“AMERICA FIRST”

DECEMBER 4, 2022 – Surely you’re acquainted with the right-wing “America First Party” with the motto, “Fighting for Faith, Freedom and the Constitution to Put America First.” Likewise, you’ve heard of Holocaust-denier, Nick Fuentes, Trump’s recent lunch guest and instigator of the annual America First Political Action Conference (“AFPAC”).  But how many people who encounter “America First” think of our anti-Semitic history associated with this label? I hadn’t until I listened to Ultra, Rachel Maddow’s seven-part podcast.

A minute into the first episode, I was hooked—by a compelling need to address my ignorance. As I became immersed in the series, I developed a fresh perspective on our current era of political nonsense. However gob-smacking the Orange Cult might be, it pales next to the “America First” movement in the 1930s, continuing, remarkably, into the 1940s when we were at war against Nazi Germany.

Ultra begins by introducing a U.S. Senator from Minnesota, no less—Ernest Lundeen. He became the lackey of George Viereck, a full-fledged Nazi agent. An ardent isolationist, Lundeen delivered speeches written entirely by the Goebbels propaganda machine and allowed Viereck to use Lundeen’s franking privileges for broad dissemination of Nazi disinformation. About to be exposed by an FBI investigation, Lundeen—along with several FBI agents—died in a mysterious plane crash in August 1940.

Though I’ve spent most of my life in Minnesota, I’d never heard of Lundeen—nor has anyone else I know from this “nice” state. We’ve heard of Charles Lindbergh, however, who, as another isolationist, was sympathetic to the Nazi regime and an outspoken critic of American policy disfavoring Germany.

Enter “America First.” I’d heard of the Nazi-sympathizing movement in the 1930s and seen film clips of “America First” rallies. I was ignorant, though, that Nazi supporters in America had amassed arsenals and conspired to bring down the U.S. Government—in order to “save America.” I was also unaware that numerous Senators and Congressmen supported the “America First” movement; that some were directly involved in seditious conspiracy. All were isolationists, and anti-Semitism ran rampant among them. For years they and their constituents had been inflamed by the explicitly anti-Semitic harangues of Father Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest based in Detroit, whose weekly radio broadcasts in the 1930s had a following of an estimated 30 million (equal to 66 million today based on total national population).

Further, prior to Ultra I’d never heard of the Sedition Trial of 1944, a headline-grabbing case in which 30 defendants sympathetic to Nazism were charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government. Defense counsel turned the trial into a farce; a veritable circus of delay tactics and twisted logic that make Trump’s lawyers look like rank amateurs. After 100s of motions and the testimony of only 39 of 200 witnesses in the months-long trial (a whole month was required to impanel the jury), the presiding judge died, and a mistrial was declared. Only after John Rogge, the dogged chief prosecutor, obtained access to Nazi files after the war and uncovered confirming evidence, were cases re-opened against some of the defendants. Eventually, Rogge achieved a semblance of justice and accountability.

Maddow devotes extensive time to an account of the trial. For more on the story, see “The Sedition Trial: A Study in Delay and Obstruction,” University of Chicago Law Review. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclrev/vol15/iss3/8

May Maddow’s chilling podcast inspire resistance against the contagions of anti-Semitism and hateful authoritarianism, wrapped ironically in the American flag—and American history.

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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson