The Second American Civil War

Rachel Maddow, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

It’s hardly a secret at this late date that America had a significant and organized population of small-f fascists and fascist-adjacents before WWII. Some were relatively well known, including Father Charles Coughlin, the pioneering televangelist, and aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was rumored for president before he squandered America’s national good will. We remember these names today, though, because they made themselves memorable. Thousands of others strove to be forgotten.

Rachel Maddow made herself a darling of progressive basic cable with her understated sardonic humor and her casual camera presence. It’s potentially easy to forget that her background isn’t in journalism; she’s a former Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in political science. Maddow brings a scholar’s eye for detail and a journalist’s knack for storytelling to this, her accounting of how America faced—and frequently flubbed—its domestic fascist menace.

Drawing entirely on public-domain documents, including one damning file which President Truman personally buried, Maddow reconstructs the pro-German PR machine. Her approach herein is more narrative than analytic; she retells events approximately in sequence. This approach tends to emphasize the movement’s leaders and their bombastic speeches. Many pro-German leaders were intellectuals, industrialists, and freelance agitators. Others were elected Senators and Representatives, actively misusing their offices.

Maddow’s history of the pro-German movement contains more names than a Dostoevsky novel; the hardcover helpfully includes a dramatis personae. It’s sometimes easier to remember the groups these men (they were indeed mostly men) represented. Some were directly subsidized by the German propaganda machine, including America First and the Christian Front; others, like the Klan, received their backing indirectly. Maddow demonstrates they were definitely coordinated.

The anti-fascist opposition wasn’t nearly so harmonized. The Department of Justice and Hoover’s FBI cared more about the Communist Left, and largely ignored right-wing insurgency. When public pressure finally forced the government to prosecute far-right seditionists, it failed to support its designated prosecutors, and actively submarined one. In an appalling precedent, literally nobody was held legally culpable for supporting Germany or undermining American democracy.

Rachel Maddow

Perhaps Maddow’s most engaging passages describe how ordinary citizens, acting without government support, sought to shine daylight on the nightcrawlers of America’s pro-German machine. Leon Lewis, a Los Angeles attorney, organized a private spy network to uncover Bundist activity in Southern California. Advertising executive Henry Hoke exposed the extensive direct-mail PR campaign Germany used to widen division in American public opinion, often with help from elected federal legislators.

Perceptive readers might recognize a pattern developing. The Roosevelt Administration, condemned by American conservatives as dangerously leftist, was terrified of too aggressively prosecuting anti-American forces, lest they open themselves to more criticism. Ultra-right conservatives, meanwhile, present themselves as merely honest Americans, faithful Christians, and grassroots activists. Then they actively attempt to conceal the vast transfusions of German money. Both sides fought each other brutally, and Germany reaped the benefits.

Only in the closing pages does Maddow acknowledge what her readers recognized from the beginning: that Maddow sees this as instructive for dealing with home-grown authoritarians today. The anti-fascists fought their battles without government support, and often faced official indifference. However, they persevered, and they eventually saw the tide of public opinion shift. Authoritarians generally don’t handle civilian pushback very well, and their lack of preparedness is frequently their undoing.

She doesn’t call it Prequel for nothing.

The hardline authoritarianism described herein doesn’t always parallel with today’s politics. Maddow lingers, for instance, on Huey “Kingfish” Long, the Louisiana governor who came closest to creating an American dictatorship. Long’s stranglehold on Louisiana politics was paradoxically generous and progressive. Maddow describes Long taxing the wealthy, endowing schools, and dismantling racial barriers (which mostly were re-erected after his assassination). She also describes him taking bribes and submarining regulators for profit.

In this and other examples, Maddow’s analogies are sometimes imperfect. But analogies generally are. The oft-repeated maxim, often misattributed to Mark Twain, holds that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Maddow highlights the consistent use of division, plain-folks rhetoric, and working class paranoia to keep Americans divided and infighting. She also emphasizes ordinary Americans’ willingness to resist, even resistance at great personal cost.

Maddow’s narrative has the suspensive form of a paperback political thriller, but she also emphasizes recurrent themes driving the story. She unpacks exactly as much as she expects her audience will need to understand the stakes, and little more, ensuring her narrative never bogs down. The story is sometimes bleak, and sometimes terrifying; but it’s ultimately triumphant, as the anti-fascists win, reminding us that we can win, too.