An Important and Fascinating History
Maddow does an incredible job cataloging the breadth and depth of support for fascism in the United States in the period before World War 2. It’s a reminder that we can’t take anything for granted.
Seven Essential Quotes
The evidence will show that they intended to abolish the Republican and Democratic parties. The evidence will show that they intended to abolish freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom from arrest without cause, and all the other civil liberties guaranteed us by the constitution.
The German propaganda operation in America, according to the first U.S. academic study on the topic, identified these kernels of disturbance as “racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life,” and “differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the “frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians.” Germany’s agents were tasked with finding these fissures in American society and then prying them further apart, exploiting them to make Americans hate and suspect each other, and maybe even wish for a new kind of country altogether. A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover.
However, the Post went on, “in the career of Huey Long is epitomized the essential weakness of democracy—the pathetic willingness of the electorate to trust a glib tongue and a dynamic personality. Quite justifiably he was called a forerunner of American Fascism.
The Nazi game plan aimed to disunite the United States by tearing at the weakest political and cultural seams in American society: the divide between haves and have-nots, fear and hatred of immigrants, white supremacist race hate, and antisemitism.
The party’s public alignment with America’s democratic and cultural institutions had effect. CPUSA membership increased from around thirty thousand in 1935 to almost seventy thousand just three years later. These were hardly big numbers, but they were numbers that were still growing at a good clip in 1938. The demographics of the membership were also shifting. Nearly two-thirds of the members were native-born, English-speaking, American-schooled U.S. citizens. Who believed in the power of American institutions. Who could vote. And did.
Metcalfe identified more than 130 organizations in his testimony and noted an interesting similarity in their brand names. “There is a common practice of misusing the words ‘American,’ ‘Patriotic,’ ‘Christian,’ ‘Defenders,’ ” he explained. “That is to mislead the public as to the true principles of those organizations.”
If we’re willing to take the harder look at our American history with fascism, the truth is that our own story in this wild, uncertain twenty-first century has not an echo in the past but a prequel. For our turn in history—and for the next time this comes around, too—we have the advantage of knowing that which preceded us. The story of what it took, inside and outside the government, to stop the violent American ultra-right in the run-up to World War II—that’s a gift from the smart, brave, determined, resourceful, self-sacrificing Americans who went before us. If we learn it, and we choose it, we can inherit their work.
