Written by a well-known liberal cable news host, Prequel is based on Rachel Maddow’s popular podcast series. Her book topped the New York Times bestseller list and it has been rumoured Steven Spielberg might make it into a movie.
It is easy to see why Prequel has been so successful. It offers a rip-roaring account of how American fascists and fascist sympathisers plotted to aid Hitler by keeping the US out of the second World War. Its story of “American democracy under attack from enemies without and within” gains urgency because of the authoritarian danger of Trumpism.
Yet its entertainment value and contemporary relevance comes at the cost of historical analysis.
Maddow’s cast of characters are compelling. George Sylvester Viereck was a German-American Nazi agent who had written “gay vampire fiction” and was rumoured to be the grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Philip Johnson abandoned his position as of head of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art to help start an American fascist movement (he later became a renowned architect). William Dudley Pelley, who sought to form his own version of the brownshirts, was an occultist who believed he heard messages from the ‘fourth dimension’.
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These individuals became tied to a larger isolationist movement led by the America First movement and aviator Charles Lindbergh that sought to keep the US out of the second World War.
Maddow’s history is very well done and is interesting in its own terms. But it is problematic to view her story as a “prequel” to Trumpism. By comparative standards, American fascism never gained much of a foothold. Not only was there no American Hitler, there was not even an American Oswald Mosely.
Maybe a couple of dozen American Congresspeople could be described as fascist sympathisers – which is hardly the equivalent of the Trumpism that has taken over one of America’s two major political parties.
The major threat to American democracy during the 1930s and 1940s came from white supremacists, especially those who operated a system of racial terror and disenfranchisement in the US south. But southern politicians had absolute power within their states and held considerable clout nationally. They did not need a fascist movement.
Unsurprisingly, Trumpism has thrived in the south. If one wants to find the roots of Trumpism it is better to look at such home-grown white supremacists and not to the entertaining eccentrics and oddballs described in Prequel.
