Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

This year seems to be a struggle between democracy and fascism, but it really is a matter of history repeating itself. It's just striking how many elected officials and public figures were touting fascist rhetoric prior to WWII and doing everything they could to support the growing Nazi party overseas. Rachel Maddow's writing is engaging, the research is thorough and the story is eye-opening. The parallels to today are so sickeningly close that one can only hope that today's traitors to democracy will actually face consequences for their actions unlike the ones who came before them. The book is a testament to how good people tried to fight the rising tide of fascism, putting their lives at risk in doing so. And it's a powerful lesson-- democracy must constantly be nurtured and defended.

Well-written, must-read for anyone trying to understand the current neo-fascist movement in American politics. Hint: we've seen this before. Stunning relevance of history to the current reality. Much more detail than the RM "Ulta" podcast series.

Rachel Maddow has done it again. With well-researched documentation and a no-nonsense writing style, she has written a book about Fascism in the United States. Many of the events she writes about occurred before I was born, and boy, was I surprised at how close we came to falling under Hitler's spell. I encourage all Americans to read her book. Her lessons from history apply very well to what we face in America today with Trump and the mega-right Republicans. It is an excellent read but hard to put down once you start. I highly recommend it.

Rachel Maddow’s “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism” recounts the efforts of pro-fascists in the United States, aided and manipulated by Nazi Germany, to keep America from actively opposing Hitler as well as to plot ways to turn America into a fascist country. The struggle to defeat those forces began in the early 1930s led by private citizens who, on their own, went undercover to join fascist groups and try to alert various government agencies about what was happening. A relatively small number of fascists gathered weapons to prepare for an insurrection. In the last chapters of the book, Maddow describes a 1944 trial in which the Justice Department brought sedition charges against some 30 defendants, most of whose activities she covered in previous chapters. The trial was chaotic, interrupted by frequent outbursts from the defendants and their lawyers. When the judge suddenly died one night of heart attack and a mistrial was declared, the Justice Department did not seek a new trial. The war against Hitler was nearing an end, so there was no push to revisit the past to pronounce judgment on those whose activities on the home front ultimately did not affect our victory over the Nazis.Since the ending is rather anticlimactic, Maddow, at times, may try a little too hard to make things sound more dire than they really were. Although elsewhere she has described Westbrook Pegler as an “extreme” right wing columnist and “pseudo-fascist,” she quotes him at the end of her chapter on Huey Long as averring that, in Louisiana, Long was “gradually copying the Hitler state.” Long was certainly a corrupt, authoritarian politician, but his populist politics had their origins in his upbringing in Winn Parish, where the Socialist Party carried the day in the 1912 election. Had he lived and had he run for president in 1936, he might have drawn enough votes from FDR to give the election to a Republican candidate, but he had no use for Nazism. (I live in Louisiana where, until 1973, we observed Huey’s birthday as a state holiday.)Maddow seems to imply that there was something nefarious about the death in 1940 of Senator Ernest Lundeen in a passenger airplane crash that occurred during a thunderstorm. Lundeen, who had close ties to a top Nazi spy, may have been under investigation, but nothing indicates that his presence on the flight had anything to do with the crash. The cause was never determined, but, based on the way the plane headed forcibly into the ground, a likely explanation is that it was caught in the kind of thunderstorm microbursts that we now know has caused similar crashes.Though, for me, the book seems to promise a bit more than it actually delivers, I did learn a lot about the ties of right wing politics to Nazism during that era.I was aware that Henry Ford was a fanatical antisemite, but, until I read Maddow’s book, I did not know that his efforts extended to publishing a ninety-two part series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that appeared in the Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that he owned, with copies distributed to every Ford dealership. It was published in book form as “The International Jew” and widely circulated in Germany. Hitler praised Ford in “Mein Kampf” and, according to one account, had a portrait of Ford displayed on the wall in his office when he was visited by an American reporter.I was aware that the Nazis studied segregation in the American South for guidance in drafting their own race laws, but I didn’t know that Nazi Germany dispatched an attorney to the University of Arkansas School of Law to acquire first-hand knowledge.I was aware that Father Coughlin was a demagogic opponent of FDR, but I was not aware of the ferocity of his antisemitism or his ties to various pro-Nazi fascists.However, I was really totally unaware of the way actual Nazi agents in league with pro-Nazi Americans were able to get congressmen and senators to distribute Nazi propaganda, typically inserted into the Congressional Record and then sent to millions of Americans for free using the congressional franking privilege. On the other hand, I doubt that propaganda delivered in that manner was very effective. Pages from the Congressional Record could not compete with the message delivered by the 1939 Warner Brothers film “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” the first anti-Nazi movie produced by Hollywood, based on actual events that Maddow describes.Nothing pro-fascists did in the United States affected our entry into the war against Germany. We went to war when Hitler himself declared war on us four days after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany certainly posed a military threat, but there wasn’t much danger that fascist politics would actually prevail in the United States.The political situation is very different today and, though I, like Maddow, admire the “smart, brave, determined, resourceful, self-sacrificing [anti-fascist] Americans who went before us,” I think the political challenges we face today are much more dire.

I knew nothing about this story before reading the book. Rachel Maddox is both a great story teller, great writer and researcher. Highly recommend, especially if you want to learn about how a country can come close to losing its democracy.

Have your dictionary in hand as you read the new Rachel Maddow book, because I guarantee that you'll need it! Even with a college degree, I found that I was constantly needing to look up her choice of words or research events. The information conveyed is eye-opening, though, which makes it a fascinating read that is well worth the effort.

Excellent book. Well written. Great detail of what happened in the lead up to WWII. The events sound so much what is happening now it's scary.

In her usual Rachel Maddow way, she explains clearly why we need to get familiar with our country's history in order to have any hope for our future. This is a very educational though frightening book.

Love her commentary and writing. He style is so conversational and she reveals so much forgotten history

A need to read, blatantly well written and very intelligent research. I highly recommend this book, and target is very clear: the orange thing!

'America First' movements were always fascist. The author explains how it failed to seize control of America in the 20th century. This time around we may not be so lucky.

Be aware that the paperback version has huge letters (for people with bad sight) and is therefore very large. Unfortunately it was not very clear in the Amazon ad that this was not a normal letter size version.I’ll keep it because I don’t want the hassle of sending it back and waiting. Very annoying.

A remarkable, highly readable account of the Fascist movement in the U S as financed by the German government endeavoring to keep America out of the war by financing influential Americans and by their spreading a mail order campaign designed to denigrate Roosevelt and promote unrest in the US . One wonders if the isolationist antisemitic sentiment this movement created perhaps kept the United States out of the European war long after Jews and others on the Nazi hit list were be murdered and countries overrun.