Robert Evans, Cody Johnson, and Katie Stoll dissect the "Birth of American Fascism," tracing its roots from Lawrence Dennis's 1932 arguments to William Dudley Pelley's 1933 Silver Legion. They analyze Father Coughlin's massive radio influence, Elwood Towner's "Chief Red Cloud" persona, and Fritz Kuhn's German-American Bund, which held violent rallies like the 1939 Madison Square Garden event. Despite a 1936 electoral defeat, the hosts reveal how economic anxiety fueled these movements, noting that 45% of Americans preferred fascism over communism in 1937, drawing chilling parallels to modern political polarization. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Guaranteed Human Podcast00:02:04
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
The Taco Bell of Fascism00:15:57
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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.
And 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.
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.
Right, all right.
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?
Is it done yet?
Exactly.
We're doing the national equivalent of watching Starship Troopers for the 37th time while we wait for Age of Empires 3 to download.
And then half the country watches Starship Troopers 2 and is like, this is a good idea for a society.
I like this.
I really like that you picked Starship Troopers 2.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You were saying T-O-O.
I was thinking about the classic sequel to Starship Troopers 2.
I also.
Starship Troopers 2.
Fine film.
Fine film.
Yeah, so that's what it's like.
Yeah.
So have y'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?
Like, I assumed it's like, I mean, the KKK was one of the first, Proto-fascist group.
I always assumed it was a natural evolution of our shittiness.
Yeah, and I know 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 Zeitlin B gas chambers from like in El Paso we have for people coming in from Mexico is stationed to delouse them.
And the Nazis were like, oh, with a couple modifications, just kill them everyone these things.
Wasted opportunities.
But what if we change the word delouse to yeah?
So this is more about ideology and sort of how fascism, yeah, how 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 stuff.
A horror story.
In 1921, 12 years before Adolf Hitler would become Germany's all-powerful fewer, 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.
Oh, interesting.
King Victor Emmanuel 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 talk about this, fascism wasn't like now 75 million people died.
And so we're like, ooh boy.
That's right.
At that point, they're like, oh, fascism.
Fascism.
Maybe this works.
I feel these things.
So, like, what's it would be nice if just one angry guy could do everything.
Right.
It could hurt all the people I hate.
That seems sufficient.
Yeah.
I will not bother imagining the logical conclusion of these beliefs, but I'm into it.
So, like Pizza and the Chefkist Jessry, 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 is 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 Ignacio 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, 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 Teutonia Association was founded in Detroit, Michigan.
So the first American Nazis, Detroit!
Wow.
Shout out to Detroit.
Not a positive, like an angry, like Detroit, like that.
Like, I'm shouting out, Detroit!
Detroit!
Not super surprising.
No.
No, I'm not sure.
Nothing so far super surprising.
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 Hallputsch, so they wouldn't go to prison for trying to overthrow the German government.
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 I could see you were worried 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, you know, on world domination.
When you put it like that, I can see why they'd be concerned.
You might be suspicious about the Nazis.
Yeah, smart cookies.
They weren't dumb.
They were about some things.
About giving coats to their soldiers.
They're effective in their goals.
They were good at...
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 World Wide 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.
It 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.
Yeah.
I love how, and especially today you talk to people and you hear people discuss these things.
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 wouldn't.
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.
Why would I bother looking at those words?
Okay.
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 U.S. 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.
Now, this is the one that people have heard of.
Yes, I have heard of the Bund.
Yeah.
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 and 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, 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.
That feels a little Nazi, doesn't it?
That's um, yeah, that's I would say that's more than a little smidge fascist.
Yeah.
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 the depression 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.
I found a review of his book published in Foreign Affairs magazine.
It stated simply, the author of Is Capitalism Doomed repeats his conviction that fascism is coming and that it will do good.
Not a great prediction.
Historically, it didn't quite work out that way.
But definitely a prediction.
But a prediction.
Let's give him credit for saying words out loud.
Yeah.
He did say some words.
Just, you know, 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.
One left-wing paper at the time described him as, quote, the tall, swarthy prophet of intellectual fascism.
Okay.
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.
And yeah, Pelley 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 29th, 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.
Yeah.
Having some sort of an epiphany.
I'm excited for him.
I'm excited for that inner peace that he's found.
I feel like this is going to go good directions.
Yeah.
Let's read the next paragraph.
Okay, yeah.
All right.
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 Galahad 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 that stood for, I think, loyalty and life and legion.
And here's a picture of these guys.
They all look like Gavin McGinnis and my shape.
God they sure do.
It's just replace the L with a pocket protector.
Nothing ever changes.
My goodness.
Pelly'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 Pelli system.
Oh my God.
I've got to tell you.
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 wrong.
Oh, no.
That's a slow creep of fascism.
That's a real.
It's slow throughout the three sentences in that paragraph.
Man.
Re-enslaved is not 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, Pelly said, a secretary of jewelry would be appointed to restrict Jewish people to a single city per state.
Grumble, grumble.
So 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, a very different and much more American sort of and very much based around white identity kind of fascism.
So this is the first autocathonic 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.
It's like someone's like, I like this.
Autocathonic American Rise00:05:48
I'm going to start my own.
I'm going to put my own spin on it.
Whatever.
It's like that, but like, it's so funky.
Yeah.
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?
Right, right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But also, like, in this scenario, the original taco is like a pile of shit as well.
The original taco is massacring millions.
Yeah, not a great taco.
Not a great thing to take inspiration from.
It's a botulism taco.
Yeah.
Tacolism?
No.
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 capacity.
You better hurry because we're going to do it a lot more.
Yeah, we will.
So Pelly knew the chief marketing lever he had to pull to sell his brand of Yankee Doodle fascism was fear of Marxism.
That was nice.
Thank you.
There we go.
Finally.
I was like, when are we going to talk about Marxism?
We're talking about Marxism right now.
I found a copy of one of their 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 can stand to read some like 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 this literature around.
It'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 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.
Yeah.
So here's a quote from the pamphlet.
The Gentile says to himself, there are, by known public count, less than 100 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, quote, 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 Pelly'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.
Goodness.
Does it make you feel better?
No, 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 still smells fashion.
That's a nice attempt.
I agree.
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 it.
Well, it's a shit bow.
A dog that ate a bow and then pooped it out.
That's exactly what it is.
So it is partially intact.
There's a bow there.
It's covered in digested food stuff and bacteria.
It's also spray-painted silver.
So, you know, yeah.
Well, it is the silver shirts.
Exactly.
Oh, what a fun thing.
We have fun.
Distributes 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.
Pelly 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 Pelly's way.
It's possible that Hitler's house up in the Pacific Palisades, that like Nazi compound that is a graffiti sanctuary now, beatable hiking, that was the Silver Shirts.
They're the guys who bought it.
Oh, it was?
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 a big mess.
I forgot that that's out there.
Yeah, it's a really beautiful hike.
Check out the house that this American fascist built.
It has a 20,000-gallon fuel tank.
I wonder what they were planning on interesting.
Yep, 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.
80 something years ago.
But before we do that, we should talk about products and services.
Yes.
I would like those.
Products and services.
Both of them.
Golden Rules for Men00:03:55
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
If you play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, it was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Dad's Advice on Talent00:15:45
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio 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, mini pizza bagels.
Just because they weren't defrosted.
Just because they weren't defrosted.
Tossed out a salad recently.
Shameful.
Shameful.
We're going to food waste shame you.
Just defrosted.
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 have.
Sell towards her in here.
Scotch tape.
Heil microphone stands.
That's a concerning name for a microphone standard.
It sure is.
Every time I see it.
Microphones are kind of always SIGHILIN.
They are saluting.
It bears looking into why they are named Heil.
And maybe you should put a picture of these stands up so the listeners know what we're talking about.
Shots fired at 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 Lembaugh at 20 million.
Jeez.
Wow, so still.
Yeah, and there was 100 million Americans.
Right, I was going to say like a third of the country.
That's the 30s, right?
Yeah, yeah.
A third of the country is listening.
That's nuts.
That is nuts.
Like, again, he's probably the most popular any single radio personality has 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.
Every time I can't type international bankers and not put parentheses around it, your computer does it automatically.
It just doesn't.
We know what's going on.
That's the Clippy.
Clippy just.
Right, I hear you.
Seems like you're dog whistling anti-Semitism.
Would you like to add some parentheses?
He likes 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.
I have to get the f ⁇ out of here.
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 how much money is coming into this fucking radio priest.
So they were paying for it to be out everywhere.
So like a little Patreon.
Yeah, like 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.
Towards the light?
No.
Like a pyre, maybe?
Oh, yeah.
Or a furnace.
Like a burning cross.
Like a burning cross.
Well, he was against the KKK's case.
Fascists can hate each other.
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 SDR 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 still all about selling gold.
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.
He'll spread that to putting sawdust in capsules and selling it to people.
Yeah.
To fix their brains.
Then he is also poisoning at the same time.
He's also giving blood poisoning.
Well, that's how he keeps him coming back.
That razor-razor blade, both of which cut the customer philosophy.
Yeah.
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.
Now, 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.
Or democracy.
Or democracy.
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.
The radio priest 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.
So he gets up with these other two populist politicians, and together their alliances believed to be as good for as many as 20 million votes.
Okay.
They represent a lot of people.
So 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, Father Coughlin really turned up the anti-Semitism.
I'm going to play a short segment from a speech he gave in Cleveland.
Cleveland!
Yes!
Cleveland!
Whenever something bad happens in American history, one-fourth of the time it'll be in Cleveland.
Land of the Cleves.
Land of burning rivers.
Cleveland, everything terrible in America starts there.
Or at least goes through Cleveland at some point.
It's like a body of water in flames.
It's like the perfect matter.
Here's a short segment from a speech in Cleveland.
We are Christian insofar as we believe in Christ's principle of love your neighbor as yourself.
So with that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it.
What?
That was one sentence.
One hell of a sentence.
Way to cancel this.
That was a sentence with an arc.
There's a whole hero's journey.
It completely cancels out the first part of the sentence.
You're like, oh, well, that's your low point.
Where are you going to go split through?
Oh, dear God.
Stunning orator, though.
Good voice.
I mean, he does have a...
He's got a good speaker.
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.
This happens October of 1936.
That was the October surprise.
There's always one, you know.
It's not like a tape of admitting to like sexual assault.
It's just, I want to take over the dictator.
You know, I've been talking about how democracy is bad.
Well, surprise.
Surprise.
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.
Hell yeah.
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 Boon 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.
And 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, Galahad Press, and used it to fund his fascist militia.
Fraud.
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 girlfriend who was a black woman and their children.
Yeah, 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 headdresses 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 and armbands beaded in swastika and Thunderbird design.
I found a picture of the guy, and it is cringe-worthy.
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.
So 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 front of you.
Oh, easy.
You're just leaving racism on the table.
It would have been a crime not to snatch that.
Exactly.
Thank you.
Furthermore, quote, Towner 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.
Towner 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 worshippers who would corrupt the Aryan Indians and put them in concentration camps.
He would often close a speech by saying, quote, our 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.
Advanced friend.
Advanced friends.
Gold worshipers.
Unlike us, silver worshippers.
And it's important to note that Chief Red Clown 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?
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.
And now he's Chief Red Cloud.
Now he's wearing a lot of money.
Which isn't even a good name.
No, it's not.
Elwood.
Elwood.
Makes me think of the Reds.
Commies.
Exactly.
Yes.
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 this.
What is even the argument you're making?
It didn't happen.
Also, they were communists.
My favorite thing now is also like, oh, the Nazis were socialists.
It's right there in the name, the healthcare and all that stuff.
And the second the president says he's a nationalist, you're like, that's good.
That's the good part.
The good part of the Nazis was the nationalist part.
It's a lot of fun.
If they just hadn't had that socialism, it would have been fine.
Fun fact, they did kill all of the socialists.
That was what the Knight of Long Knives was.
Interesting.
Fun fact there.
Fun fact that everyone should know but doesn't.
They hated Marxism and rejected the very idea of class conflict.
Oh, history.
Hierarchies and inequalities.
We don't need to look too closely at history because history is boring.
And no one learns anything from it ever.
Why would you?
Why would you want it not to happen again?
It was such a ride the last time.
But maybe this time it'll be different.
Why History Repeats Itself00:05:31
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 Bund 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 Bund command to all his members, ordering them to vote for Alf Landon, the 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, Kate.
Well, end of story.
End of story.
You're dead and forgotten now, Alfred.
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.
That's what the Nazis thought.
That seems to be how the Nazis thought about this.
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 Redcloud had made the country meant 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.
Yeah.
Idiots.
Fucking.
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 pod?
Give it a podcast.
There it is.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
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Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
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What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
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Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Birth of American Fascism00:14:55
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're back.
We're talking about fascism.
So why?
Because it's not relevant to things happening today.
Good.
Yeah.
Good.
Yeah, I'm tired of things being relevant today.
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 Derfuhrer and to the Waterland 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 Rights.
Yeah.
This really bothers 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.
Yep.
And now it's unclear how many total American children went through boond training camps and received Nazi indoctrination.
Bradley Hart, author of Hitler's American Friends, estimates around 7,200 per year.
So within 20 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.
All the old streets were similarly named for Nazi bigwigs.
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 to further their education and training, making it effectively the center of Bund training operations nationwide.
Major celebrations, such as the 4th 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.
Yeah.
I bet all those little Nazis grew up to be adult Nazis and I bet it didn't appropriate children that are now running maybe not now, but 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 back.
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 has?
I don't know that I do want to guess.
Decades.
A lawsuit found out in violation of the Fair Housing Act in 2015.
No!
That is way past what I thought you were going to say.
I was prepared to be shocked at 1995.
I know, right?
2015.
Goodness.
That's the good stuff right there.
That's a good guess.
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.
That's how it happens.
That's exactly it.
I mean, that's actually very well said.
He's a great artist who writes later.
Yeah, and self-reflective and early on the ball in terms of like, that is exactly a thousand percent my piece of ass and just like yeah, but yeah, but like that feels like just like stamp it 2016.
Like that's I'm tired of you telling me that my people are bad.
Yeah, which is a little bit better.
There was unfair demonization of the Germans during World War I.
They weren't really any worse than any of the other sides.
Everyone was garbage in World War I.
It was a garbage war.
Right.
But world wars in general aren't like nobody comes across looking great in a worldwide war.
Yeah, where we decide civilians and civilian cities are acceptable targets.
Yeah.
Universally.
Nobody's the great guy.
Right.
Although it's just really easy to look good next to the Nazis.
It really is.
It is.
It's super easy.
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.
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 Bundesführer, 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 Cafe 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 Bukowski 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.
And 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.
The Great Depression.
Right, everyone's looking for answers, and sometimes grifters might take advantage of that.
Yeah.
They might.
What's your issue with Chief Red Cloud?
Nothing, nothing.
He sounds trustworthy.
I feel like he's the hero of this episode.
You feel like that, but just sit tight.
Just hold up.
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 Metcalfe, 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 like one of these journals who gets inside this organization and like 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 podcast.
Different kind of podcasts.
Behind the guys who weren't bad.
Yeah.
So it seems like the funding to the Bund.
In front of the bastards with fists.
Yeah.
Punching the basting bastards.
Now, it seems like the Bund's funding was cut off because the Fuhrer was again worried about upsetting U.S. 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 Putzy, 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 did a weird crush on her.
What's wrong with you?
I mean, no, I yeah, it's that's mean.
I'm not gonna bag on Helena.
I'm gonna bag on Putzy.
Sure.
I mean, they all were probably pretty fashy.
I mean, right?
None of them are great people.
Putzy was later interviewed by the U.S. government about Hitler because he had a falling out.
He wasn't around for the whole World War II thing.
That whole thing.
That old chestnut.
Hansfangl 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.
Yeah, take that.
Yeah, take that, Hitler.
You don't need it.
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, ixnaying the anti-Semitism and really hammering 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.
He's not an anti-Semite.
You really dropped.
Really, really emphasized.
Their father just seems to be Jewish and they're atheists.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
I just want to make sure we're all communists.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All communists are all communists or atheists who listen unfailingly to their rabbi because they're atheists.
I get it.
It's totally logically insistent.
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 self-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 sought-off shotguns and 2,000 rounds of ammo in order to protect, quote, white Christian America.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
So President Roosevelt was obviously not super happy with the violent Nazi rhetoric and the militias.
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's 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 veiled 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 haranged 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 run an opposition.
The Republicans successfully opposed him and voted not fascist into office.
Winrod still received 53,000 votes.
Wow.
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.
They want something.
Yeah, we don't want people to mistake conservatism for fascism, so we should oppose fascists.
That's so refreshing.
What if we give 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, get out of here, man.
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 just like every single thing is the same.
It's a 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.
On the nose.
That sounds unbelievable.
Chilling Modern Parallels00:12:02
And yet.
In February 1939, Fritz Kuhn held an event that would prove to be the apex of the German-American Bund's power.
22,000 Bundists 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 Bund's apothesis, 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 Semitized Metropolis of New York.
Nearly 100,000 counter-protesters also showed up.
You might say that number again?
100,000.
Wow.
Almost.
You might call them anti-fascists.
I would call that.
What if I were anti-folks?
What if I want to shorten that word?
Yeah, it's easier to say.
We'll figure it out.
Yeah.
Opposite of, yeah, okay.
1,700 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.
Like, it is that on the nose.
It, in addition, includes a man I can only describe as sigh heiling Ted Cruz.
Because fucking look at that.
I just looked at this the other day.
I saw this.
Look at that shit.
Look at that shit.
That's fucking Nazi Ted Cruz.
I'll put that picture up too.
Like, it's just, it's uncanny.
It's really uncanny.
No.
That's got to be a relation.
It's a really close look, right?
It's really close.
So the rally opened with the Pledge of Allegiance, slightly Nazified, and I think you guys should hear this.
Okay.
If I have to.
You do.
Captive audience.
I pledge allegiance to mine.
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 alternate 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 white Gentile who ruled the United States.
Second, Gentile-controlled labor union, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.
There's 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 watermark 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.
So!
That was so upsetting.
It really makes you feel like wanting to die.
It's bad.
It's real bad.
And like, so not far off.
No, no, no, no.
And like, knowing who's in charge and like what he wants and like what he's like into and what he accepts.
And like, it's hate that.
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.
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 or not.
Or we do talk about it.
Well, we talk about it.
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.
Like, there are things that this is further along than ever before here, at least.
Yeah.
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.
It's like, 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 like, every single person is like, but it's like, if he were a fascist, could you say he was a fascist?
Well, that's the second half.
Yeah.
Like, we're not in the second half.
We're not in part two yet.
That's what it's so maddening.
And like self-proclaimed intellectuals and like thought leaders who like just dismiss it outright.
We're like, no, literally people who study this for a living are talking about it.
And the guy who came up with Godwin's Law has 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.
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.
Yeah.
And even that, I forget his name came out and was like, talk about the similarity between Mitch McConnell.
Yeah.
And just like, yeah, he's the guy who might have been Kurt von Schleicher, one of the guys.
Oh, to Hindenburg, right?
And just like, yeah, he literally used the phrase the gravedigger of democracy.
Yeah.
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.
No more Chief Red Cloud, tragic.
There are some really.
And there is still a surprise reveal ahead.
So I'm going to be able to do that.
Am I excited?
Am I not excited?
We're going to talk more about Lawrence Dennis.
Founder of American Fascism.
Turns out there's a twin.
What a treat.
All right.
Pluggables, plug.
Yeah.
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Twitter.com slash some more news.
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YouTube.com slash news.
Search 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 is Katie Stole, 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 TeePublic, Behind the Bastards, buy some t-shirts.
I love it.
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 enjoy this podcast.
What do you call that?
Buying some t-shirts.
Research adjacent.
I would.
I do write it off on my tax sanity liquor.
Part of it.
Yeah, exactly.
Medication.
Medication.
Journalism medication.
Yeah.
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 really surreal.
It's beautiful.
You guys are going to love it.
All right.
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