Every so often, an old black and white photo of a big, popular event - identified as filling the Madison Square Garden back in the late 1930s - surfaces, and never fails to shock when the caption notes that this American celebration was ... in support of Nazi Germany, only a couple years or so before World War II.
The American cultural and political climate changed so abruptly in and after December 1941, when the United States went to war with that country, that it's now strains the memory that many Americans really did lean, often strongly, in that direction. Some of it may have had to do with ethnic German support for the homeland. (Another book I've been reading recently, Bismarck's War by Rachel Chrastil, points out that during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, American public opinion was strongly on the German side rather than the French.)
But a lot of that support for Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime was specifically ideological (and racially bigoted as well), and it was not small in size. It was also organized and, as the 30s ended, increasingly well organized. A lot of domestic terror plots were being hatched; many small cells around the country were actively trying to destabilize the United States government and (through destabilizing elections) its whole system of self-government, which increasingly many of the people involved were willing to dispense with.
The fact of all this happening has been reported in many books up to now, but mostly in scattered pieces. The usefulness of bringing many of the threads together is one reason the new book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, by Rachel Maddow, is so useful: It puts the larger movement in a context, alongside telling a bunch of interesting stories about the people involved.
Another reason it's useful is that it puts a less-often seen spotlight on the people who took it on themselves to fight the galloping fascist impulse in America. And I do mean "took it on themselves" because the official arms of the United States government, federal and below, were shockingly sluggish and ineffective in doing what they should have to combat the menace - in part because all too many of the people in those agencies were sympathetic to the fascist cause.
Obviously, a third reason the book is so pertinent - why it bears reading now, right now - is because of the dark turn in American politics and society in a distinctly fascist direction, in support of foreign actors like Putin and Orban, and at a time when far-right groups have been arming into militia groups.
Madow wisely does not refer directly at all to current events, letting the readers draw in the links between then and now - and you can find them on just about every page, sometimes several to a page - pop up in your own mind. Donald Trump doesn't come in for a mention (so far as I could tell) anywhere. But the approaches, strategies, rhetoric and ideas underlying all this feel remarkably fresh.
Which is depressing: Have we learned nothing from the experience of the last century, how corrupt, empty and evil this stuff is? The optimistic takeaway is that it can be fought. It was before. It can be again.
(image/Pixabay)