealing US military weapons from US armories and amassing great arsenals to mount planned violent assaults on the US government. It was individual citizen activist groups who exposed those things and brought them to the attention of the authorities.

• 26:32Dan Snow?

  Let's name some of these heroes. Leon Lewis, I'm very struck by, World War I veteran who just came back and, as you say, citizen, just looked around his neighborhood and didn't like what he saw.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  He was a World War I veteran. He was a lawyer. He lived in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles was a real center of explicitly pro-Nazi organizing in the lead up to World War II. Not just groups like the German American Bund, although they were very present in Los Angeles. They had an Aryan bookstore. It was called The Aryan Bookstore. They held essentially Hitler Youth summer camps in multiple locations in Southern California. They held uniformed Nazi armband stormtrooper parades in parts of Los Angeles. I mean, it was pretty overt. But what Leon Lewis was very disturbed by was their success in recruiting among World War I veterans, targeting German-American veterans in particular, and recruiting among them.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  And he felt like that was a key part of the way that Hitler had built his post-Birch Hall Putsch successful, ultimately democratically blessed rise to power in Germany. And he felt like he was seeing that among his fellow veterans. He was very well-connected in the veterans' community. He was Jewish himself, but he recruited mostly non-Jewish, mostly Christian, German-American, World War I veterans to become undercover agents for him, to allow themselves to be, quote unquote, recruited, not really, to infiltrate these pro-Nazi groups and then to report to him on what they were doing. And he ran a decade-long

• 28:01Speaker 04

  Incredibly intrepid, personal spying operation based in Southern California, in which he had multiple informants, at least some of whom we believe were murdered for their work, infiltrating pro-Nazi and fascist groups in Southern California, including some that were involved in stockpiling stolen US military weapons. He was just an incredibly, incredibly important one-man band in working in a very dangerous anti-fascist environment that he created in Southern California.

• 28:31Dan Snow?

  And did his findings go towards the government case in the Great Sedition Trial of 1944? Is that the kind of thing that was being cited by the Department of Justice?

• 28:40Speaker 04

  You know, Dan, it's fascinating. For a long time, his findings, he could not get anywhere with local law enforcement or with the FBI. Because, as you know, in this period, I think famously, the FBI was very much eyes left. They thought the only threat to US national security coming from any point on the ideological number line was from the far left. They were very focused on communists. And they thought, well, these pro-Nazi groups, they're anti-communists, so they're kind of on our side. So he was not able to get anywhere with, for example, the LAPD or the San Diego local law enforcement. He did, interestingly, have one success in that regarding going to law enforcement, which is that he went, when he realized that US Marines were stealing US military

• 29:22Speaker 04

  weapons from military armories in Southern California and providing them to one of these paramilitary groups, the Silver Shirts, he went to US naval intelligence, and naval intelligence took his call. And naval intelligence actually brought court marshals against the Marines who were doing this. And he used that. Once naval intelligence took him seriously, he then essentially had naval intelligence vouch for him to other law enforcement to say, hey, we've used this guy's stuff before, and it's good. But it was still a really uphill battle, all the way until late 1940, when it was starting to look more clearly like we were going to get into the war. I think FDR, it's not official, we can't find it in the historical record, but it appears that FDR sort of urged the FBI to turn their

• 30:07Speaker 04

  eyes more to the right. And when federal law enforcement finally conceded that there might be a threat here from these right-leaning groups, when, for example, US munitions plants started blowing up and nobody knew who was doing it, they had a treasure trove from Leon Lewis, once they were finally willing to hear it from him. But it was very late in the game for him.

• 30:25Dan Snow?

  There's also something that's in the conversation at the moment and around indeed Nixon and Watergate, but there's the conversation around making sure that people have their day in court, that the impulse towards reconciliation and progress doesn't obscure the need to punish, frankly. And you make it one of the great set pieces, I think, of US history, this sedition trial of 1944 that eventually collapses. And I'm really struck by the political desire by people like Truman to just not relitigate this. But could you just explain to the audience very briefly, because of course I have to read your book and listen to all your wonderful podcasts, but explain what this massive sedition trial was?

• 31:03Speaker 04

  So there were about 30 people who were put on trial for sedition. There were a number of different indictments, but ultimately the one that went to trial happened in 1944. And it was a total circus. There were nearly 30 defendants. They each had their own defense counsel. It was all in a hot, unair-conditioned Washington DC courtroom. It got incredible national press coverage from the beginning, but then it dragged on and dragged on and dragged on and dragged on. And the number of reporters dwindled and it got weirder and really bogged down. It was seven months into it and the prosecution was only about 30% of the way through presenting their case. And the judge in the case died, appears

• 31:44Speaker 04

  to have died from the stress of presiding over this incredible circus of a trial. And the Justice Department then had a decision to make as to whether or not they were going to start over. If the judge dies, it's a mistrial. And so with a mistrial in the US system, you can either drop it or if you start over, but you got to start over at day one. And the Justice Department decided they didn't want to bother. It was too hard to prosecute. The lead prosecutor in that case, he was actually the second one because the first one had been fired once he trained his sights on some members of Congress who were involved in this plot. The prosecutor's name was John Rogge. And he decided that even though the government wasn't going to bring the case, he got permission from the Attorney General to make an official report from the Justice Department, laying out some

• 32:29Speaker 04

  of the evidence that had been gathered for the case. And in the immediate wake of the end of World War II, he went to Germany, he spoke German, he was a German American, and he collected tens of thousands of documents from the German Foreign Office. He interviewed German war criminals, including members of the German High Command at Nuremberg. And the sole focus of the evidence seeking that he was doing was, from the German side, can we document what Americans were on their payroll, what Americans were working with the Nazis? And he collected all of this evidence, he brought it back to Washington. "Okay, Mr. Attorney General, I'm ready to present my report." And the Attorney General said, "I'm gonna go talk to the President about this." Because in his report was the evidence that two dozen members of Congress had been involved in this plot.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  And the Attorney General, whose name was Tom Clark, he went on to be a Supreme Court Justice, which is insane to me, and President Truman agreed that this could never see the light of day. And they shelved it and told him that he couldn't publish it. And Rogge went out, despite that, and went on a national speaking tour to tell everybody he could, any audience he could, any reporter he could, what he had found. He was fired from the Justice Department, he lost his career, he became persona non grata in Washington. And ultimately, that report, what he gathered in Germany, wasn't published until the 1960s, whereupon Americans had moved on, and everybody who was prosecuted in that sedition trial just melted back into the sauce. And in many cases, they became the basis of the next wave of the American fascist far-right.

• 33:58Dan Snow?

  Right, well, that's the interesting thing. By failing to deal with that, there were profound consequences for politics and for American history going forward.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Yes, and, you know, there's always a tension between moving forward and reckoning with the past. But when you don't punish treasonous behavior, I would argue, in the case of some of these members of Congress, it becomes a de facto permission structure to do it again. It becomes something that there's legal precedent for in the US system for you getting away with it. It's remarkable to me that the German agent, his name was George Sylvester Vierich, it's remarkable to me that the US Justice Department prosecuted him for being an unregistered foreign agent, and the evidence that they presented against him was all his work with all Of these members of Congress and not a single member of Congress was ever charged

• 34:48Speaker 04

  for their role in that plot with him, even as he went to prison. It is important that it was exposed through that process and that the voters then got their say in whether or not those members of Congress stayed in office and the voters in most cases voted them out. But why weren't those members of Congress prosecuted? I believe it's just because they had political sway and so the Justice Department stayed away with them. And that created a de facto permission structure going forward to this day where members of Congress who get involved in foreign influence operations don't feel like there's any risk.

• 35:20Dan Snow?

  What is the legacy of this history? Why are you telling this story?

• 35:23Speaker 04

  Dan, one of the things that you have talked about on History Hit in a lot of different contexts is that we choose the stories to tell that we think tell us the most about who we ought to be today. Whatever seems like the most relevant stories from history change over time and change with each generation because we need different things from our history over time. And I think one of the things that we need in the United States right now, maybe a lot of people around the world need right now, given what's going on with the sort of decline of democratic governance and the rise in authoritarian governance. I think one of the things we need is the stories of regular people and, you know, in some cases, people who are in the military, people who work for the government, but in

• 36:06Speaker 04

  most cases, regular people finding important, effective ways to be anti fascist. And whether it's people like Leon Lewis, like we've talked about, there was a direct mail advertising guru who had a really key role in figuring out the scale of the German propaganda operation targeting the American public. His name was Henry Hoke. He's been largely lost to history. I think he ought to be famous. I think Leon Lewis ought to be famous. The mostly Irish Catholic fascist militia that operated under the auspices of Father Coghlan, it was called the Christian Front, they were incredibly violent in Boston in particular. There were essentially many pogroms against Jews in Boston.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  There were other American Irish Catholics, it turns out, who were absolutely horrified. By what the Christian Front was doing in Boston and who as individual citizens decided to infiltrate them, expose them and fight them. A woman named Frances Sweeney in particular, who was kind of a local hero in Boston. I live in Massachusetts, but isn't more widely known. I want these people who found a way to do this, not just heroically, but effectively in their own time. I want us to know their stories because I feel like I need those stories myself in terms of thinking about how to live a good life in this kind of political environment.

• 37:25Dan Snow?

  Rachel Maddow. Tell us what the book's called.

• 37:28Speaker 04

  The book is called Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.

• 37:33Dan Snow?

  So good. Thank you very much indeed.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Dan, thank you so much.

• 38:15Speaker 01

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• 39:06Dan Snow?

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