“Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism”
by Rachel Maddow,
Crown, 2023; xxx + 392 pp.
After the onset of World War II in September 1939, a struggle arose between those who wanted America to remain neutral and those who favored aid to Britain and France and, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, aid to that country as well. Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, the overwhelming majority of the American people wanted to avoid declaring war on the Axis powers, but those who favored aid to the Allies were willing to undertake unneutral measures that risked war. Both the German and British governments financed propaganda in the United States, the British on a far greater scale.
If all you had to go on was “Prequel,” you would never learn about British propaganda, nor would you imagine that there were genuine issues involved in the struggle between the noninterventionists and their opponents. For the well-known leftist television broadcaster and journalist Rachel Maddow, German propaganda is the sole explanation for the efforts to avoid war. She says, for example,
“At home, 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.”
In another passage, Maddow quotes a boast by a “German operative” in the United States that the Republican Party platform of 1940 on foreign affairs came from a German newspaper advertisement. It seems not to have occurred to Maddow that both parties were responding to the genuine wish of the American people to stay out of the war. Apparently, in her view, only Nazi machinations can account for reluctance to get involved.
In like fashion, Franklin Roosevelt’s critics were simply doing the bidding of the Nazis. She quotes a broadcast by the noninterventionist Senator Ernest Lundeen about Roosevelt’s call for a peacetime draft as if what he said was obviously absurd:
“Lundeen had called the proposed draft registration bill a proposal ‘to conscript Americans from the cradle to the grave 18 to 65. Serfs and peons, that is your destiny. ... We are being urged on by insane hysteria ... red, yellow, brown, black, and white races all are expected to die for the British Empire. I warn the American people that we cannot defend America by defending old, decayed, and dying empires.’”
For Maddow, the notion that conscription is a form of slavery is beyond the pale. Isn’t it obvious that we had to fight against the Nazis? After all, Hitler had to be defeated, even if doing so required conscription, which views people as slaves to the state.
Maddow is not alone in seeing the struggle between interventionists and “isolationists” as a Manichean conflict. High officials of the Roosevelt administration saw things the same way. “Secretary of War Henry Stimson was appalled when he learned that [Senator Burton K.] Wheeler’s pro-Nazi ‘anti-war cards’ were being sent not just to American civilian homes and businesses but to active-duty American soldiers on U.S. military bases. Wheeler ‘comes very near the line of subversive activities against the United States,’ Stimson told reporters on July 24, 1941, ‘if not treason.’” How someone could be guilty of treason if the United States was at peace is puzzling, but such Constitutional niceties did not trouble the bellicose secretary of war.
Wheeler’s response was memorable: “One can probably excuse Secretary Simpson on the ground of his age and incapacity. Everyone in Washington knows that the old gentleman is unable to carry on the duties of his office, and some go so far as to say that he is gaga. ... Before [President Roosevelt and Secretary Stimson] are through they will be doing what I said at first. They will be plowing under every fourth American boy.” Maddow’s own appraisal of Wheeler is predictable; he was a Nazi agent.
When it comes to the most famous organization opposing American entry in the war, the America First Committee, Maddow cannot contain herself:
“But the threads of isolationism, antisemitism, and fascism were becoming an ominously tight weave. ... In the final days of that summer, [Charles] Lindbergh himself began to slough off any ambiguity or coyness about his real views. ... ‘The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.’”
Maddow does not tell readers that John T. Flynn, one of the most important figures in the America First Committee, criticized Lindbergh for his comments about the Jews, nor does she mention that the group was a broad-based coalition of people opposed to entering the war, including such well-known anti-Nazis as the Socialist Norman Thomas. Other members included Potter Stewart, later a Supreme Court justice, University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Maybe to Maddow they also qualify as Nazi agents.
She will not leave the Committee alone. After Pearl Harbor, the group disbanded and urged support for the war against Japan, but this does not induce Maddow to alter her negative opinion. People in the group like Lawrence Dennis were simply trying to save their own skin:
“Any Nazi sympathizers, fascists, and anti-Semites who were capable of ‘reading the room’ started to do so around that time. Lawrence Dennis, for example still claimed in private [and would continue to do so until the end of his life] that President Roosevelt had secretly welcomed the attack on Pearl Harbor because he believed a war would consolidate his ‘dictatorial’ power.” Maddow would probably regard historians such as Robert Stinnett, who also believe that Roosevelt welcomed the attack, as fascists too.
