In recent years a disturbing trend has revealed itself in America. Long considered the home of freedom and liberty, extremists either identifying outright as neo-Nazis or actively cultivating homage to the National Socialist Party have grown in size and influence in the United States. They populate our social media with hateful memes and rhetoric. They march through cities, baring swastikas and, in the tragic case of Charlottesville, Virginia, killing an innocent bystander. With Identity Evropa, they’re recruiting young white men and engaging in murderous violence. With The Base, they’re preparing for future bloodshed with paramilitary exercises. Meanwhile, too many citizens who don’t consider themselves fascists at all are cheering as totalitarian behavior is carried out before their very eyes.
Considering America’s long-held reputation as a foe of fascism, these developments have come as a great surprise to many. The cherished American myth that positions the U.S. as the protagonist of world events doesn’t allow room for these things to occur. The story goes that America has opposed fascism at every turn, that it mobilized in the 1940 to sweep the scourge of Nazism from the face of the Earth. The story goes that America, with its moral bearings and stark and nonnegotiable principles, is simply immune from the repugnant poison of blatant human cruelty.
Unfortunately, the reality is a little more troubling.
The concept of America as the arbiter of a moral universe is a result of generations’ worth of propaganda and public opinion manufacturing that has its roots in the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, a thoroughly modern president who believed in systems of control powered by historical myth. As a historian himself, Wilson had sought to change public opinion through his five-volume chronicle A History of the American People that most infamously set the table for the Lost Cause myth of the Civil War.
Wilson was a Confederate apologist whose writings romanticized the old South as a kingdom populated with kind, noble southerners and their happy, beloved slaves. Following a supposedly unfortunate and unnecessary Civil War, Wilson painted the burgeoning Ku Klux Klan as a noble fraternity founded for “private amusement” and dedicated to keeping dangerous freed slaves from ruining society.
This portrayal would inspire Wilson’s college friend Thomas Dixon, Jr. to write a series of novels, including The Leopard’s Spots: The Romance of the White Man’s Burden, that would be adapted into The Birth of a Nation, which Wilson would screen in the White House. The Birth of a Nation, with its visual achievements and flourishes, struck Wilson as a perfect means of harnessing public opinion to accept alternate realities.
To this end, Wilson mobilized an effort to indoctrinate the American people to support the nation’s entry into World War I, tapping advertising man George Creel to head up an outfit called the Committee of Public Information, which flooded the country with millions of pamphlets, advertisements, and public speakers who would opine about the need to fight the war, but also push the vision of America as a fundamentally good nation called to war by destiny. Creel intended to spread the message of America’s goodness to “every corner of the civilized globe” while working to undermine all reports of its follies, including its rampant greed, internal strife, and, most importantly, its racist and violently segregated society.
Creel overachieved. By the time Wilson arrived in Europe he was treated like a living god and the savior of the Earth. The people of the world took him at his word that he intended to achieve democracy and self-determination for all, only to be disappointed as the major nations dismissed the so-called “lesser people” in favor of entrenched hierarchies.
Adolf Hitler, as the rising leader of the Nazis, looked to Wilson’s achievements with propaganda and saw an opportunity. Hitler understood that America had won the propaganda war in World War I and that that had made an incredible difference. Wilson and Creel had manufactured a war will in America, but also a myth that was as powerful as any weapon. To build the Nazi Party into a dominant force, Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels patterned their efforts after Creel and the CPI’s campaign.
There was a natural relationship anyway as the Nazis relied on the same Romantic myths that had given America its manifest destiny and claim to moral power. Just as Americans had flouted the concept of divine intention in the 19th century to carry out genocide of its Native American population, Hitler embraced those Romantic notions to justify the eradication of all other races in the name of Aryan domination.
But Nazi Germany and America had more in common than simple myth.
As the Nazi Party coalesced, Americans were fascinated with a burgeoning pseudo-science called eugenics. One of the leaders of this twisted pursuit was Harry Laughlin, head of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Springs Harbor, New York. Laughlin warned of “race degeneracy” and, after sending out employees on a national survey, advocated a purge of the American population, including “the lowest ten percent of the human stock.” Laughlin was far from a pariah and was treated by the nation and government as an expert. He was asked to weigh in on the racist Immigration Act of 1924 and gifted large sums of money by the Carnegies and Rockefellers. His influence was so great that 30 states passed forced sterilization laws based on his advice and over 70,000 Americans were sterilized against their will.
When the Nazis’ Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Disease was passed, it was done so with an admitted eye to Laughlin’s achievement. The Nazis admired Laughlin, plied him with honorary degrees and heralded him as an influential thinker and inspirer of their design.
Other Americans were afforded such honorifics, including author Lothrop Stoddard, whose book The Rising Tide of Color Against White-World Supremacy was a bestseller in America and Germany. For his role in inspiring Hitler’s racist worldview, Stoddard was invited to Germany in 1939, where he was wined and dined by the Third Reich, given exclusive access to its sterilization trials, and given a private audience with Hitler himself.
Another American writer, Madison Grant, a close friend of President Herbert Hoover’s, authored the successful The Passing of the Great Race, an ode to white supremacy. Hitler called this book his “bible,” and in it he found an American warning of “race suicide” and advocating the murder of infants in the name of racial purity.
Perhaps no American held more esteem for Hitler than auto magnate Henry Ford. Hitler admired Ford’s legendary assembly line, but gained much of his hatred and distrust of the Jewish people from reading Ford’s printing of anti-Semitic publications that spread the discredited Elders of Zion conspiracy theory. Hitler kept a portrait of Ford in his office and once noted in an interview that he would have happily dispatched his shock troops to the United States to help install Ford as a fascist president.
There was a time, however, when Hitler might not have needed to do so. Leading up to America’s entry in World War II, Nazism and fascism were less controversial than what we might imagine now. Groups including the German-American Bund proudly sported Nazi iconography and even hosted a rally in Madison Square Garden that featured swastikas and a portrait of George Washington. Twenty thousand Americans attended.
National hero Charles Lindbergh represented the America First movement that advocated isolationism and cooperation with Hitler. Lindbergh had visited the Third Reich, advised their air force, and returned with an appeal to form a pact with the Nazis to defend the white race, claiming that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the American media, and the levers of power had been overtaken by a vast Jewish conspiracy.
Hitler would have likely welcomed that peace. He saw America as one of the great achievements of the Aryan race and said on several occasions he had no desire to war with the United States. He admired the systematic genocide of the Native Americans. He saw the Confederate States of America as an ideal society built on the foundation of racial inequality and white supremacy. In the post-Civil War United States, he regarded the laws of segregation as modern fascist achievements in a liberalized world.
With the attack of Pearl Harbor those hopes for an Aryan pact would crumble. America would join the effort on the side of the Allies, thus quieting the America First crowd, all but erasing the openly fascist elements within the country, and necessitating a revision of history that posited the United States of America as vehemently anti-Nazi in nature. All ties between the culture, science, and mythos of the time would be covered up and hopefully forgotten. There was a war to fight.
But as soon as the war began to winnow down, America turned to Nazis once more. With the threat of Hitler neutralized, the American government made an unfortunate calculation. Nazism was contained and the threat of European fascism neutralized, but the rising power of the USSR, America’s ally in the war, represented an emerging threat. To counteract this, the political mind reconditioned itself once more, and Nazis became a necessary evil.
As U.S. troops liberated Europe near the end of the war and raced into Germany, they began carrying out Operation Paperclip, a focused effort to find Nazi scientists and return them to America. What troops found in the Nazi bases was that Germany’s technology was cutting-edge and could prove useful in a future showdown with the Soviet Union. High-profile targets, including Wernher von Braun, were rounded up and filtered back to America, where they would take on key roles in American weapons development and the space race.
In a bizarre twist, Heinz Haber, a Nazi and former Luftwaffe pilot, would serve as a principal in the field of space medicine before becoming the public face of science and a popular children’s entertainer for Walt Disney.
It was a surreal turn, having Nazis like Haber trotted out in the public eye to stand alongside cartoon icons like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. But it happened in no time at all because the ideas and principles that fueled the nightmare in Nazi Germany had been in place in the United States of America from the very beginning. It was only a matter of advertising, branding, and tireless propaganda that hid it in the first place.
The sad truth was that fascism had never been a European phenomenon in the first place. It is part of the human condition and capable of appearing in any population at any moment, particularly whenever a power group in a nation found the circumstances of its power threatened. Like Germans in the 1930s, any people could find themselves infiltrated by fascists when their power and dominance were threatened and the democratic institutions no longer served their favor beyond a shadow of a doubt.
America’s opposition to Nazism and fascism was only as good as the moment. When fascism suited white Americans, when it benefited white Americans watching the demographics shift as immigration increased, they accepted fascism with open arms. When the American myth necessitated a full-throated rejection of fascism, fascism was rejected. But the very moment it served their interests again, Americans were more than happy to welcome in the wolf at the door.
With a rise in American fascism, it’s not only necessary to accept that tyrannical tendencies have rooted here, but a matter of life, death, and democracy. When seeing the blood-red flags of the National Socialists marching in our streets, we must not ask how they got here, but seek the answer as to how we kept them at bay for so very long.
