[On September
20, 1945, the first group of Nazi scientists repatriated to the US under
Operation Paperclip arrived at a
landing point in Boston Harbor. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful
of histories and stories of American Nazis, leading up to a special post on
that fraught anniversary.]
On three famous
figures who reflect the breadth and depth of American support for Nazis.
1)
Henry Ford: The automobile inventor and entrepreneur
wasn’t just an American Nazi supporter—he was apparently an influence on Adolf
Hitler himself. Between 1920 and 1927, Ford and his aide Ernest G. Liebold
published The
Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that they used principally to expound
antisemitic views and
conspiracy theories; many of Ford’s writings in that paper were published
in Germany as a four-volume collection entitled The
International Jew, the World’s Foremost Problem (1920-1922). Heinrich
Himmler wrote in 1924 that Ford was “one of our most valuable, important, and
witty fighters,” and Hitler went
further: in Mein Kampf (1925) he
called Ford “a single great man” who “maintains full independence” from America’s
Jewish “masters”; and in a 1931 Detroit
News interview, Hitler called Ford an “inspiration.” In 1938, Ford
received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, one of Nazi Germany’s highest
civilian honors.
2)
Charles Lindbergh: As I mentioned in this
post on Lindbergh, the aviation pioneer likewise received a Cross of the
German Eagle in 1938, this one from
German air chief Hermann Goering himself. Over the next two years,
Lindbergh’s public opposition to American conflict with Nazi Germany deepened,
and despite subsequent attempts to recuperate that opposition as fear over
Soviet Russia’s influence, Lindbergh’s views depended entirely on antisemitic
conspiracy theories that equaled Ford’s. In a September 1939 nationwide radio
address, for example, Lindbergh argued, “We must ask who owns and
influences the newspaper, the news picture, and the radio station, ... If our
people know the truth, our country is not likely to enter the war.” Seen in
this light, Lindbergh’s
role as spokesman for the America
First Committee makes clear that that organization’s non-interventionist
philosophies could not and cannot be separated from the antisemitism and Nazi
sympathies of Lindbergh, Ford, and all those who took part in the 1939 Madison
Square Garden rally.
3)
Father Coughlin: As the tens of thousands of
attendees at that rally illustrate, American Nazism was much more than just a
perspective held by elite anti-Semites—it was very much a movement. And like so
many problematic social movements, it featured a demagogic voice to help spread
its alternative realities—in this case, the Catholic priest turned radio host Charles
Edward Coughlin. Like any media figure who worked for many years, Coughlin
said different things at different times; after the 1939 rally, for example, he
sought to distance himself, arguing in his weekly address, “Nothing can be
gained by linking ourselves with any organization which is engaged in agitating
racial animosities or propagating racial hatreds.” But by that time, Coughlin
had been publicly supporting both
Nazi Germany and antisemitic conspiracy theories for years; his weekly
magazine, Social
Justice, ran for much of 1938 excerpts from the deeply antisemitic Protocols
of the Elders of Zion (as that link illustrates, a text that
contributed directly to the Holocaust). Both Social Justice and Coughlin’s radio show were hugely popular,
illustrating that American Nazism and antisemitism were in the 1930s (as they
frustratingly seem to be today) widespread views.
Next
NaziStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment