When Fascism Threatened American Independence

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

I am praying for the healing of America as our nation gears up for the fall presidential election.  The country is bitterly divided, like we were during the Civil Rights demonstrations and the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Family members and neighbors who were once close find themselves at odds over politics. There is a temptation to despair.

We do well to remember that we have been here before and God has seen us through. As the World War II generation passes, most Americans do not remember the fierce differences that prevailed in the nation before that war.

Auto manufacturing pioneer, Henry Ford, and aviation hero, Charles Lindbergh, were leaders in the “America First” movement that was both white supremacist and anti-Semitic. Founded in 1940, the AFC was an American isolationist faction against the United States entry into World War II.  It had over 800,000 members and 450 chapters around the country.

Henry Ford’s personal newspaper, the “Dearborn Independent,” which was distributed in Ford Motor dealerships all around the country, railed against evil Jewish capitalists and propagated the big lie that an all-powerful international Jewish cabal was seeking to bring communist rule to America. Henry Ford sent an annual birthday gift of 5,000 Reichmarks to Adolf Hitler for several years during the 1930s, and during the same period donated all proceeds from his German businesses to the Nazi Party. The New York Times reported that Hitler had a large portrait of Ford on the wall behind his desk. In his waiting room were copies of a book by the American auto magnate entitled, “International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.”

Charles Lindbergh, who was one of America First’s principal spokespersons, wrote in Reader’s Digest in 1939 that Americans “can have  peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.” Hitler, Lindbergh said, “accomplished results (good in addition to bad) which could hardly have been accomplished without some fanaticism.” “A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos,” Lindbergh wrote in his diary in 1939. “And we are getting too many.”

Rachel Maddow wrote in her recent book, “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” the following: “The fight here at home in the 1930s and 1940s is a story of American politics at the edge: a violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships, with detailed plans to overthrow the U.S. government, and even with former military officers who stood ready to lead.”

Maddow tells about “Father Charles Coughlin, the ‘radio priest’ whose national audience at the time numbered in the tens of millions,” nearly a quarter of the U.S. population, addressing a crowd of 150,000 in Chicago in a 1936 speaking tour opposing Franklin Roosevelt’s  re-election. The popular priest called the president a “betrayer and a liar who was in thrall to the Reds … practically handing the country over to the commies.” Coughlin said, “Democracy is doomed…This is our last election. It is Fascism or Communism. We are at a crossroads…I take the road to Fascism.”

Maddow wrote, “The isolationists in America were in the majority in 1939.” She says, “Both the Republican and Democratic parties had adopted planks in their respective 1940 platforms pledging that America would not involve itself in any foreign war. Nazi agents had energetically promoted that outcome, while also ramping up the German government’s secret effort to try to defeat the sitting American President in the upcoming election.”

One America First leader made the astonishing public case, according to Maddow, that any Jewish person immigrating to the United States, should be sterilized. And, “…Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, a North Carolina Democrat, was calling for federal legislation to close our borders to European Jews, despite the widespread knowledge by then that they were being rounded up – men, women, and children –and murdered by the Nazis. They were going to be ‘seeping into the country by the thousands every single month’ Reynolds said, ‘to take the jobs which rightly belong’ to Americans. ‘I wish to say – and I say it without the slightest hesitation –that if I had my way at this hour, I would build a wall about the United States so high and so secure that not a single alien or foreign refugee from any country upon the face of the earth could possible scale or ascend it.’ ”

Maddow revealed that during “the lead-up to World War II, the U.S. Congress was rife with treachery, deceit, and almost unfathomable actions on the part of people who had sworn to defend the Constitution but who instead got themselves implicated in a plot to end it.” A U.S. Justice Department investigation which was not made public even after the war implicated two dozen members of Congress in a scheme to “produce and distribute more than three million pieces of German propaganda” using their “free mailing privileges.”

Maddow added, “We can look back now, at a distance of more than eighty years, and see that all those American fascists (along with their lies and disinformation, their Hitler love, their white supremacist anti-semitic derangement) ended up splintered on a rocky embankment. But in the moment, the lead-up to World War II in America was a much more close-run affair than we want to remember.”

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, essentially ended the isolationist America First movement. The Hitler sympathizers that had been gaining momentum, including those in Congress, went quiet in the face of a national outpouring of support for war. Both Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh did an about face and supported the war effort.  

I wonder who or what will stem the tide against the pro-authoritarian forces on both the right and the left in America today? As I brace myself for the storm of political ads that are about to hit before the election in November, I think of the Prophet Jeremiah who, in the year 605 B.C.E, a time of great national distress when the destruction of Israel was imminent, raised this lament:

“My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.

Hark the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land...

Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?”

Is there no balm in America? Is there no physician here?

Who will pray with me for a balm in America?

The Rev. John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and the author of “Vision Stories” & “How to Preach the Miracles.”