Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

Rachel Maddow, “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” Crown, 2023, 324 pp..

Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis. 

 

Washington Post Review:

A network of trained paramilitary cells. A propaganda campaign intent on sneaking Nazi materials onto college campuses. Attempted election interference from a hostile foreign power. A network of right-wing radio personalities and talking heads, often using sensationalism to spread anti-democratic messages. Sitting politicians with ties to an authoritarian groundswell. A seditious conspiracy trial.

 

All of this ought to sound familiar: In the last decade, each of these things has occurred in the United States. Rachel Maddow’s usual business is to report them on her evening news show, detailing each incidence of the creep of authoritarian power and each incarnation of organized violence. But in her new book, “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” Maddow locates these now-familiar features in a more distant historical moment.

In telling these stories, Maddow makes a vital contribution to the history of armed fascism in the United States. She demonstrates that a broad-based social movement of Nazi activists was afoot in the 1940s. It wasn’t just America First here and the Silver Shirts there, but a host of interconnected people (well documented in the book) who wanted to overthrow the United States and implement a fascist government.

 

Maddow also documents another common feature of then and now: stunning failures of surveillance, prosecution and government response. A central event of “Prequel” is the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. It ultimately accomplished little to nothing. The public was left largely unaware of the real threat posed by a coalition of Hitler-backed Nazi propagandists, not to mention the reality that there were sitting U.S. senators using their offices (and taxpayer money) to distribute disinformation designed to turn Americans against one another. And that was all in addition to an array of paramilitary groups ready to go to war on the United States so they could install a fascist regime.

 

 Looking at this story in aggregate is a shock to our usual thinking about this historical period. It’s an era that, as Maddow notes, is ordinarily remembered as a time when Americans unified against fascist threats. The trial was such a failure that most of us don’t know that the politics of the era were far more divisive than Greatest Generation mythologies would have us believe.

 

It’s hard to point to exactly where the Great Sedition Trial failed, but the details Maddow presents are galling. What should shock us most? The defendants putting together propaganda envelopes right there in the courtroom? Government reprisals against the lead prosecutor? The president who buried the incendiary investigation that proved — for, what, the third time? — that the defendants’ effort was designed and bankrolled by the Hitler regime?

In “Prequel,” as in its preceding podcast, “Ultra,” Maddow sticks to history. She doesn’t draw out the connections to the present moment but rather lets the through lines emerge organically. Many of those parallels will be obvious to those who’ve studied recent developments in white-power movements and similar groups. But in my view, Maddow’s decision to not overexplain those connections reflects both trust in the capacity of her readers and a sense that knowing this history will illuminate the way that fascist and authoritarian threats appear in our society in the present day. “Prequel” is a valuable and compelling work of the history of the present, looking at the past to understand where we are — and to locate possibilities for action that we might not otherwise have seen.

 

It’s also not a book that leaves us with the failures that it documents so well. Maddow makes clear that the crisis we face today is not new and that this realization should give us hope — because previous generations have faced this threat and overcome it. To this, I’ll add a hopeful note: It’s not just that we’ve weathered these threats before but also that a lot has happened since we did the last time. Between then and now, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT movement and others have profoundly transformed the way Americans think about equality. The climate crisis has ignited political action, particularly among young people.

 

So, as we face reactionary politics, polarization, and fascist conspiracies (prosecuted as such after Jan. 6, 2021), we have more than the example of the prior generations: We also have years and years of teaching and learning and organizing. We don’t reset back to zero with every sedition trial, even those that have failed.

As Maddow notes, it’s not just about the failed court prosecutions and the others who chose not to act. It’s about the secretary who reported her boss, the civilian investigators, the whistleblowers, the undercover journalists. It’s about people like O. John Rogge, the lead prosecutor who refused to be silenced, and at great personal risk attempted to reveal the full extent of Nazi infiltration and sympathy. Silenced by the Truman administration and others who didn’t want some two dozen sitting members of Congress exposed, Rogge nevertheless worked until he could publish a report. It took decades, and by then, in 1961, the American people weren’t so worried about the Nazi threat. Yet there the threat sat, subsurface, waiting to reemerge in ways that would continue to menace American democracy in Oklahoma City, Charlottesville, and the nation’s Capitol.