What I Am Reading: "Hitler's American Friends" by Bradley W. Hart

When I was first becoming interested in politics, one of the outlets I plugged into was the history of the antiwar movement. Vietnam and Iraq were the easy ones to oppose, but I did have a book of reprinted primary sources from opposition to all of America's major wars. I never had much interest in the opposition to WW2 or the Civil War though, even at the time. I couldn't have articulated it then, but obviously in retrospect higher moral considerations factored into the equation. Despite that, I read a bit about the America First movement, mainly in the works of Gore Vidal. He, my favorite writer, was a child in Washington in this era, and had connections to the larger political milieu through his father, a pioneering aviator, and his grandfather, a Senator from Oklahoma. If I recall correctly (it has been a few years, and I refuse to reread any Vidal until I move back to DC) he was not entirely unsympathetic to the cause, but realistic about its larger motivations. His grandfather bluntly told him that Senator William Borah opposed the war because he took Nazi money.

The America First movement, as well as the efforts to corrupt members of Congress, are two of the precisely eight topics of this book. They are each given a chapter by Bradley W. Hart, a professor at California State University, Fresno (have I mentioned that I like my histories to be written by academics?). The through-line of these segments is that, whether they were officially affiliated, sponsored, tacitly endorsed, or just fellow-travelers, "Hitler's American friends" never gained much political traction. The Nazis themselves engaged in some espionage efforts, but never made full use of the resources available to them, due to their general lack of interest in the US beyond wanting to avoid our entry into the war. Nevertheless, espionage efforts could have been more successful if not for the counterintelligence efforts of the British, who took the threat more seriously than the FBI did at first. On the political side, despite several available candidates, an American Fuhrer never emerged or was selected, and the variations on the pro-Nazi cause never commanded a high level of popularity.

Some of these Nazi and fascist groups were astroturfed by the actual Germans, but some were homegrown grassroots. Some helped the Nazi cause explicitly, some only implicitly; some for ideological reasons, some for utilitarian ones. Since Hart regiments them, so shall I; with a brief description that leaves out a lot of interesting details, so find the book if they interest you . To wit, there was:

The German American Bund: this was the most visible pro-Nazi group, but the least effective. The Bund was formed out of several predecessor organizations that had organized to support the Nazi cause from overseas early in its existence, and eventually came to be officially disowned as its predecessors had been. It was framed as a social organization for Americans of German descent, and steeped itself in a mix of Americana and Nazi symbolism. They held rallies and social events, and ran summer camps for children, in an effort to increase Nazi cultural capital. The group was run by most of its life by Fritz Kuhn, an egotistical character who clearly fancied himself to be another version of Hitler. Meanwhile, the group itself was disowned by the Nazis after their clumsy propagandizing became embarrassing. The group was infiltrated by journalist John C. Metcalfe, who (like the automatically-trusted new hire in an undercover cop movie) was tasked by Kuhn to inspect the local chapters across the country. These chapters were often lazy and uncoordinated, and ignored directives from HQ concerning uniforms and such. They held a famous rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939, the subject of a recent documentary. This was actually a last hurrah by Kuhn, who was losing influence in the organization. They proceeded to fall apart after a Congressional hearing exposed their activities, and the leaders were taken down on various charges of tax evasion and such.

The Silver Legion: This was a more eccentric group, essentially a cult of personality surrounding William Dudley Pelley, former-screenwriter-turned-guru. The Legion didn't pursue an official or symbolic affiliation with the Nazis, and instead were homegrown Christian/Aryan fascists, with an explicitly racist and antisemitic mission statement (unlike the Bund) and a desire to overthrow the government. They were still admirers of the Nazis, and there was considerable membership overlap between the two groups. Pelley was a flaky L. Rom Hubbard type who claimed to have visions from supernatural entities, and would eventually go on to be an UFOlogist in a later era. Despite this, he knew well what bigoted buttons to push with his rhetoric, and was able to rally opposition to Jews and other scapegoats and targets of opportunity. Despite this toxicity, they were never much of a political threat, since Pelley was in it for egotistical more than he was for political reasons. They were also shut down by financial and ideological investigations, but in a bit more style than the Bund was, as Pelley went on the run for several years while taunting the government. He was a very Hollywood figure, and some of his cult leader success came from his sense for show business (cover that, You Must Remember This). As an aside, he also had an unsuccessful interest in gaining Native American support, and did get one Native American, Elwood A. Towner, to perform at his rallies. This reminded me a bit of Karl May's German westerns, and how they led to Nazi appropriation of some Native American symbolism.

The Religious Right: this banner is used to cover radio preacher Father Charles Coughlin, evangelist Gerald Winrod, and politician Gerald L. K. Smith. Coughlin was a famous figure, a Catholic priest who ran a popular and populist radio show in the '20s and '30s, and who initially supported Roosevelt for economic and cultural reasons. As the New Deal wore on, Coughlin decided that his platform, known as “Social Justice,” was what was needed to protect the United States from a Jewish/Communist plot, by replacing the government with a radically nationalist regime. He joined with Smith, a Louisiana political orator who had worked with Huey Long prior to the latter's assassination, and with Francis Townshend, a propagandist for old-age pensions whom I have always thought of as a perpetually befuddled activist. This effort, called the Union Party, failed after Coughlin and Smith fell out over a clash of egos. Meanwhile, Winrod was a protestant fundamentalist version of Coughlin, who mainly preached out of Kansas. One day, he stumbled upon the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and dove into antisemitic conspiracy theorizing; including the publication of Nazi propaganda sent over by Julius Streicher, whom you may know from his appointment with the Nuremburg gallows. In 1938, Winrod ran for the Republican nomination for Senate in Kansas. After a bit of prodding, the national and state Republicans dropped the hammer on him, and managed to entice former Governor Clyde Reed into the race. Winrod pulled a bit more that 50,000 votes, good for 21% and third place. Would he have won without the establishment attack? Tough to say; and in the Senate (over doomed Democratic incumbent George McGill) he could have been the most useful Senator to Hitler, despite stiff competition as seen below. Meanwhile, after the Union Party’s failure Coughlin launched the Christian Front in the late '30s, an openly combative and antisemitic organization. Some of its members went to trial on charges of conspiracy after they plotted an uprising in New York. Coughlin survived this fiasco, but was eventually muzzled by the church hierarchy, and lived the rest of his life as a normal Michigan priest. Winrod went on to be arrested for sedition after his anti-government magazine was found in Army ranks.

The Senators: This segment mainly focused on the efforts of George Viereck, propagandist and lobbyist who had in fact lobbied for the Kaiser's government previously. Viereck ran a scheme out of Cannon HOB Room 1424 whereby friendly Senators provided him with franked envelopes, and he printed (for free) copies of their antiwar and pro-Nazi speeches to mail all over the country. The propaganda effort was mainly facilitated by Farmer-Labor party Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, who went on to die in a very suspicious plane crash, as well as Republican Rep. Hamilton Fish III, who provided the office, and Montana Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler, formerly an agrarian leftist in good standing. After Lundeen's death, the plot was revealed by British intelligence and received considerable media scrutiny, and naturally went into a decline. Viereck was busted under FARA, which was enacted around this time.

The Businessmen: Many industries already had considerable German interests, and thus came to be closely co-mingled with the German state. The book gives the most attention to Ford (with Henry Ford lending considerable antisemitic aid and comfort), GM (which owned Opel), and Coca-Cola. These companies made large profits during the Nazi era before and after the war, though German laws made it difficult to take money out of the country. As the war started and American involvement ramped up, some corporate leaders undertook efforts to not only prevent the US from joining, but to end the war entirely. One of the main ones was William Rhodes Davis, grandfather (point of interest) of Gray Davis. Davis was a boom-and-bust oil millionaire, and secured a backroom deal to take crude oil from Mexico, refine it in Germany, and sell it to the Nazis. Davis went back and forth across the Atlantic to get the parties to agree to a peace mediated by Roosevelt, but the parties in question never took his inept and exaggerated efforts seriously. After his plan fell apart, Davis switched to an effort to defeat Roosevelt in the next election, scheming with famous United Mine Workers leader John L. Lewis, estranged from the Roosevelt administration. These efforts met with a similar lack of success, though they received German funding. Other executives, such as James D. Mooney from GM, engaged in similarly bumbling efforts to end the war and protect their profits. They all received a happy ending, though, as their German wings were able to profit during the war (Ford and Opal making many military vehicles, Coke creating Fanta) and they secured this money after the war. Some of them even eventually came to pay back the forced laborers.

The Students: This chapter was the one that intrigued me most prior to reading; there were a reasonable (and apparently unknowable?) number of students who studied abroad in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. Some probably went for practical reasons, but some clearly went for ideological reasons, and others came back brainwashed. This is an interesting trend, since the Nazis took little interest in sustaining Germany's robust higher education tradition, and put caps on student bodies and wore their students out with physical fitness requirements. Meanwhile, in the United States, academic institutions were often battlegrounds between administrations, which took a lenient view of pro-Nazi speeches and activity on campus; and students and faculty, who were often opposed to this, were largely disenfranchised. The administration of Columbia University was a prominent example, letting the Nazis propagandize without much official or intellectual pushback. When the war came, pro-Nazi student activists mainly shifted to opposing US intervention. The subject of the study abroad programs interested me; I'm sure some participants (more likely those in opposition to the regime) much have written memoirs of it later; but I can't help but think that it would have been best discussed as the subject of a Reddit thread, medium-form and interactive. The timing doesn’t quite work though, without even taking Reddit’s modern alt-right into account.

America First: When the war came, this was the last and strongest of the organizations of Hitler's American friends, encompassing many business interests, Bund members, and anti-interventionist politicians. Upon analysis, it was composed heavily of people and entities that had already heavily opposed the New Deal, and so in some ways could be viewed as an extension of that opposition, or at least as an interesting correlation with it. The main figure of the America First Committee was Charles Lindbergh, famous aviator and the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic in 1927. Lindbergh, regarded by some as a future Presidential candidate, toured and spoke extensively on behalf of the America First Committee. He was never incredibly popular, especially after he made mistakes such as accepting a medal from Hitler. Hart quotes polls showing that 24% of listeners to one of his speeches on nonintervention out of those familiar, while 56% disagreed; as well as one for the 1942 midterms from before Pearl Harbor that show 18% supporting a hypothetical "Keep Out Of War" party led by Lindbergh, to 26% for Republicans and 40% for Democrats. His political ineptness finally did him in after he explicitly embraced antisemitism in a speech in Des Moines in 1941, and the coup de grace was of course delivered by the Pearl Harbor attacks. Hart attributes this outburst of antisemitism to osmosis from the circles Lindberg moved in at the time: both the casual antisemitism of leading citizens and the Nazi sympathies of those who flocked to the America First movement. His reputation came to a dramatic end, but Hart pronounces Lindbergh the most likely of the potential American Fuhrers.

Spies: The last chapter is about the activities of some actual Nazi spies in the United States, some German and some American. One spy network was run by Fritz Wiedmann, consul in San Francisco and Hitler's commanding officer during WW1. Contrary to American and British assessments, Wiedmann was actually fairly anti-Nazi, and attempted to defect (though amazingly was not taken up on this). In the meantime, he halfheartedly commanded the Nazi spying efforts in the hemisphere while adventuring and intriguing with Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe. The FBI came to be fairly successful in sweeping up various spy and sabotage rings; though they were helped along by random happenstance, such as when one of the Nazis covertly inserted by U-Boat for Operation Pastorius, a terrorist bombing campaign, was nailed by an NYC taxi. These spying efforts were widely publicized after Pearl Harbor, and most of the saboteurs got the chair.

So that's what we've got. There were obvious themes that reappeared in every iteration, such as (obviously) antisemitism, usually wedded to anticommunism. Additionally, much of the actual political activity was based in the Midwest, and efforts by America First and others to make headway in the deep south were curtailed, though the Klan was often identified as a potential ally. Again, the various pro-Nazi causes did not make full use of the resources available to them, fortunately for the rest of us.

Hart poses some intriguing questions in the afterword, amidst recounting the fates of the various actors (most of them saw few consequences). He asks: what would have happened if McCarthyism had been targeted against former Nazi sympathizers? Would as many lives have been ruined as during the Red Scare, perhaps for a more deserving reason? He also recounts the Sedition Trial of 1944, where prominent Nazi sympathizers, including some of those recounted, were given a mistrial in the face of a weak government case pursuing conspiracy. Despite this, the Roosevelt Administration did see some success going after domestic enemies, as seen above; often through creative sidesteps to the first amendment. that might be looked at askance if they weren’t deployed against those trying to overthrow the government. Meanwhile, Hart also recounts how prosecutor O. John Rogge investigated corporate profiteering in Germany after the war, and compiled a report on prominent individuals who had supported or benefited from the Nazi regime. He was sacked by the government, on Truman's request on behalf of his friend Burton Wheeler; but was able to publicize his report eventually, and made a career as a civil liberties lawyer.

The other theme that came up throughout this 2018 book was comparisons to the world of Trump, from the notes on FARA, which snared Michael Flynn, to the courage of Republican leaders in 1936 for opposing Winrod, and many other points of comparison. The similarities between the two are, of course, not flattering to the modern parties concerned. The main difference is the absence of a driving foreign ideology to import; the problematic ideas were homegrown in the United States.