What’s in it for me? A lesson in democratic vigilance.
American democracy, the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840, was animated by “two conflicting passions”. The first was the wish to remain free. The second was the wish to be ruled and do away with the messy business of democratic politics.
Left unchecked, this latter desire, he warned, would lead to “democratic despotism”. If a majority of Americans didn’t remain vigilant, their compatriots might one day vote to place unlimited power in the hands of a dictator, abolishing democracy by democratic means.
In the wake of the riots in Washington on January 6, 2020, that threat seems more powerful than it has for a long time. The riots didn’t just target a symbol of democracy – the Capitol. They also aimed to destroy a cornerstone of America’s political system: the peaceful transfer of power. Talk of rigged elections and treasonous politicians as well as attacks on minority and civil rights add to the sense that many Americans crave an authoritarian strongman.
For the author Rachel Maddow, this isn’t just a case of democratic backsliding: what we’re witnessing, she contends, is the rise of a fascist movement. But America has been here before. In the 1930s, the country confronted – and defeated – domestic fascists intent on burying democracy. The story of how this plot against America was undone, Maddow argues, holds lessons for the present. Above all, it shows us that it takes many brave citizens to thwart such dangers.
The German agent
Meet George Sylvester Viereck, born in Munich, Germany in 1884. Viereck was many things: an acclaimed poet, a novelist, and a journalist capable of landing interviews with names like Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud. A self-styled “bon vivant”, he moved easily in American high society, rubbing shoulders with the great and good. He was also one of America’s most notorious Nazi sympathizers. We’ll come back to that, though.
Viereck emigrated to America when he was twelve. He romanticized his family history, falsely claiming to be the product of an affair between his mother, an actress, and the German king, Kaiser Wilhelm I. The Kaiser was in no position to acknowledge his illegitimate son, Viereck admitted, but he still boasted about the royal blood supposedly flowing through his veins.
Viereck was 29 when WW1 broke out in 1914. He was widely recognized as an up-and-coming literary talent and had developed a knack for attracting fawning publicity. But that all changed in 1915 – the year he burnt his bridges with the New York literary scene and the American public.
The United States hadn’t entered the conflict yet. For most Americans, it was a European affair best left to the Europeans. The war, however, came to the United States. That summer, a German submarine torpedoed a New York-bound British passenger ship, the Lusitania, killing some 1,200 civilians, including 124 Americans.
Outraged Americans condemned the maritime massacre, but Viereck, who supported Germany, defended the action. The British admiralty had instructed British ships to ram German submarines operating in the Atlantic. That, he argued, effectively erased the distinction between warships and civilian vessels. Sinking the Lusitania was thus justified – it was, in his words, an effective reminder that Germany “does not bluff”. That put him at odds with most of his compatriots. His fall from grace, however, was only just beginning.
A few weeks later, while showing a visiting German official around Manhattan, Viereck left his briefcase on a train. Its contents were a bombshell: top-secret documents outlining Germany’s plans to interfere in American politics and undermine the case for America’s entry into the war on the side of Britain and France. Viereck had effectively been outed as a paid agent of Germany.
The documents showed that Germany was spending $60 million a week on propaganda and espionage in the United States. When America entered the war in 1917, Viereck’s star finally set. He was publicly shunned and even chased out of his home by a furious mob. His literary reputation never recovered. But he didn’t care: he had found a new calling.
The plot against America
Germany surrendered on 11 November, 1918. Its empire was dismembered, the Kaiser fled into exile in the Netherlands, and Germany became a republic.
But the legacy of the war dominated politics in the fledgling democracy. Nationalists refused to accept that Germany had been defeated militarily. They said the army had been “stabbed in the back” by international bankers, Communists, treasonous politicians, and intellectuals. For them, this sinister alliance was a front for the true masterminds of Germany’s defeat: the Jews. That idea became the cornerstone of a terrifying new political movement – Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party.
The Nazis lay a heavy emphasis on propaganda. Modern wars, Hitler claimed, weren’t won only on the battlefield. In the recent war, Germany had focused on military objectives while its enemies flooded the country with propaganda, sowing defeatism and chaos. By sapping morale on the home front, they had won the war without needing to achieve a decisive military breakthrough.
Viereck thought the same way. In 1930, he wrote a book about propaganda. He highlighted the briefcase incident to make his point. If German leaders had understood the importance of propaganda, especially in then-neutral America, they would have hired chauffeured cars for visiting officials, thus avoiding the debacle of the lost briefcase. It was that kind of stinginess, Viereck concluded, that had ultimately doomed Germany’s war effort.
By this point, Viereck was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. For him, Roosevelt’s American government proved the inferiority of democracy: it was, he said, nothing but an unholy coalition of Communists and plutocrats controlled by Jewish groups. The only path to national renewal was to abolish democracy and place power in the hands of an American Hitler.
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Viereck devoted himself to that goal.
The United States once again found itself on the sidelines of a conflict between rival European powers. Isolationists said the country didn’t have a dog in this fight, and that entering the war would only weaken America. Internationalists, by contrast, argued that the United States had a moral and political duty to aid democracies in their fight against Nazism.
Germany spared no expense in amplifying American isolationists. According to records discovered after the war, Hitler’s government funded the printing and distribution of one million leaflets and postcards, 2.5 million pamphlets and magazines, and 135,000 books in the United States in the summer of 1941 alone. This unprecedented propaganda campaign was designed to turn Americans against their Jewish compatriots and persuade them to elect isolationists.
A good chunk of the hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to this campaign passed through Viereck’s hands. Viereck cynically exploited democratic norms to erode democracy in the United States. America, he wrote, was uniquely vulnerable to foreign propaganda. Newspapers were legally obligated to disclose who owned them, but nothing prevented the German government giving money to its American sympathizers. Nor was there anything to stop those sympathizers making that money talk – for Germany’s benefit.
There were plenty of influential pro-Nazi Americans out there, too. The ranks of Viereck’s homegrown conspirators included a former United States Army general who advocated seizing power in a coup and a radio preacher whose antisemitic diatribes reached over 30 million listeners. At least 24 sitting members of Congress colluded with Viereck to mail isolationist pamphlets to American voters. Those pamphlets, published under the senators’ own names, had been written by members of the Hitler government in Berlin.
Many Americans were listening. Paramilitary organizations modeled on the street-fighting gangs that had paved the path for European fascists sprang up across America. One of them, the Silver Legion of America, claimed to have 100,000 active members. These organizations collaborated with supporters in the military and law enforcement to steal weapons from armories. They planned on using them, too. One of the most audacious plots foresaw hundreds of simultaneous attacks on Jewish and federal targets – a wave of terror designed to overthrow Roosevelt’s government and trigger an exodus of American Jews.
Here, then, was a well-funded, calculated effort to undermine democracy and spread disinformation. It was spearheaded by influential Americans, including members of Congress, and supported by many less-influential citizens who were willing to take up arms against their government.
At this point you might ask: why has this “plot against America” been largely forgotten? Why don’t pro-Nazi generals, senators, and preachers feature more prominently in our account of twentieth-century America?
The simple answer is that they failed. In 1941, America entered the war, deploying its democratic might to rid the world of Nazism. Men like Viereck, in short, lost: they ended their lives in disgrace – and, often, in prison. But that answer risks taking their failure for granted. Really, there was nothing predetermined in this struggle. What turned the tide was the work of ordinary Americans who took on domestic fascists. It’s to their stories that we now turn.
Citizen spies
Adolf Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. On July 26, his American supporters held their first public rally in a downtown biergarten in Los Angeles, California.
The rally looked European – the brown shirts and swastika armbands worn that day had, after all, been designed for militias in war-torn Berlin and Munich. Many of the attendees, meanwhile, spoke German – like Viereck, they’d come to the United States as children.
For the most part, though, American fascism looked and sounded, well, American. The organizations that sprang up after 1933 didn’t call themselves things like the National Socialist Workers’ Party – they sported patriotic-sounding names like the Christian American Guard and the Silver Legion of America.
These groups wanted to emulate Nazi Germany, but they didn’t import conspiratorial antisemitism and white nationalism from Germany. Their fascism overlapped with older, domestic traditions of hate. Many members of the North Carolina-based Silver Legion, for example, had cut their teeth in the Klu Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups.
The fact that American fascism was so familiar helped it fly under the radar for much of the 1930s. While some groups openly called for the death of Jews, most wrapped their hatred in officially sanctioned ideologies like anti-Communism. Assuming that the real threat to the United States came from the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany, intelligence agencies tended to watch Communists much more closely than they did fascists.
Which brings us back to that first public pro-Hitler rally in the downtown Los Angeles biergarten. Among the Angelenos appalled by the rally was a Jewish attorney called Leon Lewis.
Lewis had no illusions about the prevalence of antisemitism in American life – he had helped found the Anti-Defamation League to combat it. But a Nazi rally in the heart of one the country’s most important cities was something different. The more he looked into the matter, the more concerned he became: fascist organizations, it seemed, were appearing all over California. How dangerous were these groups? Lewis decided he would find out.
By the end of the summer, he had persuaded four fellow World War One veterans as well as their wives to help him infiltrate the fascist groups. By the end of the year, Lewis’s incognito “citizen spies” had attended dozens of rallies, meetings, and events. They heard the same conversations time and again – conversations about procuring weapons, violently overthrowing the government, and killing Jews. This wasn’t idle talk, either. Many of the groups they had infiltrated were already planning specific attacks. There was a plot to storm armories and seize control of local government in three Californian cities, for example, as well as a conspiracy to murder 24 prominent American Jews, including Charlie Chaplain.
Lewis and his colleagues patiently collected evidence proving that there were multiple plots to install a fascist form of government in California alone. Law enforcement, though, refused to act on this evidence. As the police chief in Los Angeles told Lewis during one meeting, the greatest danger to the city came from the Communists. As far as the chief was concerned, that menace resided in Boyle Heights – a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population.
Lewis continued his work despite these rebuffals: sooner or later, he believed, the authorities would be forced to confront the reality of the fascist threat. That day came on December 11, 1941 – the day the United States declared war on Nazi Germany and its intelligence agencies finally turned their attention to the vast networks of Nazi sympathizers on their own soil.
Leon Lewis wasn’t alone, of course – there were other Americans who spent the 1930s working to stymie the advances of domestic fascists. All of them recognized the truth of the words once uttered by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill: that the triumph of evil requires nothing more “than that good men should look on and do nothing”. When American intelligence agencies began dismantling Nazi networks after 1941, they found mounds of ready-made evidence to prosecute them. All of it had been patiently collected over many years by men and women who, like Lewis, understood that citizens must protect one another when democratic governments fail to stop violent extremists.
Final summary
The preservation of freedom requires the vigilance of ordinary citizens. In the 1930s, a conspiracy sought to align the United States with Nazi Germany and install a domestic dictator. This plot against America came closer to succeeding than we often remember. It was ultimately foiled by courageous ordinary citizens who recognized the threat of fascism to democracy.