Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Birth of American Fascism

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

In episode 30, Robert is joined again by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discuss how fascism started in America. It is a well-established fact that fascism can rise to dominate a democratic nation from relatively humble beginnings. Keep that in mind as we talk about the birth of the American Fascist movement in the United States. Because, more than anything, this is a story about how close the USA came to going down Germany’s path.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I'm Robert Evans and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Today we're talking about the worst people in all of history, the Nazis, or rather we're talking about how Nazism and fascism got started in America way, way back in the day. My guest with me for this debatably topical podcast episode, Cody Johnson, Katie Stoll, how are y'all doing today? Oh, you know, living in a fascist country, you know?

Well, I mean, 30% of the way there. Getting there, it's like, we've got time. It's the national equivalent of when I was a kid and I would get a new video game and I would start installing it and I would know it was going to take like three hours because my computer wasn't that great. But it's like, it's on its way. So you find something else to do to sort of distract you, but you also keep going into check-in. Like, is it done yet? We're doing the national equivalent of watching Starship Troopers for the 37th time while we wait for Age of Empires III to download. And then half the country watches Starship Troopers II and is like, this is a good idea for a society.

I like this. I really like that you picked Starship Troopers II. Oh, I'm sorry, you were saying T.O.O. I was thinking about the classic sequel to Starship Troopers II. I also thought that too. No. Fine film. Fine film.

Yeah, so that's what it's like. Yeah. So have you all ever wondered what the very first American fascism was like? How it got here? Like, was it a kind of thing of like, you know, got imported from Europe or like, did it boil up naturally? I assumed it's like, I mean, the KKK was one of the first fascist groups, probably. I always assumed it was a natural evolution of our shittiness. I feel like the Nazis crafted a lot of their policies on some American policies.

Yeah. I mean, that was more like they got the idea for how to set up the Zyklonby gas chambers from like, you know, Paso. We have for people coming in from Mexico, a station to delouse them. And the Nazis were like, oh, with a couple modifications, you could just kill people with these things. Wasted opportunity there. What if we changed the word delouse? Yeah.

So this is more about ideology in sort of how fascism, yeah. Now it first crept up in America. So if y'all will indulge me. Yeah, fascism loves to creep up. Yeah, it sure does. It's a creeper. All right. I'm going to read you guys 20 pages of this stuff.

Awesome. A horror story. Mm-hmm. In 1921, 12 years before Adolf Hitler would become Germany's all-powerful fuhrer, the National Socialist German Workers Party had roughly 2,000 members. So it's a well-established fact that fascism can rise to dominate a democratic nation from relatively humble beginnings. Keep that in mind as we talk about the birth of the American fascist movement in the United

States because more than anything, this is a story about how close the USA came to going down Germany's path. The first fascist government on earth was formed in late 1922 when Benito Mussolini and his black shirts marched on Rome with the stated goal of bringing order to an Italy that seemed on the verge of political chaos and collapse. Interesting. King Victor Emanuel allowed Benito to form a government and fascists around the world were electrified by the seeming endorsement of their quirky little belief system.

And you got to remember when we talked about this, fascism wasn't like now 75 million people died and so we're like, oh boy, that's not something to trade again. Right at that point they're like, oh, fascism. Fascism, maybe this works. I feel these things. It would be nice if just one angry guy who could do everything could hurt all the people I hate. That seems efficient.

I will not bother imagining the logical conclusion of these beliefs, but I'm into it. So like pizza and the chef-kiss gesture, if fascism first came to America, courtesy of the Italians, or at least the first fascist group in America was formed by Italian Americans. They started organizing in New York and Philadelphia mainly in 1921, which was when Mussolini's party had started to gain power in Italy, but before they were totally in charge. Mussolini's government was instantly more interested in using the fascist movement in America to further Italian foreign policy goals. He didn't seem to care much about actually bringing up fascism in the USA.

Dogs get angry when you talk about fascism because they're good. Rightfully so. In 1924, Mussolini sent Count Ignatio Theon de Revelle to the United States to organize several disparate and quarrelsome groups of Italo-fascists into the Fascist League of North America. Oh. Yeah, cool. This is the first American fascist organization.

These guys primarily positioned themselves as against, quote, atheism, internationalism, free love, communism, and class hatred. Okay. Yeah. I will not comment on any similarities to any sort of ideology. We can save that for later. Yeah. Yeah, we'll do that again.

So now 1924 was kind of a banner year in fascism. It was also the year Hitler spent in prison putting the finishing touches on Mein Kampf, and it was the year that the National Socialist Tutonia Association was founded in Detroit, Michigan. So the first American Nazis, Detroit. Wow. Shout out to Detroit. Hey, Detroit.

Not a positive, like an angry, like, Detroit, like that kind of shot. Yeah, like I'm shutting out. Detroit. Detroit. Yeah. Not super surprising. No. No, I mean.

Nothing so far is super surprising. Yeah. Now, the NSTA pledged open support of the German Nazi Party. Most of its members were recent immigrants to America from Germany, actual Nazis who'd fled in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch, so they wouldn't go to prison for trying to overthrow the German government. Uh-huh. The NSTA was mainly a way to raise funds for Hitler's Nazi Party from sympathetic German

Americans. So at this point, neither of the actual growing fascist movements in Germany or Italy was interested in trying to convert Americans to fascism. When the Italian FLNA proved troublesome, Mussolini's government ordered it disbanded in 1929, leaving its 12,500 members and 80 branch offices to find some other reactionary political organization. Good news. There's about to be a ton.

Yeah. I know you could see where we're at about that. Yeah. Wide-eyed waiting for that. Now, European fascists were actually something of a hindrance to the early efforts of American fascist thinkers and activists to organize. In 1931, as the Nazi Party crept into power in Germany, their foreign office formed an official Nazi Party branch in New York City, and at the same time dissolved the NSTA in

order to create Gauleitung USA, or District Headquarters USA. So the Teutonia Association folded, and Gau USA was briefly the home of American Nazism. But as Hitler gained absolute power, it became clear to the Nazis that the existence of an American Nazi Party was not helpful to their goals. It kind of made them look like an evil empire based on world domination. When you put it like that, I can see why they'd be concerned about that. You might be suspicious about the Nazis. Yeah.

Yeah. Smart cookies. Yeah. They weren't dumb. Oh. They were about some things. Yeah. About giving coats to their soldiers.

Sure. Sure. Sure. They're effective in their goals. They were good at... Yeah. In 1933, they were firing on all cylinders. We all have our strengths.

Now, in 1933, the German Nazi Party had Gau USA declared defunct and opened up the Friends of Germany. Its goals would be to build support for the Third Reich in the U.S. and to spread Nazi propaganda, but not to bring Nazism to the United States in any organized way. The worldwide depression is often credited with the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, although the extent to which that's true is kind of debatable, definitely had an impact on the spread of fascist thought in Europe and in the United States. The first truly American fascist intellectual was a man named Lawrence Dennis.

Now he started out as a child evangelist who attended Harvard as a young man and worked briefly in the Foreign Service before working as a journalist for the New Republic and the nation. In 1932, in the depth of the depression, he wrote his first book, Is Capitalism Doomed? Lawrence worried that it was and that the void left by its absence would be filled by something tremendously destructive, like communism. Readers of Dennis' first book walked away with the distinct impression that fascism would be preferable to communism since the choice was inevitable.

I love how, and especially today, you talk to people and you hear people discuss these things and they're like, if you had to choose between fascism and socialism, you'd choose fascism. But you can't say it out loud, but it's true. You would. Nope. You can look at like USSR versus Tsarist Russia, obviously a lot of horrible things done by the USSR, but also for most of the people in it, probably better than life in Tsarist

Russia, then you look at Nazi Germany versus the Weimar Republic. So the Friends of Germany recruited 5,000 members from between 1933 and 1935. This made them comparable in size to the American Communist Party at the same time. But the Friends of Germany also drew negative attention from US Congress for its armed division, the OD, and for the fact that many of its members were German nationals living in the United States, the German government quickly folded and ordered all its citizens to leave the Friends of New Germany. The organization was dissolved in 1936 and absorbed by another organization, the German

American Bund. This is the one that people have heard of. Yes, I have heard of the Bund. Now the Bund was led by Fritz Julius Kuhn, a German born man who'd fought for the Kaiser in World War I and fought for the Nazis in the streets prior to Hitler's rise to power. He'd moved to Mexico in 1923 and then moved to the United States. Fritz Kuhn had joined the Friends of New Germany in 1933 and become a citizen in 1934. So the Bund was not officially a fascist organization.

Their stated purpose was to build support for Nazi Germany in the USA. A description for a pro-America rally they hosted notes that, quote, the Bund is opposed to all isms in American public life, including Nazism and Fascism, regarding these political systems as affairs of the people who live under them, supported as they are by upward of 95% of the electors in nationwide plebiscites, but impracticable and inexpedient innovations in the American system of government. People really love fascism, but we're not fans of fascism, we're not advocating it, but people are happy with it.

But trust us, yeah. A lot of people are saying it's the best kind of government, not us. Not us, no way, but a lot of people, and there are fine people on all sides. You didn't have to squint hard to see Nazism in the Bund's messaging, quote, the Bund opposes Zionism as an infectious disease gnawing at the core of American political, social and economic life, covering an ever-widening field of activities, which have already developed a power of American life which cannot be shaken off as long as Jews control the press, the radio, the screen and the stage.

That feels pretty explicit. It feels a little Nazi, doesn't it? I would say that's more than a little Nazi. Just a smidge-fashy. Yeah. Oh, no. Now, 1936, the year the Bund was founded, was the year of another American fascist landmark. Lawrence Dennis published his second book, The Coming American Fascism.

His basic argument was that fascism was preferable to communism and that oppression had proved that capitalism could not possibly continue. Most of his arguments had to do with economics and the fact that he felt the current debt-based state of the global economy was unsustainable. A founder review of his book published in Foreign Affairs Magazine. It stated simply, the author of his capitalism doomed repeats his conviction that fascism is coming and that it will do good. It's a great prediction, historically, that it didn't quite work out that way.

But definitely a prediction. But a prediction. So, let's give him credit for saying words out loud. Put something out there? Yeah. He did say some words. Just tossing things on the wall and if they stick, well, a lot of people are going to die.

A lot of people. Tens of millions will be burned alive. Lawrence grew more and more renowned. He booked speaking engagements all around the country, talked at colleges and published journals advocating an end to capitalist democracy. Some left-wing paper at the time described him as, quote, the tall, swarthy prophet of intellectual fascism. As Lawrence Dennis's example shows, American fascism was not exported by foreign powers.

It actually grew far too quickly for the Italian fascist and Nazi parties to even manage. In 1933, a former Hollywood screenwriter named William Dudley Pelley founded the Silver Legion of America, the first explicitly fascist and truly American organization. Dudley was a pretty good pick for an American Hitler. If you're looking for a guy who's kind of similar and tries to do the same thing, he's a pretty solid pick. He had been a moderately successful screenwriter in Hollywood and made the modern equivalent of about $1.5 million for the various films that he'd written.

He'd earlier spent time as a war correspondent in Russia and had developed a tremendous fear of the Bolsheviks along with a profoundly anti-Semitic worldview. All this made him feel guilty about his life of excess in Hollywood's golden era. On May 29, 1928, he had a profound religious experience. Here's a quote from the wonderful book Hitler's American Friends that inspired part of this podcast. Quote, he experienced a vision of being whisked away through a bluish mist. He regained consciousness lying on a marble slab next to two men who began to reveal the

secrets of the universe. Among these was the revelation that death was only temporary and that all human beings are reincarnated to proceed up a ladder to higher existence. Even more important, Pelley reported, the men told him that he would receive additional revelations in the future. Claiming himself to have been reborn, Pelley declared that when he woke up the next morning, his physical appearance had changed, lines had disappeared from his face, and he appeared more relaxed.

The great release, as Pelley called it, put his life on a new course. I mean, that sounds like Buddhist or something, like having some sort of an epiphany where yeah. I'm excited for him. I'm excited for that inner piece that he's found. I feel like this is going to go good directions. Let's read the next paragraph. Okay, yeah.

He opened a spiritualist journal and gained more than 10,000 subscribers eager to read his opinions on automatic writing and clairvoyance. Most of his followers at this point were women, and their donations supported the opening of Gallahad Press in 1931. His anti-Semitism and paranormal beliefs gradually coalesced into a thoroughly American kind of fascism. The silver legion was formed in the hopes that it would sweep American politics, and they were called the silver legion because they wore silver shirts with a big L on them.

It stood for, I think, loyalty and life and legion, and here's a picture of these guys. They all look like Gavin McGinnis. Oh my God. The shape is weird. They sure do. It's just, it replaced the L with a pocket protector. Nothing ever changes. Nothing ever changes.

Nothing ever changes. My goodness. Pelley's goal was a new fascist state where all property was held by the government and every citizen was a stockholder in the nation. This would guarantee everyone a healthy basic income that would rise if they did things to help the state, like serve in the military. Only white citizens could own stock in the United States. Black Americans would be re-enslaved in order to provide the free labor Pelley system needed

to work. What? Oh my God. I've got to tell you. Such an immediate turn. How does he not realize that's taking him down the ladder? He's going away from his growth. It's like, oh yeah, basic income.

That's a thing that might be, oh no! It's not a slow creep of fascism. That's the real... It's slow throughout the three sentences in that paragraph. Man. Re-enslaved is not the best. No. Such a matter of fact tossing that out there.

Oh, we're not done. Oh good. Pelley called his dream of a new nation the Christian Commonwealth, and he described its financial system as Christian economics. He saw Jewish people as the main obstacle to this dream. When the Commonwealth was established, Pelley said, a secretary of Jewry would be appointed to restrict Jewish people to a single city per state. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

This is a very American... It's fascism, but it's very clearly on similar lines to what Hitler's saying, but it is also in a lot of ways very different and much more American, and very much based around white identity kind of fascism. This is the first auto-Catholic fascism that we have in the United States. The first time it arises from within us, as opposed to just Germans and Italians. Right, it's not being imported. Like someone's like, I like this, I'm going to start my own.

I'm going to put my own spin on it. Whatever it's like that, but a little funky. It's like the Taco Bell of fascism, when an American was like, this is cool, what if I make it terrible and easily spreadable? But also in this scenario the original taco is like a pile of shit as well. The original taco is massacring millions. Not a great taco. Not a great thing to take inspiration from.

It's a botulism taco. Yeah. Taco Bell, we are looking for someone else to plug for no money. Yes, please. If you want us to stop making references to botulism in your products, give us some double crowd shrubs. You better hurry, because we're going to do it a lot more. Yeah we will.

So, Pelley knew the chief marketing lever he had to pull to sell his brand of Yankee Doodle fascism, the sphere of Marxism. That was nice. Thank you. There we go, finally. Let's talk about Marxism. Right now, I found a copy of one of the recruiting pamphlets, The Reds Are Upon Us. Yes.

It's a guide for how sponsors of the silver shirt movement can create new fascist cells within the United States. So it was meant to be read out to groups of people to convert them. And this will be on our site if you've been like, I could stand to read some 1930s honest American fascism propaganda. Just for pleasure. Just for fun. I was going to do some canvassing, but maybe I'll canvass about this.

Maybe I'll take his literature around. That's what I did instead of write Christmas cards this year. There you go. Okay. Yeah. Good use of time. So it's actually really cleverly organized. It starts off by harping on the dangers of communism, but then a couple of pages in,

it portrays communism as a fundamentally different from not capitalism or from Americans, but Gentiles. So it starts just talking about communism and then it introduces the idea that communism is something fundamentally opposed to being a Gentile. So it makes that clever little shift before it starts talking about Jewish people in any way. Sure, yeah. Yeah.

So here's a quote from Pamphlet. The Gentile says to himself, there are by known public count less than a hundred registered communists right here in my own city. Why should I get excited about a number so silly? That is precisely why the Communist Party is out in the open. To make the average Gentile think there is really nothing to get excited about. Now the pamphlet continues to state that the real work of communism is promoted in ways, but gullible Christian Americans won't recognize.

According to the Silver Legion, communism is not a small movement in the U.S. at all. Quote, Chief Pelley's personal estimate is that there are something like 22 million or one fifth of our whole population. It continues after researching the matter for 10 or more years. He finds that first of all, we must take our total Jewish population into account. Our Jewish population constitutes the main backbone of communism, secretly or in the open, my goodness. Does it make you feel better to know he doesn't think that all Jewish people are fundamentally

communists. He just thinks that they are required by their religion to do whatever their rabbi says and all rabbis are communists. You know, it doesn't make me feel better actually. I appreciate the rephrasing, but you know, it smells fashy. It's a nice attempt. I agree. I don't.

It doesn't make me feel super great. It's putting a bow on the fascism a little bit. You get a taco, and it's based on shit, and you put a bow on it, and that bow is made of shit. Maybe the bow is made of shit. Maybe it's really just a pile of shit on top of a pile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a shit bow.

A dog that ate a bow and then pooped it out. That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is. So it is partially intact. There's a bow there. It's covered in digested food stuff, though, and bacteria. It's also spray-painted silver, so, you know, well, it is the silver shirts. Exactly.

Oh. What a fun. We have fun, don't we? Distries, a hoot and a holler. Dislike. So people who've spent some time reading their Hitler will notice that this is, yeah, a pretty similar thought process to what led him to invade the USSR, the idea that Bolshevism and Judaism are like inherently tied together.

That kind of thinking found a warm home in parts of the United States. Pelley was most popular in the Pacific Northwest, particularly Washington and Oregon, and the Midwest. Pelley said he had 50,000 followers within a few months of starting the silver shirts. This is almost certainly an exaggeration, but it's likely the organization had about 15,000 members at any point in time during its height. So not tiny, but not giant in the context of the whole country. In 1937, the Nazi Party's World Service sent Hitler a memo informing him that Pelley had

risen to become one of the, quote, national men of American politics and one of the first native fascists in the country. It was noted that his movement might even be a better way to gain U.S. support for Nazi policies than the Bund. The Nazis pushed a little bit of money Pelley's way. It's possible that Hitler's house up in the Pacific Palisades, that like Nazi compound that is a graffiti sanctuary and a beautiful hiking, that was the silver shirts. They're the guys who bought that.

And it's very possible, although not confirmed, that that was bought with money that was sent by the German Nazi Party. We don't know. It was registered in the name of someone who probably didn't exist. It's all, it's a big mess. I forgot that that's out there. Yeah. It's a really beautiful hike.

If you look out the house that this American fascist built, it has a 20,000 gallon fuel tank. I wonder what they were planning for. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, that's right. I remember that. Really neat.

Okay. So when we get back, we're going to talk about how talk radio helped inculcate fascism in America. Oh, this is exciting. Eighty-something years ago, but before we do that, we should talk about products and services. Yes. I would like those.

Yeah. What products and services? Both of them. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

This season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad-ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back, and I just want to shame our producer, Sophie, for throwing out a couple

of mini-pizza bagels that had not just because they weren't defrosted, tossed out a salad recently. Shameful. Shameful. We're going to food waste shame you. Yes. And if you're a listener at home, throw some food in the trash, and you can feel more of what it's like to be in this room.

Also have Lysol scrubbing wipes, the only scrubbing wipes on the table in front of us. Some Star Magazine, some In Touch Magazine. This is just audience interaction. Advertising by default. Whatever's around us are the products we sell. Altoids are in here. Scotch tape. Hi-O microphone stands.

That's a concerning name for a microphone stand. It sure is. Wow. Every time I see it. Microphones are kind of always sig-high-ling. They are saluting. Is that why? It bears looking into why they are named Hi-O.

And maybe you should put a picture of these stands up so the listeners know what we're talking about. That's fire to the company who provides our microphone stands. Okay, so yet another source of Native Nazism or at least fascism in the United States was the famed radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin. Coughlin had been born in Canada in 1891 and wound up in America on assignment from the Catholic Church. He started his radio career in 1926, speaking out against a rash of cross-burnings by the

KKK. He was actually victimized himself by the Klan shortly after he moved to Michigan. His radio show proved riotously popular, and by 1931 he was probably the largest radio star in the world and maybe the largest radio star in history. At his peak, Coughlin was reaching roughly 29 million American listeners per broadcast. The only other broadcaster who's ever come close is Rush Limbaugh at 20 million. Wow, so still. Yeah, and there was 100 million Americans.

Right, I was going to say, this is the 30s, right? Yeah, a third of the country is listening to this guy. That is nuts. Coughlin is probably the most popular in any single radio personality he's ever been. Now Coughlin started out angrily decrying the KKK and moved on to attacking the banks. As the Great Depression kicked off, he railed against both capitalist excess and godless communism. By 1931, the focus of most of his ire were the international bankers who'd started World

War I. The term international bankers was, of course, seen by many as a synonym for the term Jews. Could we put some parentheses around that? They are, I can't type international bankers and not put parentheses around it. Your computer does it automatically. We know what's going on. That's Clippy. Clippy just knows.

Right, Clippy. I hear he's... Seems like you're dog whistling anti-Semitism. Would you like to add some parentheses? Would you like to add some parentheses? Oh, Clippy. Oh, Clippy, no. Clippy, why are you doing that?

Oh, God. He just starts shouting 1488 all over my document. Now, CBS wound up kicking Father Coughlin off the air after his Jew-baiting got a little bit too hardcore. Sure. NBC refused to pick up his show, so Father Coughlin created the Radio League of the Little Flower, where for the cost of $1 a year, users could support Coughlin in his screaming at the people they hated.

This allowed him to buy time on 11 and eventually 27 stations across the country. He was paying something like a quarter of a million dollars a week to run his radio stations. That's funny, is coming into this fucking radio priest. So they were paying for it to be out everywhere, so like a little Patreon. Yeah, it is. It is. It's exactly that.

He was ahead of his time. He was basically using Patreon to fund his radio show so that he could say what he wanted with no restrictions. Wow. And I'm going to give you one guess as to where he turns when there's no restrictions on him. It is... Towards the light?

No. Like a pyre. Oh, yeah. A furnace. Like a burning cross kind of thing. He was against the KKK. I was going to say, yeah, at least he was against the KKK. Now in 1932, Father Coughlin endorsed Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the DNC.

He did this because he was essentially trying to push FDR to fix the depression and he was very vocal about this. He wanted FDR to fix the depression by minting gold and silver coins in order to create inflation which would reduce debt and unemployment. So Coughlin turned on FDR when he became president because FDR didn't do any of this. In 1934, the Treasury Department announced that Coughlin's secretary owned 500,000 ounces of silver and was the largest silver holder in the state of Michigan. The purchase of all this silver had been paid for, in part, by donations to the Radio League

of the Little Flower. Some people allege that Coughlin's support of FDR was basically a scheme to make a shitload of money off of silver. A lot of people are saying that, huh? Also, weird how nothing has changed about radio. It's just selling gold, like I'm waiting for you to be like, oh, and then he started selling brain pills to everybody. That's an innovation from Alex Jones, but very proud that he has spread that to putting

sawdust in capsules and selling it to people, to fix their brains, that he is also poisoning at the same time. Sure, sure. Well, that's how you keep some coming back. That razor-raiser blade, both of which cut the customer philosophy. So whatever the case, by 1934, Coughlin was pissed at the Democrats and announced the start of his own political party, the National Union for Social Justice. The NUSJ was open to people of all religions, as long as that religion was Christianity,

and it called upon Americans to resist communism and socialism. Coughlin also urged the abolition of the Federal Reserve. Near the end of the year, during one of his wildly popular radio broadcasts, Coughlin announced that there was no longer any hope for capitalism or democracy in the United States of America. Some sort of dictatorship might be preferable to the current conditions. Maybe. By the end of 1935, membership in Coughlin's union was somewhere between 1 and 8.5 million

people. He's teamed up with Kenneth Smith, a Midwestern preacher who'd worked with Huey Long and Francis Townsend, a political firebrand who wanted to solve the depression by giving old people huge pensions that they would then be required to support every month. He gets up with these other two populist politicians, and together there are alliances believed to be as good for as many as 20 million votes. They begin to campaign around the country, laying the ground for a vast union party ticket in the 1936 elections.

They had great early success, and now that he was addressing crowds of cheering supporters, bother Coughlin really turned up the anti-Semitism. I'm going to play a short segment from a speech he gave in Cleveland. Cleveland! Whenever something bad happens in American history, one-fourth of the time it'll be in Cleveland! Land of the Cleveland. Land of burning rivers.

Cleveland, everything terrible in America starts there. Or at least goes through Cleveland at some point. A body of water in flames is like the perfect metaphor. Here's a short segment from a speech in Cleveland. We are Christian in so far as we believe in Christ, principle, of love your neighbor as yourself, and with that principle I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it. That was one sentence!

One hell of a sentence! That was a sentence with an arc, there's a whole hero's journey in it! Completely cancels out the first part of the sentence. You can see like, oh, well that's your low point, where are you going to go for the third time? Oh dear God! Stunning orator, though. Good voice.

I mean, he does have a... You can see why people listen to that. Yeah, absolutely, that's a voice you can trust. So, unfortunately for the Union for Social Justice, but fortunately for the country and world, Coughlin and Smith were a couple of messy bitches who couldn't keep their shit together. Coughlin got jealous of the fact that Smith was a better public speaker than him and refused to share the stage at any events.

Kenneth Smith went bug fuck nuts shortly thereafter, declared on stage that quote, the lunatic fringe is about to take over the government, and then decided that the union party was too moderate for him and now his goal was to seize control of the government. Oh boy. Well, October of 1936, that was the October surprise. There's always one, you know? It's not like a tape of admitting to sexual assault, it's just, I want to take over the government.

I want to be the dictator. You know I've been talking about how democracy is bad? Well, surprise. About that. I'm a fascist. The union party was resoundingly defeated in the election, Coughlin disbanded the party and announced his retirement from broadcasting. This lasted until January of the next year, when he said in essence, okay, if y'all want

me back that bad, I'll come back. Now I had a lot of trouble deciding how to organize this episode. Bradley Hart, the author of Hitler's American Friends, separates Father Coughlin and the Silver Shirts and the Boond into different chapters. I made a decision to try to do all this chronologically because I think it's important to really get a sense for the pace at which fascism bubbled up in American politics. It cropped up all over the country in a bunch of different locations and among different sections of American society.

At this point in the story, there was fairly little convergence between the sundry fascist groups. So the Silver Shirts were active in the 1936 election as well. Pelley, their founder, had just recovered from a minor scandal. He'd basically defrauded shareholders in his book production company, Gallahad Press, and used it to fund his fascist militia. A fraud. Yeah.

Shameless fraud. Another strong American tradition. He'd been indicted in North Carolina, arrested and convicted, but he was out of jail and back in politics by 1935. He announced to his thousands of followers that God had sent him a message, another economic crash was coming. He formed the Christian Party, essentially the political wing of the Silver Shirts in order to rescue America from disaster.

Now, President Roosevelt, according to Pelley, was a secret surprise Jew whose real name was Rosenfeld. Oh my God. Al Flandon, the Republican candidate, was conspiring with FDR to destroy the Christian Party by hosting his campaign events in the same cities that Pelley was. Since the conspiracy against him was clearly so far-reaching and powerful, Pelley had to get creative in order to build support. I'm going to read a quote from Hitler's American Friends, and y'all are going to like

this part. I want you all to think, there was a proud boy recently who was exposed as one of the violent people I think in the Portland rallies, and it might have been in New York. There were pictures of him with his, I guess, wife or girlfriend who was a black woman and their children. He just started his trial, got all clean shaven. So keep that in mind as I read this next point. One of his more bizarre ploys involved an effort to convert Native Americans to the

Silver Shirt Cause. Pelley's sudden interest in Native Americans stemmed from a supposed divine realization that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been taken over by Bolsheviks. Native Americans were therefore natural allies for his political movement because they, too, were supposedly victims of the Jewish conspiracy Pelley saw everywhere. Among the many problems with this eccentric plan was the fact that Pelley did not actually know many Native Americans. His efforts to reach out by referring to himself as Chief Pelley of the Tribe of Silver, and

writing articles and prose that could have been lifted from stock characters of Hollywood Westerns gained few supporters. But Pelley did succeed in getting one actual Native American supporter, a Portland attorney named Elwood Towner. Now Towner was part Native American, but he saw a money-making opportunity in budding American fascism. He started calling himself Chief Red Cloud and began touring boond and silver shirt meetings across the West Coast.

Thousands of people who probably wouldn't have shown up to a lecture on fascism showed up to see Chief Red Cloud for the same reason certain white people today wear feather head dresses at music festivals. Here's how one attendee at a speech described Elwood. Dressed in full Indian costume, beautiful headdress of white, green, and lavender feathers, a thunderbird design in the center of his headband with a swastika on each side, pants of buckskin trimmed with fringe and beads, a beaded vest in armbands beaded in swastika and thunderbird design.

I found a picture of the guy, and it is... This is cringe-worthy. It is pretty special. Oh my goodness. You can make out those swastikas on the top. You sure can. You sure can. You don't even have to squint.

Surrounding himself with frauds and charlatans. Oh my... God. I found a fun article on Chief Red Cloud on the website Crosscut. They note that he was famous for calling FDR's New Deal the Jew Deal. Of course. It's right there. It's right there.

It's right in the front. So easy. You just live in racism on the table. It would have been a crime not to snatch that up. Exactly. Thank you. Furthermore, quote, Tauner also began preaching a false history of America, saying that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin had been warned to keep Jews out

of America, but were thwarted in getting that provision in the U.S. Constitution, a Native American-inspired document, he said, by none other than Alexander Hamilton. Tauner lectures sometimes included readings from an infamously debunked track embraced by violent anti-Semites even today, the protocols of the elders of Zion. Chief Red Cloud claimed that the coming of Germans to the Americas had been, quote, glowingly prophesied by his ancestors. Jews were, quote, the gold worshipers who would corrupt the Aryan Indians and put them in concentration camps.

He would often close a speech by saying, quote, Are people admire Hitler for this reason that he adopted for his symbol the swastika? It means prosperity, good luck, and Christian government. Hitler also adopted our salute, which means peace be unto you, advance, friend. So that's what these mic stands are saying. Exactly. Advance, friend. Advance, friend.

Those gold worshipers, unlike us silver worshipers. And it's important to note that Chief Red Cloud went around to all the different. He was at the Bund. He was with the silver shirts. He hung out at Italian fascist meetings, I think, and he made a lot of money during these years doing this. Like, this seems to have been a grift. I don't know.

Maybe he also believed all of this. I mean, yeah, half of it's usually a grift, right? Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is he's putting on a performance here. His name is Elwood, and he was a lawyer before this year. And now he's Chief Red Cloud. And now he's Chief Red Cloud. Which isn't even a good name.

No, it's not. Elwood. Elwood. Makes me think of the Reds, Commies. Exactly. Yeah. I don't trust this guy. There you go.

He might be a secret communist, which is the same thing as fascism, according to fascists today. It's the same thing. And one's worse. Who can keep track? I do love it when you get the Nazis who will both simultaneously deny Nazi crimes and also point out the socialist part of it. It's like, what is even the argument you're making?

It didn't happen. Also, they were communists. Communists. My favorite thing now is also like, oh, the, you know, the Nazis were socialists right there in the name, the healthcare and all that stuff. And the second the president says he's a nationalist, they're like, oh, that's good. That's not a bad thing. That's the good part.

The good part of the Nazis was the nationalist part. Idiots. If they just hadn't had that socialism. This would have been fine. Fun fact, they did kill all of the socialists. That was what the Night of Long Knives was. Interesting. Fun fact.

Interesting. Fun fact that everyone should know, but doesn't. Yeah, that they were. They hated Marxism and rejected the very idea of like class conflict. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, history. Ah, hierarchies and inequality helped.

We don't need to look too closely at history because history's boring. And no one learns anything from it ever. Why would you? Why would you learn not to happen again? It was such a ride the last time. But maybe this time it'll be different. So in spite of Chief Red Cloud's endorsement, Pelley's Christian Party did not do well in the 1936 elections.

They only made it on the ballot in Washington state and they didn't even rack up 2,000 votes in Washington. So the German-American boond was of course also active in the 1936 election. They took a different tact than their other far-right compatriots. They did not create a political party since they were explicitly not supposed to be a political party. They instead threw their support behind the party they saw as most being supportive of Nazi Germany.

So in October of 1936, Fritz Kuhn announced a boond command to all his members ordering them to vote for Alph Landon, their Republican presidential candidate. He claimed that Landon's administration would have, quote, more favorable commercial relations with Germany. He also attacked Roosevelt's, quote, preference for the Jewish element and his placing of too many Jews in public office. Landon did not win. Sorry.

Well. End of story. End of story. Everything turned out great. You're dead and forgotten now, Alph Landon. And he all lived happily ever after. Yeah. But he's got so many more pages in his hand.

I do. So the party that would have been most beneficial to the Nazis with the… That's interesting. That's what the Nazis thought. That seems to be what how the Nazis thought about it. Oh. Yeah. So the 1936 elections were kind of a defeat across the board for the American fascist

movement. But the increased visibility they'd gotten in the press and through the speaking tours of people like Coughlin and Pelley and of course Chief Redclad had made the country. And that as 1937 dawned, more Americans than ever were curious about and sympathetic towards fascism. A Gallup poll taken that year asked respondents whether they'd prefer to live under fascism or communism. 45% of Americans picked fascism.

Idiots. Fucking idiots. I feel like this is going to work out great for me. Oh my gosh. So we're going to get into what came next for fascism in America. But first, what comes next for ads on this podcast? Yes. There it is.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

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I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back when we're talking about fascism. But why?

Because it's not relevant to things happening today. Good. Yeah. I'm tired of things being relevant today. No, it's just useless. So the late 30s was a time of great growth and increasing acceptance of fascism in America. The German-American Bund opened a network of summer camps in the United States. As an undercover reporter in the Bund, John C. Metcalf later testified, quote, American

boys and girls sing hymns to der Führer and to the Watterländ they have never seen. Their youthful feet goose-step in a march of racial and religious hatred. The minds and souls of these babes in the woods are a fertile field for the propaganda of the Bund. The Hitler Youth thing, yeah. This is really, oh, there's me this part. Yeah. I really don't like this part.

Because that's one of the most, maybe not the most chilling thing about Nazi Germany, but it is chilling to me when I think about the indoctrination and what they did to these kids. Yeah. It's the scariest part. Yeah. And now it's unclear how many total American children went through Bund training camps and received Nazi indoctrination.

Bradley Hart, author of Hitler's American Friends, estimates around 7,200 per year. Oh my God. 20,000 to 30,000 probably. The biggest camp, Siegfried, was located in New York and turned into something of a Nazi town right in the East Coast. There was a small neighborhood of houses and the whole camp was owned collectively by the homeowners on the land. Quote, Adolf Hitler Street was a major thoroughfare.

Oh no. The streets were similarly named for Nazi big weeks. Guests from Germany were frequently hosted at Siegfried and during the summer, the OD trained there with rifles and other firearms. Promising members of the Youth Division from all over the country were also sent to Siegfried, the furtive education and training, making it effectively the center of Bund training operations nationwide. Major celebrations, such as the Fourth of July celebrations that began this chapter, could

attract tens of thousands of people from New York City to Siegfried's leafy surroundings. So tens of thousands of Americans being like, I'm not on board with the Nazis, but I want to see their fireworks show. And thousands and thousands of kids. Yeah. It's just like a community thing. I bet all those little Nazis grew up to be adult Nazis and appropriated children that are now running, maybe not now.

I bet we'll never have an episode where we talk about what some of the people who went to these summer camps went on to do. I will not take that fast. Now on an interesting side note, the Nazi Homeowners Association that owned Siegfried continued to be a thing after the Bund collapsed at the outbreak of war. They even had rules about what races you couldn't be to live there. The Board of Homeowners had to sign off that any new buyers met their, quote, racial qualifications. You want to guess how long this went on?

How long this Nazi Homeowners Association was a- I don't know that I do want to guess. Decades. A lawsuit found it in violation of the Fair Housing Act in 2015. No, no, no. No, no. That is way past what I thought you were going to say. I was prepared to be shocked at 1995 or something.

2015. Goodness. That's the good stuff right there. That's the good stuff. That's the good bad stuff. That's the good bad stuff. Now I bet you're all wondering just what the fuck went on in America's Nazi summer camps. Good news.

Charles Bukowski went to one as a kid and wrote extensively about the experience. He became a member of the Bund in 1938 at age 18 and remained one until the outbreak of war in 1941. Later in life, he wrote a novel, Ham on Rye, where he basically fictionalized his real experiences as a young Nazi and explains why the movement was so compelling to him. Bukowski was born in Germany, so he was a first-generation German-American immigrant. Quote, I had no freedom. I had nothing.

With Hitler around, maybe I'd get a piece of ass now and then and more than a dollar a week allowance. As far as I could rationalize, I had nothing to protect. Having been born in Germany, there was a natural loyalty and I didn't like to see the whole German nation, the people, depicted everywhere as monsters and idiots. In the movie theaters, they sped up the newsreels to make Hitler and Mussolini look like frenetic madmen. Also, with all the instructors being anti-German, I found it personally impossible to simply

agree with them. Out of sheer alienation and a natural contrariness, I decided to align myself against their point of view. Yeah, that's how it happens. That's exactly it. I mean, that's actually very well said. Because he's a great artist who later self-reflective and early on the ball in terms of that is exactly it.

That's a thousand percent. My god. A piece of ass. Yeah. But yeah, but that feeling of... Just stamp it 2016. I'm tired of you telling me that my people are bad and I want to get laid. There was unfair demonization of the Germans during World War I.

Sure. They weren't really any worse than any of the other sides. Everyone was garbage in World War I. It was garbage war. Yeah. World wars in general. Nobody comes across looking great in a worldwide war. Yeah.

Where we decide civilians in civilian cities are acceptable targets universally. Nobody's the great guy, although it's just really easy to look good next to the Nazis. It really is. It is. Super easy. A natural contrarian. Yeah. That's...

That is. Bukowski also gives a typically blunt rundown of one of their meetings, quote, we went down into a cellar, they had this great big American flag there, we all stood up to pledge allegiance to the flag, then we started talking about the communist menace. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to note that I learned all about this from a UC Boulder undergraduate honors thesis by Patrick Rodriguez.

So thank you, Patrick. Thanks, Patrick. I probably wouldn't have found this otherwise. It's very useful. He also describes how the armed wing of the Bund, the OD, was formed and trained into something approaching a militia, even while the Bund continued to maintain a banal friendly exterior. Quote, composing roughly 10% of the Bund's membership, the OD, despite its name, which

translates into armed guard, was an unarmed ceremonial organization reserved for ambitious young men between the ages of 18 and 25, because it offered close proximity to the Bund's fewer, full access to the Bund's recreational facilities such as Camp Siegfried in upstate New York and the promise of a steady wage, young men flocked to the OD for support. For less athletic individuals, the Bund offered other possibilities for economic advancement. The Bund often used its propaganda machinery to promote the small businesses of pro-German, pro-American members. Such was the case with Café Hindenburg, a cocktail lounge in Manhattan named after

Paul von Hindenburg. So this is a complicated situation. There are other reasons at this point, other than just being an inherent monster, that people support these organizations, like Zikowski grew up like. Well, I think that's important when you're looking at the rise of any of these movements and Nazi Germany, it's not a lot of it because, oh, we hate Jews, it's because we are afraid and we don't know what to do next and we really are in kind of dire straits and this is a different answer.

Everything is fucked up and confused. Exactly. No one knows what's going to happen next. That's why those are the environments where these things happen. That's literally the birth of American fascism, is that Lawrence Dennis being like, capitalism seems like it's on its way out, something's got to replace it. Great depression. Everyone's looking for answers and sometimes grifters might take advantage of that.

What's your issue with Chief Redclad? Nothing. Nothing. He sounds trustworthy. I feel like he's the hero of this episode. You feel like that, but just sit tight. So Hitler actually cut off funding to the German-American Bund in 1938. Some of that probably had to do with the fact that John Metcalf, that undercover reporter,

started publishing his articles from the inside of the Bund in 1937. There's a lot to talk about. Metcalf's a real hero and one of these journalists who gets inside this organization and both writes good articles about it, but also provides the government with information about crimes that they're committing. He's a real cool guy. Big fan of John Metcalf. Yeah, different kind of podcasts.

Different kind of podcasts. Behind the guys who weren't bastards. So it seems like the funding to the Bund is coming. In front of the bastards with fists. Punching the bastards. Yeah. Now, it seems like the Bund's funding was cut off because the Fuhrer was again worried about upsetting US public opinion.

If so, that's actually more evidence for how out of touch Hitler was with the United States. In June of 1938, Gallup asked Americans which was worse, fascism or communism. Nearly half of respondents didn't answer. 32% said communism, just 23% found fascism more dangerous. Now Ernst Homstengel, aka Putze, was a good friend of Hitler's and an American. For some reference, Hitler was in love with his wife for a while and she stopped him from killing himself after he fucked up the Munich Beer Hall Putsch. He had a weird crush on her.

What's wrong with you? I mean... No. Yeah, it's... That's mean. I'm not going to bag on Halina. I'm going to bag on Putze. Sure.

I mean, they all were probably pretty fashy. I mean, right? That's also like... None of them are great people. Putze was later interviewed by the US government about Hitler because he had a falling out. He wasn't around for the whole World War II thing. That whole... That whole thing.

That whole chestnut. Honstengel said that Hitler had a, quote, wildly superficial understanding of American culture. I never really succeeded in bringing home the importance of America as an integral factor in European politics to Hitler. He wanted to hear all about the skyscrapers and was fascinated by details of technical progress but failed utterly to draw logical conclusions from the information. Now Hitler did at one point express interest in making a pact with the Ku Klux Klan.

So he never really seemed all that motivated to push fascism in America. But in 1938, American fascism seemed to be doing pretty well without Hitler's help. Pelley published a manual. Take that, Hitler. Take that, Hitler. We don't need you. You never believed in us. In 1938, Pelley published a manual, a million silver shirts by 1939 and announced that each

state needed to sign up 100 new fascists every day. The silver shirts launched a major recruitment drive, exnaying the anti-Semitism and really hampering on communism. One Washington state fascist wrote that year to a critic, the only reason we make open opposition to the Jews is because they are the ones who support communism, which is atheism, and are out to destroy Christianity. We are not Jew haters as reported. We are only against their system.

I do not hate a single Jew, but I do feel sorry for them. I do not hate a single person on this earth, including all Jews. But I do feel sorry for them. You really talked about the Jews a lot there, buddy. Yeah, for you guys, not an anti-Semite. You really dropped, really, really emphasized that. So they're Jewish and they're atheists. Yeah.

Okay. I just want to make sure we're all communists who listen unfailingly to their rabbi because they're atheists. I get it. I get it. They're totally logically consistent. Honestly, checks out. Yeah.

Really seems to hold together type. So the mild rhetoric was in direct contrast to their behavior. Pelley, the chief, traveled with a 40-man bodyguard, all of whom carried pistols openly and basically told law enforcement in Seoul towns, what are you going to do about it? Also in 1938, a silver shirt officer told a Milwaukee reporter that all members of the Legion had been advised to buy sawed-off shotguns and 2,000 rounds of ammo in order to protect, quote, white Christian America. So President Roosevelt was obviously not super happy with the violent Nazi rhetoric and the

militias. One would hope. One would hope. He'd have his finger on that button. He was particularly concerned with Pelley and asked the DOJ if it would be possible to sue him for libel. They weren't able to do that initially, but this does start a chain of reactions that leads to prosecutions for Pelley and the gradual end of the silver shirts.

They don't wind up taking America by storm. But there were plenty of other American fascists, don't you worry. One of them was John Winrod. John Winrod was also a huge fan of the protocols of the Elders of Zion and of course of Father Coughlin. And when Father Coughlin's union party fell apart in 1936, Winrod decided to try and pick up the pieces. In 1938, one of Kansas' Senate seats was open, and Winrod decided the Democratic

incumbent looked vulnerable. John Winrod's plan was to win election in 1938 and then ride the surely forming red wave into the Republican nomination for the 1940 presidential election. He started a radio show and bought time on stations all over the country, mostly lamenting the state of the economy and making available references to Jews. Quote, perhaps you have thought the United States Congress controls the nation's money. This most decidedly is not the case. Who decided that?

I'll give you one guess in three letters. So Winrod attacked Roosevelt for going after the fascist powers without equally criticizing the Soviet Union. Winrod harangued voters twice a day on the air and he gave speeches that attracted audiences of thousands. He was only defeated in Kansas because the state Republican party united against him and convinced former governor Clyde Reed to want to run an opposition. The Republicans successfully opposed him and voted not fascist into office when Rod still

received 53,000 votes. But hey, the Republican party, unlike the episode that we'll have run like the week before this, where they failed in like three states to stop fascists, they have their act together in this situation. Right, they're aware and they're not cool with it. They're like, boy, we don't want people to mistake conservatism for fascism, so we should oppose fascists. That's so refreshing.

What if we gave it a few decades if only 2018 Republicans would take a leap out of 1938 Republicans? So Father Coughlin was also active in 1938. In January of that year, he founded the Christian Front, a nationwide organization dedicated to fighting communism. Jews were forbidden from joining. Members were encouraged to arm themselves and regularly train at gun ranges. The Christian Front proved popular with the same sort of people who become proud boys today.

Soon, mobs of them were beating up Jews on the street in various cities. Some even called themselves Father Coughlin's brown shirts. It became known that during rallies where Father Coughlin would speak, the Christian Front members would fight with anti-fascist protesters, because again, nothing ever changes in all of history. Everything is the same, so. I hate this. It's pretty wild.

It is. So it's just the same thing. And it's like, it's just all stuff like, yeah, like you see this parallel, but then just like every single thing is the same. Little on the nose. It's so on the nose. It's like a guy covered in pro-Trump propaganda stickers, mailing bombs to all the people Trump names.

It is like that. That would never happen. On the nose. That sounds unbelievable. And yet. And yet. In February, 1939, Fritz Kuhn held an event that would prove to be the apex of the German American boon's power.

22,000 boondests and sympathetic listeners showed up at Madison Square Garden for a gigantic America-themed Nazi rally. It was billed as a mass demonstration for true Americanism and a celebration of George Washington's birthday. In the book, Swastika Nation, Arnie Bernstein writes, quote, the unprecedented event was really intended to be the German American boon's apotheosis, proof positive to America and the world, as well as Berlin, that the American Nazis were here to stay. The rally was to be Kuhn's shining moment, an elaborate pageant and vivid showcase of

all he had built in three years. Kuhn's dream of a Swastika Nation would be on display for the whole world, right in the heart of what Berlin Press called the Sematized Metropolis of New York. Nearly 100,000 counter protesters also showed up. You might- Wait, say that number again? 100,000. Almost.

I, one, would call that. You'd call it an Antifa. What if I want to shorten that word? Yeah. That might be a good way to do it. It's easier way to say it. Or Antif- Antif-

We'll figure it out. Yeah. Opposite of- Okay. 1700 police officers were deployed to keep the Nazis safe. At the time, this was the largest show of force in NYPD history. There is quite a lot of video of this rally, and it is fucking chilling. It's been cut into a short documentary called A Night at the Garden, which you can watch

online. The rally stage has a full marching band and a giant painting of George Washington that honestly looks exactly like a fucking screen grab from a Bioshock game. It is that on the nose. In addition, it includes a man I can only describe as Sig Hyling Ted Cruz, because fucking look at that. Oh! Look at this the other day.

I saw this. Unbelievable. Look at that shit. What? That's fucking Nazi Ted Cruz. I'll put that picture up too. It's uncanny. Yeah.

It's really uncanny. I don't know. That's gotta be a relation. It's a really close look, right? It's really close. I'll check that out. So the rally opened with the Pledge of Allegiance, slightly Nazified, and I think you guys should hear this.

Okay. All right. If I had to. You do. Captive audience. I pledge allegiance to mine. Come. Come.

I recommend watching the documentary and seeing this, because the visuals of this are pretty goddamn striking. I pledge undivided allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all. It's like a fucking screen grab from a bad, altered history movie. Yeah. I pledge. What did they say?

I pledge undivided allegiance was like, wow, that's a wrinkle on that. So Fritz Kuhn took the stage next and began to deliver a speech, at which point a Jewish American protester who worked as a janitor in Madison Square Garden rushed onto the stage and was horribly beaten and stripped mostly naked by the Nazis. He had to be rescued by the NYPD. The whole moment was actually filmed and we are going to watch it. Oh, good. Yeah.

We are actively fighting for under our charter, first, a social just wide, gentle, rural United States. Second, gentle controlled labor union, free from Jewish Moscow, directed domination. That is 22,000 people cheering the beating of a man. Oh, that's hard to watch. Yeah. It's rough. It's real rough.

The good news is that this rally at Madison Square Garden would prove to be the high water mark for the German American Bund, but not, it turned out, for fascism in America. When we come back in part two, we're going to talk about the fall of Fritz Kuhn, one potential candidate for American Fuhrer, and the rise of a second candidate, Charles Lindbergh. Who? Hey. That is so upsetting. It is chilling.

It really makes you feel like wanting to die. It's bad. It's real bad. Oh, my God. So not far off. No, no, no, no. And knowing who's in charge and what he wants and what he's into and what he accepts. One of the things that is interesting to me, we will save the explicitly political stuff

for the end of part two. But this book, Hitler's American Friends, is the second book that I've talked about heavily on this podcast this year, the first being The Death of Democracy, both of which are written by scholars and historians who focus on the history of the Third Reich and the end of the Weimar Republic. Multiple of them now have all been like, I should really need to put out a book that specifically addresses the things that are happening now that happened back because it's so similar.

Wait, they're putting books out now? Yeah. This book was written, and Hitler's American Friends was written in reaction to the 2016 election. Really? So was The Death of Democracy. Really? Yeah.

They did this quick. They put them out because they were like, oh, my God, this is the thing I've studied my entire life, and it seems to be happening again. That's the thing that we don't talk about enough. Or we do talk about it, but we talk about it, but people don't talk about it, because in many ways, it's like, yeah, there are similarities. There are things that hopefully aren't going to happen, but there are things that have happened that didn't happen.

There are things that this is further along than ever before here, at least. When people were calling George W. Bush a Nazi or Hitler, it was left-wing protesters, but it was not academics. It was not people who had specifically spent their life studying this period in history. They're all coming out now. You don't find any being like, no, the comparisons to fascism and Nazism are overblown. They're all like, no, this is really concerning. Every single one of them.

Every single one of them. And it's always people who study the part before the stuff that everyone… Before all of the killing. Right. And every single person is like, if he were a fascist, could you say he was a fascist? Well, that's the second half. We're not in the second half. We're not in part two yet.

That's what… It's so maddening. Self-proclaimed intellectuals and thought leaders who just dismiss it outright, when like, no, literally people who study this for a living are talking about it. And the guy who came up with Godwin's Law specifically said like, no, no, no. Do it. Do it. This is the time.

This is the time. And like, I didn't realize that both of those books were written. They're not the only ones written in direct reaction to the current things happening in America by scholars of that, but they're the two we've talked about this year. Yeah. And even that, I forget his name came out and was like, talking about the similarity between Mr. McConnell and just like, yeah, he's the guy who… Yeah, he might have been Kurt Von Schleicher, one of the guys, oh, to Hindenburg, right,

right, right, right. But yeah, he literally used the phrase, the grave digger of democracy. Because he spent his entire career obsessed with money and power and doing his best to suppress democracy and go along with whoever gives him more power to do the things he wants. We have failed to not talk about politics at the end of this. We're going to get into more Nazis next time on Thursday. And there's going to be some fun stuff in this one. Oh, I can't wait.

It's going to be really neat. There's going to be no more chief red cloud tragically, some other really fun stuff. He's played his part. He sure did. And there is still a surprise reveal ahead. I'm excited. Am I not excited? We're going to talk more about Laurence Dennett's founder of American fashion.

Turns out there's a twist. What a treat. God. All right. Plugables. Plug. Yeah. Patreon.com slash some more news.

Twitter.com slash some more news. YouTube.com. YouTube.com slash some more news. We're also searching for some more news for all of the videos that we talk about this kind of stuff and other stuff. And check out our podcast, Even More News on all the podcast places. Dr. Mr. Cody is my Twitter handle. It's my personal thing.

Mine's Katie Stoll. Katie with a Y. Yeah. Like Katie Perry. Like Katie Perry. I'm Robert Evans, like the guy who produced Godfather. You can find me on Twitter at iWriteOK. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com.

You can find us on T-Public behind the bastards by some t-shirts. I will use the money to, I don't know, sometimes I watch a video about a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden and I need to buy beer. That's what you can help with. If you enjoyed this podcast. Would you call that research-adjacent? I would. I do write it off on my taxes.

It's called Sanity Liquor. It's part, yeah. Exactly. Medication. Medication. Journalism Medication. Yes. You can find this website on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com where you will find,

among other things, Nazi Ted Cruz. Oh my God. It's uncanny. It's uncanny. It's really surreal. It's beautiful. You guys are going to love it. Yeah.

All right. This has been the podcast. I have been Robert Evans and once more, I love about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know.

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