This story originally appeared on msnbc.com/ultra Oct. 10 to Nov. 21, 2022
https://www.msnbc.com/ultra

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Episode 1

Oct. 10, 2022, 10:15 AM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 1: Trip 19

It started with a plane crash. The tragic, mysterious crash of a commercial airliner in the summer of 1940 left a scene of devastation in rural Virginia -- and a series of unanswered questions. The cause of the crash was unclear. Among the dozens of people killed was a sitting U.S. senator. His presence on the flight and the strange circumstances surrounding the crash would end up revealing threats to American democracy itself.

(NBC NEWS RADIO CHIMES)

Radio Reporter: Good morning all. This is the NBC newsroom in New York.

Rachel Maddow: His name is Ernest Lundeen.

He's a United States Senator from Minnesota. And Senator Lundeen is at work, even though it's Labor Day Weekend.

Radio Reporter: Today, Saturday August the 31st…

Maddow: It's Saturday, August 31st, 1940. Senator Lundeen gets to work early that day. Even before his secretary arrives. When she gets in, she finds him already there, already at his desk. But something is definitely wrong.

He's not sitting at his desk like usual. He's slumped there. He's got his head down on his desk, his head is buried in his arms. He doesn’t appear to be sick, though. What he appears to be is emotionally distraught. He's crying.

His secretary asks him what's wrong, he won't explain. He's got tears streaming down his face, but all he'll say to her is, “I can't talk about it,” and, “I've gone too far to turn back.” She doesn't know what this means. She doesn't know what has made him so upset.

Now, the reason his secretary had come into work that Saturday of the holiday weekend is because the senator had asked her to drive him to the airport. He's due to fly that day to Pittsburgh. Then he's due to change planes in Pittsburgh for connecting flights all the way back home to Minnesota. Senator Lundeen is planning to see his wife and get some home time. Then on Monday, on Labor Day, he's got a big speech that he's planning to deliver.

On that Saturday morning of the Labor Day weekend, despite the fact that he is so visibly upset, that he is inconsolably crying in his office, the trip is still on. He's still planning to travel.

He and his secretary leave the Capitol building. They drive to the airfield for him to catch his flight. Senator Lundeen's secretary will later tell the FBI that they didn't talk at all for the whole ride. The Senator just cried. He wept the whole way. No explanation.

They arrive at the airfield. There's a storm rolling in, but the flight is cleared for takeoff after a slight delay. The Senator's secretary stays to make sure that he’s safely boarded the plane and then she leaves to drive back to D.C. Then as she makes it back to the Capitol, the news comes through.

(NBC RADIO CHIMES)

Radio Announcer: This is the National Broadcasting Company.

Radio Reporter: In this country now, in the nation’s capital at Washington. Senator Ernest Lundeen reported killed today in the crash of a Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane, was the second member of the United States Senate to die in an airplane crash. Senator Lundeen was 62 years old.

Maddow: The plane Senator Ernest Lundeen was on crashed in rural Virginia, less than forty miles from where it took off in Washington. When she hears the news, Senator Lundeen's secretary decides she’s gonna go there, to try to find him. She races to the scene of the crash. But what she finds there leaves no room for hope.

Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19, a brand new Douglas DC-3, had come down with such velocity that its engines were driven six feet down into the earth. There had been 25 people on board that plane, including the crew. Everyone was killed instantly.

Renace Painter: It was terrible. It was one of the worst things I ever looked at.

Maddow: Even decades after the fact, eyewitnesses to the crash were just haunted by what they saw that day.

Painter: We walked through this cornfield and parts of bodies was strung along the cornstalks, and everything like that. And I ran across this one, walking around, and it was just from the middle of her stomach, her head and everything, that was it. I said I gotta get out of here, I can’t take anymore of this.

Maddow: The evidence of human loss across the hundreds of yards of the debris field from the crash, it was just devastating.

John Flannery: Shoes neatly tied sat in the field with the feet still in them, separated from the bodies of the people on the plane. The dive into the ground was so dramatic that there were pieces of people— pardon the description— all over the area.

Maddow: That’s John Flannery. He lives about 10 minutes from where the plane went down. A few years ago, he decided he would interview some of the last living eye-witnesses, people who were actually there that day in 1940 when the disaster happened.

Flannery: When I spoke to them, it was clear as a bell. It was riveted in their mind. Some people went into the field, younger people, and then were discovering things they could never forget.

Maddow: One local farmer told a wire service that the human remains, quote: "were so badly mangled, I don't see how they could ever be recognized."

But there was a passenger manifest from the airline. And that passenger manifest confirmed what Senator Lundeen's secretary already knew. Ernest Lundeen, 62 years old, had been on board that flight and he was among the dead.

A sitting U.S. Senator, gone in an instant. In a plane crash that, from the very start, was a real mystery.

Flannery: Why did this plane go down with these experienced pilots in a seemingly good airplane, in a storm that planes go through?

Maddow: The plane that crashed was a new DC-3. It was in perfect repair, it had passed all its checks. Pennsylvania Central Airlines had never had a crash in its entire history as an airline. The pilot was very experienced. He had a spotless record.

There was a federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board. That investigation found that while there was bad weather— there was thunder and lightning and some heavy rainfall in the area— there was nothing so unusual about the storm that the plane shouldn't have been cleared to fly.

The investigation found that there was no evidence of a fire on board the plane, no evidence of an explosion. There was no evidence that the plane had been struck by lightning.

Its engines certainly weren’t knocked out. Witnesses say, in fact, they heard the engines roaring full tilt right up until the moment of impact.

Painter: And all of a sudden, all we heard was, vroooooooom! That’s when it nosedived.

Maddow: The aeronautics board report concluded that the multiple witnesses who described abnormally loud roaring engines right at the time of the crash, those witnesses were onto something. The two engines of the DC-3 actually had been at wide-open full throttle when the plane slammed into the ground.

The board also concluded that neither the pilot nor the co-pilot were actively controlling the plane when it crashed. The report said, "It is possible that for some reason the pilot and copilot were prevented from effectively operating the controls."

That’s what the report said: “Prevented from effectively operating the controls.” Prevented by what?

When Lundeen’s secretary raced to the scene of the crash that afternoon to learn the fate of her boss, one report from the time says she met a policeman at the scene of the crash who told her something strange. He told her there was a fight on board the plane.

Now, of course, there were no survivors of the crash to tell anyone anything about what had happened on board the plane. But that supposed report from the policeman, it was not a totally incongruous detail. In fact, the senator's secretary herself had reportedly witnessed something along those same lines.

When she dropped her boss at the airfield for the flight, the Senator's secretary— according to some accounts— had noticed through the open doorway of the plane that something was happening between the passengers. “Some of the passengers were locked in a struggle” of some kind. And it looked to her like her boss, Senator Lundeen, might have even been among the people involved in that struggle, but she couldn't be entirely sure.

The reports of a possible physical altercation among the passengers on the plane, those reports would never be fully verified. And the mystery of what caused that crash, that mystery has endured. We still don't know what caused it. We certainly don't know if something weird happening between the passengers somehow brought the plane down.

But there was even more that was strange about "Trip 19," as it came to be known. Including: who else was on-board— along with Senator Lundeen— when the plane crashed. And what exactly the Senator was carrying with him when he stepped on board that flight…

Why was he so upset before he got on board? That one, we think we know. And it only makes the mystery of the plane's crash all the more confounding.

This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”

(OPENING TITLES)

Nancy Beck Young: He was on the run for not only his political life, but his actual life

Bradley Hart: Allegations already circulating that he might be pro-German, if not pro-Nazi. They're both trying to figure out how much reporters have found out about what's going on.

Young: There has been speculation that perhaps the flight was tampered with...

Lundeen: We are being urged on by insane hysteria.

Young: …as a way to end Lundeen's life unnaturally.

Flannery: I think that the coincidence defies the probabilities

Lundeen: Reason? We seem to be bereft of reason

********************************

Maddow: Episode 1: “Trip 19.”

Flannery: Well, we're standing at a, at the top of a ridge, if you will, and we're at a location, which if you were to take some of the witnesses, 750 feet above us, a plane is roaring over our head. And it's headed toward this field and it doesn't appear to be able to avoid it.

Maddow: John Flannery is giving us a tour of the exact location where Pennsylvania Central Airlines Flight 19 met its end. It’s a big, empty field that’s been taken over by weeds and lots and lots of bugs. There is no plaque, there is no marker designating it as the site of a deadly plane crash. But John Flannery has lived in the area for almost 20 years. He knows which windy country roads to take in order to find it.

Here he is with producer Kelsey Desiderio:

Kelsey Desiderio: So, obviously we don't know exactly where the plane came down, but do we have any rough idea, in terms of where we're standing, where did it happen?

Flannery: Well, from where we're standing, it's, it’s between us and the Short Hill mountain. Some people talk about it as the sacred land, you know, baptized in blood and destruction and, and hurt.

Maddow: In the hours and days that followed the crash of “Trip 19,” which killed Minnesota Senator Ernest Lundeen and 24 other people, there were a range of reactions across the country. Most immediately, in Washington, there was shock and grief from Senator Lundeen’s colleagues in the capital.

NBC Radio Anchor: In Washington, the flags are at half staff today. Washington hears Senator Pat McCarren of Nevada, mourning the death of his senatorial colleague Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, who died in that crash.

Maddow: Sitting Senators just don’t drop dead on a regular basis. The sudden, tragic nature of Lundeen’s death was just shocking to the whole Congress, to all of Washington.

There was also a more general horror among the public over what— up to that point— was the single deadliest civilian air crash in U.S history.

But soon there was also something else. Something close to confusion over the emerging reports about all these odd circumstances surrounding the crash. There was that official government report on the crash, which, frankly, left many more questions than it answered.

Flannery: The report is just full of unsupported exploration of possibilities that are, that they have no basis in fact, they have no basis in science, and they just say these things.

Maddow: John Flannery, who gave us the tour of the crash site, he also happens to be a former federal prosecutor— he was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for years. John Flannery didn't only talk to the surviving witnesses to the plane crash, he's also made a real study of the aeronautics board report into the crash. And to him, something about it doesn’t add up.

Flannery: The more I looked at it, the more it seemed that at least the government agency didn't ask the right questions or find out very much. So it's not, it's not very useful. As a, as a recovering federal prosecutor you would throw somebody out of your office if they came in and they said, “This is our finding.” Really?

Maddow: Separate from that report, there was Senator Lundeen’s strange behavior in his office right before he and his secretary left for the airport. The tears streaming down his face, his comment to her that he’d gone “too far” and he couldn’t turn back. There were also those reports of an altercation that took place among the passengers on-board the plane, what the secretary reportedly saw before takeoff, what the policeman reportedly told her.

Flannery: There was reportedly a scuffle, whatever that means. Is that a fight? Is that an argument? Did people lose their seat?

Maddow: Among all the strange circumstances surrounding this crash, there was also… a note.

A reporter for the Winchester Evening Star in Virginia filed a story from the crash scene that day for the Associated Press. He reported that he came across a charred partially-burned piece of paper lying on the ground about three miles from the scene of the crash. He said it was signed by the lone flight attendant on board. Her name was Margaret Carson. And her note, right above her signature, it said, “going down.”

Whatever had happened on-board the plane, the flight attendant apparently had both the presence of mind— and the time— to dash off that note before the end. What could have been happening on board the plane that made her know the plane was "going down?”

Perhaps most intriguing, though, was something that was found in the passenger manifest from the flight. Because it turns out that in addition to U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, that manifest showed— and the press soon reported— that the other passengers on-board “Trip 19” included a Special Agent of the FBI, a second FBI employee, and a prosecutor from the Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice.

Now, there were only 25 people total on the plane— three people from the Justice Department and the senator among them.

The presence of those three individuals from the FBI and the Justice Department on the flight that day, along with the Senator, that could have been happenstance, could have been just a coincidence, that they were all on that same flight. Could have been. Might not have been.

Flannery: I think that the coincidence defies the probabilities.

Maddow: What were those FBI and Justice Department personnel doing on board that flight? Were they there because Senator Lundeen was on board?

Just who was Senator Ernest Lundeen?

Bradley Hart: Lundeen sort of creates a gadfly reputation for himself.

Maddow: That’s historian Bradley Hart, who’s studied and written about Lundeen’s tenure in Congress.

Hart: Ernest Lundeen is, I think, one of the more fascinating figures in this period.

Maddow: Lundeen's political career had a bit of a bumpy start. He was sworn-in to his first term in the House of Representatives in 1917, just a month before Congress took a very fateful vote on whether the U.S. would enter World War I.

Lundeen, again, just a month into his first term in congress, he voted no. He voted no to the U.S. joining the Great War. And although he certainly wasn't alone in that vote, it was a controversial vote. And he managed to stand out even from his other peers who voted no like he did.

That vote, that stance, it stuck to him.

Hart: When American troops are actually in combat, virtually every member of Congress, every politician sort of makes a show of supporting the troops and even goes over to visit the trenches of the Western front and things like that. Lundeen doesn't do any of these things. He, he sort of refuses to support the war effort. At one point does try to visit the troops and is turned away by the military because he's seen as a, an almost unpatriotic figure.

Maddow: Lundeen's constituents back home in Minnesota were also pretty peeved with him at the time. He was in his first term in Congress when he took that vote against the war. When he ran for re-election after his first term, they voted him out. And they didn't just run him out of Congress, they ran him out of town on a rail. Literally on the local railroad.

Nancy Beck Young: He was on the run for not only his political life, but his actual life.

Maddow: Historian Nancy Beck Young has done extensive research on this fight in Congress, and in the streets.

Young: Angry crowds came out to protest him and his safety was in question on more than one occasion. He had to escape one such angry crowd hidden away in a refrigerated train car.

Maddow: Hidden away in a refrigerated train car. Yeah. Just a few months after he lost his seat in Congress. Ernest Lundeen went to Ortonville, Minnesota to give a speech on foreign policy, but this angry crowd turned up and force-marched him out of the venue after he'd only spit out about two sentences of his speech. They force-marched him to the local railyard, threw him in the refrigerator car of a train that was just pulling out of the station, and then locked the door. Locked him in. The train crew heard him yelling about 20 miles down the tracks. They let him out of the cold car. They let him ride in the caboose to the next station.

So, Ernest Lundeen knew the cost of taking an unpopular stance in elected office. That one term he served in Congress back in 1917, it was a political disaster. But he still wanted more. He still had the itch for elected office.

After more than a decade biding his time, building up the support and the war chest he would need to try again, Lundeen made another run for office. And the good people of Minnesota forgave him, apparently. They did return him to the Congress, and then to the United States Senate.

Radio Announcer: Instead of the program originally scheduled for this time, we bring you a talk by Senator Ernest Lundeen.

Maddow: In his first stint in Washington, Lundeen had opposed the U.S. getting involved in World War I. Now as he was sworn in to the Senate in the late 1930s, the U.S. was weighing getting involved in the Second World War. And Ernest Lundeen threw himself headlong into the effort to try to stop that, too.

Senator Ernest Lundeen: Fellow Americans, America prepares to take the last step before entering another World War. I call upon the youth of America to put a stop to these un-American, pro-European doctrines. The people should make known their protest. Write your congressmen and senators, telephone them, wire them, come to Washington to see them. You must do this now. Immediate protest will block the way to militarizing our nation.

Maddow: With the world steaming toward World War as Hitler stormed Europe, picking off country after country, U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen quickly became one of the loudest and most confident voices inveighing against the U.S. joining the fight.

Lundeen: We are being urged on by insane hysteria. Reason? We seem to be bereft of reason.

Maddow: Senator Lundeen knew from experience that his stance against the U.S. joining the war in Europe might be politically unpopular. It might even get him run out of town on a rail again. But he was determined. He pressed his case on the radio, and on the senate floor, and at home with his constituents.

When Senator Lundeen boarded that doomed Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane in August 1940, remember that his final destination was back home in Minnesota, where he was slated to deliver a speech on Labor Day weekend. That speech was also a speech against America getting into the war. But it turns out it wasn't your average Ernest Lundeen stump speech.

Hart: This is a speech that's sort of unlike most that Lundeen gives. He pours months of effort into this speech. I mean, the, the sort of background notes for this go more than a hundred pages.

Maddow: It wasn’t just the length of time it took to prepare the speech that set it apart. This really was a different kind of speech. It was a speech that was full of praise for Germany under Hitler. It's one thing to be not-excited about the U.S. fighting Nazi Germany, this really was something else.

Hart: The archival records suggests that possibly some, if not pro-Hitler, sort of pro-peacemaking with Nazi Germany type content.

Maddow: Lundeen’s speech that he planned to give on Labor Day 1940, it extolled the great contributions of German culture to American life. It stressed, essentially, that we Americans had more in common with them, with Germans, than we had with our allies who Germany at that moment was busy invading and conquering. That's the speech Lundeen was heading home to give on Labor Day weekend, when his flight crashed on its first leg out of Washington.

Now, somehow, miraculously, the physical draft— the hardcopy draft of that speech— survived the plane crash. You can see it in Ernest Lundeen’s archives at Stanford University. There’s a note pinned to the front describing how the pages of the speech were found 100 yards away from the epicenter of the plane crash site.

Hart: When the FBI agents who are sent to the scene recover his body, they find a draft of the speech that he was going to give just a few days later. It's kind of creepy to hold, right, because you realize what that document, you know, went through. It's absolutely an incredible artifact.

Maddow: Beyond the apparent indestructability in that speech surviving a plane crash, beyond its pretty remarkable content, there was something else notable about that speech. The really important thing to know about that speech is who wrote it.

That speech had been ghost-written for Senator Lundeen. Ghost-written by a senior, paid agent of Hitler's government operating in America, a man to whom Senator Lundeen had grown very close.

And Senator Lundeen, of course, he never delivered that speech. The plane crash made sure of that. But the Senator did have reason to be concerned while he was on the plane that day. And, for that matter, while he sat in his office with his head in his hands just before leaving for that flight. The reason for him to be concerned was that there was a good chance the feds were onto him, onto his relationship with that Nazi agent. And Senator Lundeen knew it.

That’s next.

********************************

Maddow: Senator Ernest Lundeen's last two weeks on earth were stressful. As weird and mysterious as his death in an inexplicable plane crash would prove to be, his last two weeks before the crash were fraught with anxiety, even panic. Because two weeks before he got on that plane, he suddenly found himself the apparent subject of a blockbuster newspaper exposé.

Hart: There's a publication called PM, which is a left-wing tabloid, a muckraking left-wing paper in New York city, which happens to do incredible reporting.

Maddow: A newspaper called PM had published an exposé describing a scheme in which sitting members of Congress were helping an agent of Hitler's government distribute German propaganda in quantity all over the United States.

Now the exposé did not mention Senator Lundeen by name, but the newspaper's description of the scheme, it was spot-on when it came to describing the nature of that relationship, the nature of the activities that Lundeen was up to with that German agent.

Between when the article came out and the plane crash, Lundeen's papers show he received a letter from the German agent telling him to not worry about the press being onto them. Telling him the whole thing was, quote, "a witch hunt".

That letter from the German agent he was working with, it apparently did not ease the concerns of Senator Lundeen.

Hart: They're both trying to figure out how much reporters have found out about what's going on. Lundeen very clearly starts sweating about this, this sort of relationship.

Maddow: So, the Senator seems to have been in a near-panic about being exposed in the days leading up to him stepping on board that flight— a flight in which he, quite literally, was carrying a speech that was written for him by a Nazi agent who had just been exposed in the press.

He was in tears leading up to that flight, according to his secretary. He told her he’d gone too far and could not turn back. And the flight that he was about to board also happened to include multiple Justice Department personnel who would be flying alongside him. A flight that none of them would survive.

Radio Reporter: In this country now, in the nation’s capitol at Washington. Senator Ernest Lundeen reported killed today in the crash of a Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane.

Hart: You can imagine how this strikes the country, that this man who had been seen already as an outspoken anti-war figure, allegations already circulating that he might be pro-German, if not pro-Nazi, has suddenly died dramatically.

Maddow: After the crash of “Trip 19,” Senator Ernest Lundeen was given a state funeral in Minnesota. He lay in state at the state capitol. He was buried in a military cemetery. But ten days after his burial, all hell broke loose over the legacy and death of Senator Lundeen because of another newspaper report: September 13th, 1940. And this one most certainly named him.

Dateline Washington. Headline: "G-MEN WERE SHADOWING LATE SENATOR." Here’s the lede:

"If Federal authorities probe deep-enough into the crash of the Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane which carried Senator Lundeen to his death in Virginia, they may find some highly interesting facts regarding Nazi activities in the United States. What most people do not know is that Senator Lundeen was under investigation at the time of his death.”

“A G-Man [meaning an FBI agent], a Department of Justice attorney, and an FBI secretary were on the plane with him, and all were killed.”

“The Department of Justice probably will deny that they were shadowing the Minnesota Senator, but the fact is that at least one of them definitely was."

This was crusading, controversial columnist Drew Pearson.

Hart: Drew Pearson is arguably the most powerful journalist in the country in this era. Drew Pearson plays this incredibly important role in blowing the lid off of this.

Maddow: This was just days after Senator Lundeen was buried and Drew Pearson just drops this bombshell. He says, quote, "Justice Department agents were attempting to find out the extent to which Berlin was definitely hooked up with any members of [Congress] when Lundeen's plane crashed."

"Whether certain foreign agents figured that they were about to be exposed, whether G-men on the plane tangled with Lundeen in flight, or whether it was an act of God-and-the-weather… may never be known."

Young: The question has never been put to rest. Maybe it was just bad weather. But there has been speculation that perhaps the flight was tampered with. Speculation, but no proof. Speculation, but no proof, one way or another.

Maddow: Just as the journalist Drew Pearson predicted, the cause of the crash of “Trip 19” has remained a mystery, indefinitely. We still don't know. There have been relatively recent reports that the FBI's investigation of the crash technically remains an open case. We tried to confirm those reports one way or the other. We couldn’t.

But another thing that Drew Pearson was definitely right about in his reporting was his prediction that the Justice Department was going to deny that Senator Lundeen was under investigation. In fact, they did deny it. In the weeks after the crash, the Attorney General emphatically rejected the suggestion that Lundeen was under active investigation when he died. In a letter sent to the Senator's widow, the Attorney General wrote that law enforcement officials were on that plane with the Senator “by pure coincidence.”

That denial from the Justice Department, as emphatic as it was, it didn’t hold up. Because the Justice Department's own prosecutors would soon reveal, in court, voluminous evidence they had in fact collected about Senator Lundeen. Evidence that Senator Lundeen was involved in a criminal conspiracy, a conspiracy to subvert American democracy on behalf of a hostile foreign power.

Desiderio: When we talk about the DOJ’s response after the crash, in addition to saying those agents were on the plane by coincidence, they also deny that Lundeen was under investigation at all. What do you make of that?

Flannery: Well, they call that consciousness of guilt, when you deny something that's true. So when the Department of Justice says he wasn't under investigation and we know he was, then they're concealing that he was under investigation and it's being asked in the context of a plane crash. And so you have to scratch your head. It means they know something they don't want us to know.

Maddow: In the wake of the “Trip 19” plane crash, the Justice Department said there was “nothing to see here.” No one was under investigation, it was all just a coincidence. But soon, the story of Ernest Lundeen colluding with a hostile foreign power, the involvement of a sitting member of Congress in what would soon be charged in court as a wide-ranging, seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, that story would play out in ways that nobody would expect. And that was in part, because it would not end up being just Senator Ernest Lundeen who was caught up in it.

This is a story about politics at the edge. A violent, ultra-right authoritarian movement, weirdly infatuated with foreign dictatorships. Support for that movement among serving members of Congress who prove willing and able to use their share of American political power to defend the extremists, to protect themselves, to throw off the investigation. Violence against government targets. Plots to overthrow the United States government by force of arms. And a criminal justice system trying, trying, but ill-suited to thwart this kind of danger.

Hart: We have a number of the biggest figures in American politics in this period, they all fall under the spell of this sort of Nazi propaganda operation.

Young: This group of people, if they were anything first, it was their own political success and careers first. If they could advance their career by playing footsy with Nazis, so be it.

Radio Reporter: Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a leader of the America First Committee, has threatened to demand a congressional investigation of the way the Justice Department has been handling the prosecution of Nazi sympathizers.

Radio Announcer: You’re about to hear an address delivered before a meeting of the America First Committee in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Radio Reporter: He thinks reporters and newspapers who have helped to indict the defendants are engaged in a dirty business, and predicted that the day will soon come when they will all regret it.

Father Charles E. Coughlin: Rest assured, we’ll fight you and we’ll win!

Hart: I do think that some of the members of Congress who were involved probably didn’t know how deep they were in it. This is a moment of great political danger, I think, for these men.

O. John Rogge: I was told that I could make public any evidence of Nazi penetration that I might find, and why did he change his mind? Because 24 congressmen are mentioned in this report that I prepared. Now, do you think that’s sufficient basis to keep these facts from the American public?

Maddow: This is a story of treachery, deceit and almost unfathomable actions on the part of people who are elected to defend the constitution, but who instead got themselves implicated in a plot to undermine it. A plot to end it.

Hart: He wants to build an American version of fascism. His followers are, are armed. They are violently committed to this mission.

Steven J. Ross: They don’t call themselves right-wing fanatics. They’re patriots who are saving America.

Maddow: Perhaps most importantly, this is also the story of the Americans— mostly now lost to history— who picked up the slack in this fight, who worked themselves to expose what was going on, to investigate it, to report on it, ultimately to stop it.

And there's a reason to know this history now. Because calculated efforts to undermine democracy, to foment a coup, to spread disinformation across the country, overt actions involving not just a radical band of insurrectionists, but actual serving members of congress working alongside them, that sort of thing is... that's a lot of things. It's terrible. But it is not unprecedented.

We are not the first generation of Americans to have to contend with such a fundamental threat. Lucky for us, the largely forgotten Americans who fought these fights before us, they have stories to tell.

“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio.

The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz, it's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Our Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. Madeleine Haeringer is our Head of Editorial. Archival radio material is from NBC News, via our beloved Library of Congress, with additional sound from CBS News.

A special thanks to John Flannery for providing us with his incredible interviews with the eye-witnesses of the “Trip 19” plane crash.

You can find much more about this series— you can even see the copy of Senator Lundeen's Nazi speech that survived the plane crash— at our website: MSNBC.com/ultra

********************************

Flannery: Mr. Painter's older brother walked into the field and he saw teeth and there was a gold tooth in there and he threw it at the ground and broke out the gold tooth and he kept it. And he didn't just keep it for a day, he kept it the whole rest of his life. He was about 15 at the time. And I asked his surviving younger brother, Mr. Painter, why do you think he did that? And he didn't know. That piece of gold, that became like a talisman, I think for him. He didn't sell it. He didn't ever try to get money for it. He kept it for himself. He hung onto that tooth until his death as a contemplation of the duality between the notion of immortality and the death that was everywhere contradicting it. It’s powerful stuff.

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Episode 2

Oct. 10, 2022, 10:19 AM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 2: The Brooklyn Boys

The most prominent media figure in America calls for the creation of a militia, armed Americans willing to use violence to get their way. What they want is to overthrow the U.S. government and to end democracy in this country – by force. Their plot raised alarming indications that the federal government is not up to the task of dealing with that kind of homegrown threat.

(NBC NEWS RADIO CHIMES)

Rachel Maddow: It started with a photo. A photo of guns on the front page of an old newspaper clipping from the year 1940. That’s where it started. But things really got cooking with the kind of phone call that makes your stomach flip over.

Charles Gallagher: I got a phone call from the declassification unit. It's always a little bit chilling to show up to your apartment and have a voicemail from the FBI on the other end of the line.

Maddow: That’s Charles Gallagher. Back when he was a sophomore in college, years before he got that stomach-flipping call from the FBI, he was struggling with a research paper that was coming due for a class he was taking on national security.

He didn't have a topic for his paper. He couldn’t figure out what he wanted to write about. So he just started flipping through old newspapers, looking for inspiration. And what he found, it just leapt off the page for him.

Gallagher: One of the front pages in January of 1940 was of young men carrying, what seemed to me, to be huge rifles, and it indicated that they tried to overthrow the government of the United States. And when I looked more closely at the headline, it said that they were followers of a Catholic priest from Detroit.

Maddow: A group of armed, American men led by a Catholic Priest with a plot to overthrow the government of the United States, forgotten about and filed away in a stack of old newspapers.

To a young, undergraduate, Charles Gallagher, this sounded serious. I mean, it sounded weird, but it seemed like maybe a serious threat to the country. Until he read past the headline.

Gallagher: And as I kept reading about the case, it seemed that the journalists at the time downplayed it. Particularly magazine journalists, in writing stories about it, seemed to disregard these folks as being, kind of crackpots, was the main term used. Just kind of crazies who really didn't have any real intent towards either lethality, or toward any kind of systematic overthrow of the U.S. government. As one journalist, put it a, a playful plot.

Maddow: A playful plot. Those young men in the photo, accused of trying to violently overthrow the U.S. government, they were all holding these big rifles in that front page newspaper photo. And it was those guns that were what caught Gallagher’s attention in the first place.

Because more-so than your average college sophomore, Charles Gallagher knew what he was looking at in that photo. While he was going to college at the time, he was also a working police officer.

Gallagher: I was being trained on semi-automatic weaponry. I was being trained on the use of single-pump shotgun. I knew what they were holding. Like, I knew that the .30-06 shell is about a three-inch-long bullet, full metal jacket. And one of those bullets can go through a brick wall. These folks were armed for war.

Maddow: Charles Gallagher showed his professor what he’d found. His professor told him that this story was not worth his time.

Gallagher: He thought it wasn't worth writing about because he said nothing happened, no bombs went off. And so, consequently, they had minimal impact on history.

Maddow: Charles Gallagher disagreed with his professor on that. But he moved on. He graduated from college. He left the police department. He got a master’s degree. He eventually got a PhD. These days, Charles Gallagher is a history professor at Boston College.

Charles Gallagher also became Father Charles Gallagher. In his mid-30s, he became a Jesuit priest. But all that time— through his studies, and his career changes, and his travels, and taking the vows of the priesthood— that photo of those men who plotted to overthrow the government, the guys with the rifles in that photo, it just nagged at him.

Gallagher: I always had them in the back of my mind because my big question was what motivates religious people to take up arms. Against kind of, you know, against a lot of dissuasion, I just kind of kept digging.

Maddow: In 2010, Charles Gallagher set out to figure out, once and for all, what those guys with guns on the front pages of the newspaper had been up to, and how big of a threat they really did pose. He decided to request the FBI file on the case.

Now, you’re never exactly sure what to expect when you request an FBI file, but you do expect something. In this case he was told there was nothing.

Gallagher: I was told by the National Archives that the FBI file did not exist. I told them that there was a case that was adjudicated through the spring and summer of 1940 and that it was one of the largest cases. It was on the front pages of all the newspapers on the east and west coast during that period. It was a well known case and there had to be an FBI file. The national archives insisted there was not a file.

Maddow: Those guys with the guns were pictured in the newspaper in January 1940 because something had happened. They had been arrested. They were getting put on trial in federal court. It really had been front-page news across the country. How could there not be an FBI file?

Charles Gallagher wasn’t buying it.

Gallagher: So I got on a website called Reddit. Someone on Reddit had, input a case number from what they said was the case from 1940. And it, frankly, it looked like what an FBI case number ordinarily would look like. So, I copied it down. I went back to Washington, went to the National Archives, and they went through their database with that case number and, miraculously, they actually found it.

Maddow: They found the file. It did exist. And it was at this point in Gallagher’s pursuit to pry-loose that file, that he got the call from the FBI.

Gallagher: So I called them back and then we had to negotiate three times to get the file released because they told me it was the third-largest case file in their inventory.

Maddow: The file was, in fact, just massive. It was more than 2500 pages long. That’s as big as the FBI file on the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. And what was in all those pages, it confirmed Gallagher’s suspicions that those men with guns, they weren't kidding around. This was not a playful plot.

That F-B-I file Charles Gallagher got declassified, it described in vivid, granular detail: the types of military-grade weapons these guys stockpiled, the bombs these guys had made, their detailed planning to mount an armed assault to overthrow the U.S. government, and also, just how close these guys came to pulling it off.

This is Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.

(OPENING TITLES)

Father Charles E. Coughlin: We will fight you shoulder to shoulder and cheek to jowl!

Gallagher: If you look at how they were constructing the bombs and what they were using to construct the bombs, what they were planning was quite lethal in nature.

Coughlin: Rest assured, we’ll fight you! And we’ll win!

Gallagher: I seem to think that we came kind of like a hair’s breadth away from the triggers being pulled and the buttons being pushed on those bombs.

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Maddow: Episode 2: The Brooklyn Boys.

It was 1940 when Senator Ernest Lundeen died in a mysterious plane crash, with two FBI employees and a Justice Department prosecutor on board that plane with him. In the wake of the crash, there were these explosive reports that the senator had been engaged in a scheme with an agent of the Hitler government to distribute Nazi propaganda in the United States, through congress and the U.S. Senate.

A speech written for him by a Nazi agent was found by the FBI along with the senator’s remains in the field where his plane went down outside D.C. The Justice Department would soon reveal in court, that the Nazi propaganda scheme the Senator was involved in was the subject of a big, ongoing, indeed widening, federal criminal investigation.

The Justice Department had a tiger by the tail with that investigation. Powerful elected officials in Washington helping the Hitler government operate inside the United States, targeting the American people with this information, taking money to do it. This was really something.

But the exact nature of the threat, just how dangerous the situation was for the United States, and how well equipped the government was to contend with the threat, that had started coming into sharper focus before Lundeen’s plane crash.

It had started coming into focus for the FBI and the Justice Department over the whole course of the year 1940, in the months leading up to Senator Lundeen’s death. And particularly, thanks to those young men on the cover of that newspaper holding .30-06 rifles.

It was January 1940 when newspapers all across the country ran that photo of those young men with those guns. And as strange as it was that the Ernest Lundeen scandal broke into the open because of a plane crash in Virginia, this one started somewhere even more unexpected.

(CHURCH MUSIC)

Radio Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, once more it is my privilege to present to you Father Charles E. Coughlin from the Shrine of the Little Flower at Royal Oak, Michigan.

Maddow: It’s the late 1930s. And what you’re listening to is the most popular radio show in the entire country– by a mile.

Radio Announcer: The Little Flower choristers with Mr. Cyril Guthrill at the organ before me will sing for you the advent hymn, “Come O Come Emmanuel.” Immediately following, Father Coughlin will come to the microphone.

(CHURCH MUSIC)

Maddow: Father Charles E. Coughlin. A Catholic priest, a radio preacher based out of Royal Oak, Michigan at the Shrine of the Little Flower.

In the late 1930s, Father Coughlin commanded a radio audience as eye-popping today as it was back then. Coughlin had tens of millions of Americans listening to him at the height of his popularity— and this is at a time when there were fewer than 130 million people in the whole country. And he had tens of millions of people in his weekly audience. He had the largest radio audience in the world.

Coughlin: Several years ago, it was customary to say that America was at the crossroads. Today, we’re not at the crossroads! To my mind, we’ve gone beyond that point.

Maddow: Father Coughlin's broadcasts were part theology— they had a church service element to them, with organ music and lots of references to scripture— but the religiosity in his broadcasts was also mixed with politics; with increasingly strident politics.

Coughlin: Show me a man whose policies completely ostracize God from our public institutions and I will show you a person who indirectly is working hand in glove with the Bela Kuns, the Trotskys, the Stalins, and the Lenins.

Maddow: As Coughlin grew in popularity and his views turned more and more hardline over time, he could increasingly be counted on to share with his gigantic radio audience some new bit of information that he had just discovered about the threat to America from, more often than not, Jews.

Gallagher: The grievance claims that he manufactures are gonna be blamed more and more on Jews. He was blasting Jewish bankers, told his audiences that both Marx and Lenin were Jews, and that Jews created communism.

Coughlin: This official paper prints the names of the Jewish bankers who helped to finance the Russian Revolution and Communism. Perhaps these financial overtures were made in innocence. Perhaps not.

Maddow: Today, Father Coughlin sometimes gets referenced like there's a direct throughline from him to modern, ultra-conservative radio and TV personalities in the United States. And there is a way to make that case, sure. But it shouldn't be attempted without really contending with how extreme Father Coughlin was.

Coughlin wrote fan mail to Benito Mussolini. Coughlin reprinted a speech by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels about how Jews are the real aggressors, and Gentiles everywhere are just victims of the evil Jews. Coughlin translated that Goebbels speech from German into English, then published it word-for-word in his newsletter under his own name. Coughlin organized boycotts of Jewish businesses under the slogan "Buy Christian.”

In 1938, just a few days after Kristallnacht, Coughlin got on the radio to assure his American listeners that they shouldn't be too worried about what they might be hearing out of Germany about Jews being persecuted and Jews being murdered. They shouldn’t be too worried about that because Americans, he explained, should understand that the Jews had it coming.

Gallagher: He kind of gave a whole hour-long speech where he talks about kind of the Jews in Germany deserving Kristallnacht. The entire speech is rather ghastly in terms of Father Coughlin coming on the air as a Catholic priest with 30 million listeners, kind of blaming the Jews for their own persecution.

Maddow: Father Coughlin told his followers that democracy was "doomed.” He said "We are at the crossroads. I take the road to fascism."

Father Coughlin spent every Sunday on the radio encouraging his listeners to feel attacked and put-upon by unseen forces; to admire fascism and fascist leaders, to see democracy as a failure, to hate and fear the supposed worldwide menace of the Jews.

But he went beyond just preaching about it. He also told his audience of millions to turn that talk into action.

Coughlin: We will fight you shoulder to shoulder and cheek to jowl! Rest assured, we’ll fight you and we’ll win!

Maddow: By 1938, Father Charles Coughlin— the most listened-to media figure in the whole country— called for the creation of a militia to pursue his aims. He called it “The Christian Front.”

Coughlin: The Christian Front is no longer a dream. It is a reality in America. A reality that grows stronger, more courageous, and more determined under the threat of your ideological invasion! Call it inflammatory, if you will. It is inflammatory! Every group, in every city, in every state must be marshaled. The Christian Front organization is not a debating society, it is an action society!

Maddow: Coughlin told his listeners, “Units of the Christian Front have formed and are forming in New York City and elsewhere.” And it wasn’t just bluster. Father Coughlin's Christian Front militia did soon have chapters in New York City and in cities all across the country.

In Boston, they were particularly strong. The Christian Front was led there by a man named Francis Moran.

Gallagher: Francis Moran is a Boston, Irish Catholic. He and his mother listened to Father Coughlin every Sunday. And in 1936, Father Coughlin came through Boston and Moran met with him. Coughlin commissioned Francis Moran to become his Lieutenant in Boston.

Maddow: Francis Moran was a trained salesman. By all accounts, he was kind of a charismatic guy. He was definitely a fervent, true believer. He quickly got to work organizing Christian Front rallies across the city. Massive ones. Father Coughlin already had a huge radio audience to tap into, particularly in Boston. Thousands of people would turn out for these events.

Gallagher: He was able to get over 10,000 people, at least on two occasions, in the Boston Arena for Christian Front meetings. And these were gala events with kind of high school bands, and giant American flags, and a huge stage presence.

Maddow: One Boston minister who was in the crowd at one of these rallies reported later to the FBI that he was concerned by what he had seen. He was concerned by “the loyalty of the audience” towards Father Coughlin, as well as what he described as “their emotional intensity” toward him.

Gallagher: He is so deeply disturbed by what he sees. He sees high school kids chanting anti-Communist chants. He sees crowds kind of geared up into a frenzy for Father Coughlin. And he writes about a 15-page memorandum to the local FBI office. And he talks about how tonight in Boston Father Coughlin set fire to a city and that no one knows that the fire is burning.

Maddow: That proverbial fire that Father Coughlin had set in the city of Boston, through Francis Moran, it was spreading uncontrolled all across the city. And that’s because Francis Moran was also furthering the mission of Father Coughlin’s Christian Front by bombarding that city with loads and loads of antisemitic propaganda. And it was propaganda with a remarkable pedigree.

Francis Moran, in Boston, as leader of the Christian Front, he’d managed to get his hands on thousands and thousands of copies of propaganda literature that had been produced and paid for by the Hitler government in Berlin.

Gallagher: Through his kind of sales wizardry, he gets all of the members of the Christian Front to basically go out and push Nazi propaganda into the streets of Boston. He's very creative. He starts a raffle system about, you know, if you buy so many books, you can be entered into a raffle and then the winner of the raffle wins more Nazi books.

Maddow: Francis Moran was also at the time meeting regularly with the German consul— with the Hitler government's representative in Boston— and with the Nazi official in charge of paying Germany's agents in the United States. Charles Gallagher's own scholarship unearthed evidence that the Christian Front's finances were bolstered by the Hitler government.

Francis Moran called publicly for the confiscation of Jewish property in the United States. He told Christian Front rallies that President Roosevelt was a secret Jew— he called him “Mr. Rosenfelt” instead of Mr. Roosevelt. He called for FDR to be "removed from office by force and violence." And that wasn’t just Francis Moran freelancing.

Coughlin: Since the time of Christ, Jewish prosecution only followed— only followed!— after Christians were first persecuted.

Maddow: The message of revolution, of the need to overthrow the government by force, that was in keeping with what Coughlin's Christian Front units were being told all over the country, by their leader, on his radio show.

Gallagher: Coughlin insinuates President Roosevelt is Jewish. He now starts to call President Roosevelt a tyrant. That tyrannical language is not just, kind of, metaphor. It's got theological grounding where if, if the leader is deemed tyrannical, then physical activity can be taken to remove the tyrant. And so this is where he takes the concept to the Christian Front, we can take up guns against tyrants.

Maddow: Father Coughlin’s Christian Front militia was a nationwide operation. It was huge in Boston under Francis Moran. It was also booming in cities like Minneapolis, and Philadelphia, and St. Louis. But what ultimately made the Christian Front famous nationwide, is what they did in the city of New York.

Gallagher: There are paramilitarized cells who will now be outfitted with military grade weaponry. They receive special training on how to make pipe bombs. By late 1939, early 1940, the Christian Front decide to overthrow the government of the United States.

Maddow: That’s next.

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Maddow: In the fall of 1939, a dozen cans of cordite— military grade explosives— went missing from the 165th infantry division of the New York National Guard.

A dozen cans of cordite. About 1500 rounds of ammunition, as well. Those explosives and that ammo went missing because the commander of a New York National Guard machine gun company took the stuff and gave it to the Christian Front.

The Christian Front, by then, had started to prioritize the recruitment of new members who had military training. They had decided to escalate their own military training and their own arsenal of weapons.

By then, Father Coughlin's Christian Front militia had decided it was time to move beyond rallies and protests and pickets and beating up Jews in the streets. By then, they had decided it was time for them to move, as an organization, in a big way.

Gallagher: By late 1939, early 1940, the Christian Front decide to overthrow the government of the United States.

Maddow: The Christian Front's plan to overthrow the government— later revealed in federal court— included the simultaneous assassination of a dozen sitting members of Congress, simultaneous bombings of government targets, and sensitive targets designed to cause outrage; panic; violent reprisals; the military being called in, invoking emergency powers. Ultimately, the toppling of the democratic government, replacing it with an authoritarian one, with the Christian Front in the lead. Taking power by violence, holding power by force.

Gallagher: There are a couple of members of the Christian Front who are adept at bomb making and give rather chilling, very disturbing workshops on how to make homemade pipe bombs with powder that they are able to gather from many armories in the U.S. If you look at, at how they were constructing the bombs and what they were using to construct the bombs, what they were planning was quite lethal in nature.

Maddow: In Narrowsburg, New York, on the New York-Pennsylvania border, the Christian Front set up a paramilitary training center.

Gallagher: They're doing stationary target practice, but they're also doing military rushes where they take their weapons and they advance anywhere from 12 to 15 yards at a time, drop down on the ground, fire the weapons from the prone position, then up again, reload, rush about 10 to 15 yards further, drop quickly to the ground, fire it to prone position, and then kind of repeat after that.

Maddow: Charles Gallagher's scholarship on the Christian Front also turned up evidence that around the same time the group managed to get access to U.S. military-issue machine guns. The rifles that the Christian Front guys held in that picture that made the front page of all the newspapers, that was one thing. Them having stolen, U.S. military, heavy machine guns, that was just a whole different level of threat.

Gallagher: What seems to have taken place, from the declassified FBI file, is that in the fall of 1939, Browning Automatic Rifles were stolen from an armory in Waltham, Massachusetts. The Browning Automatic Rifle was one of the most lethal weapons of World War II. It shot .30-06 rounds at 20 rounds on full auto and was, could actually blast through a building. It was a large weapon, but it could be carried by a, by a strong soldier. You could rapid fire walk it and it would just mainly just obliterate anything in its, in its path. It was one of the most lethal weapons on the battlefield. The civilian police had no counter weapon to a BAR.

Maddow: Weapons like that, stolen from the U-S military, to be used by an armed group plotting a attack on the U.S. government, the same group manufacturing bombs in quantity, stockpiling them.

The FBI had been watching what the Christian Front was doing. Watching. Collecting evidence. They finally decided the threat was too great. The planned attack, they believed, was imminent. The FBI believed the Christian Front was due to launch their attack on the US government on January 20th. One week ahead of that planned attack on January 13th, the FBI moved.

Gallagher: I seem to think that, that we came kind of, like, a hair's breadth away from the triggers being pulled and the buttons being pushed on those bombs. The FBI decides to move on the Christian Front before they can, before they can explode their bombs. That's what they were worried about.

Maddow: In January 1940, it really was front page news all across the country when the head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, personally announced this round-up, the mass arrest of the Christian Front in New York.

Radio Announcer: In New York, the alleged ringleaders of a fantastic Christian Front plot to overthrow the United States government by force are now behind federal bars. J. Edgar Hoover charges that they had plotted widespread terroristic activities, bombings, and antisemitic outbursts.

Maddow: Seventeen members of the Christian Front in New York were arrested. The majority of those arrested were either actively serving in the New York National Guard or they’d served in other branches of the military. All of them were charged with sedition, with a plot to overthrow the U.S. government by force.

This is from some of the newspaper coverage from that day:

"A plot to overthrow the United States government with bombs and other arms— some looted from the arsenals of the Army itself— was charged tonight against [individuals] who were arrested and accused of conspiracy to create a revolution.

"The plot, [Hoover] said, was aimed against Jews generally and involved seizure of key government agencies such as Federal Reserve banks, post offices, and Public Utilities.”

Hoover said, quote, "The government they proposed setting up, they referred to as a 'dictatorship similar to Hitler's."

Father Coughlin had created the Christian Front. He had recruited, deputized, personally met with the leaders of Christian Front groups in big cities including the leader of the New York chapter, who was among those arrested, a man named John Cassidy.

But in the immediate aftermath of the arrests, Father Coughlin claimed that he had no idea who these people were. Never heard of 'em. He literally tried to argue that they might be a Christian Front, but they were not his Christian Front.

As their fearless leader backpedaled and played dumb, the defendants themselves were entirely unrepentant about their actions. They mounted a defense in court that said they weren't plotting against the country, they were the most patriotic Americans imaginable. They weren’t out to destroy the United States, they were out to save it.

Gallagher: They devise this scenario to indicate to the court that the Christian Front is nothing more than a group of patriotic, young American boys who are anti-communist in nature and truly American. They feel that they are doing the country a favor of purging the U.S. government from these bad actors.

Maddow: The trial of the Christian Front defendants began in the spring of 1940. The prosecution was led by the U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, which is where the case was being tried. But the Justice Department also brought in for the trial the head of the criminal division from Main Justice in Washington D.C. His presence on the Brooklyn prosecution team indicated just how important this case was to the federal government, how big a priority this was.

And they did have a blockbuster pile of evidence. The FBI had put an informant inside the Christian Front. They had these stockpiles of weapons that they had seized from these guys during the arrests. They had information about the group's specific plans, all the military training they’d been undergoing to prepare for it. But when the case finally went to trial, things fell apart. And pretty quickly.

Prosecutors were blamed for not appreciating— not factoring in to their jury presentation— just how favorably the Christian Front was viewed in the community where the trial was held. The local press affectionately nicknamed them “The Brooklyn Boys.” The local Catholic Church supported them loudly. Nobody who was Jewish was allowed to sit on the jury. There was a local Catholic priest who was advising the Christian Front, who had been leading rallies to support them, who was close to Coughlin. His first cousin was picked as the foreman of the jury.

Gallagher: The Christian Front had its own fan clubs that would gather both inside and outside the court. There would be cheering during the trial when points were made in favor of the Christian Front.

Maddow: The local environment of enthusiastic support for the defendants, that was not the only challenge to prosecutors in trying to convince the jury that these defendants were bad guys. The other challenge was just the extreme nature of what they were accused of. The plot that prosecutors laid out was increasingly seen by the public— and presumably the jury— as just too much, too much to believe. These guys in Brooklyn were really going to kill all these members of Congress, and blow up all these buildings, and start some kind of revolution? Were they really capable of violence on that scale?

In June 1940, after nearly three months at trial, most of the Christian Front defendants were acquitted. And then the rest were let-off in a mistrial. All of them got off. The government failed on every count.

Gallagher: There was much jubilation and cheering when the acquittal was announced. And as the courtroom was cheering the acquittal of the boys from Brooklyn, John F. Cassidy rushed up to the judge and asked for his guns back, which the judge immediately had to give him, in line with the Second Amendment. And Cassidy and others walked out of the courthouse to the awaiting cheers.

Maddow: The New York Times reported at the time that 2,000 people turned out in Brooklyn for a rally to celebrate the Christian Front defendants after the prosecution fell apart. It was as much a humiliation for the government as it was a cause for celebration for the defendants.

In the wake of that failed trial, supporters of the Brooklyn Boys demanded to the Attorney General that FBI and Justice Department personnel themselves should be investigated for why the group had been indicted in the first place.

Father Coughlin, who had initially tried to distance himself from the Christian Front when they were charged, he proclaimed himself vindicated and victorious. He said the whole prosecution was all ginned up just to try and make him look bad. He said, in his words, that it was “a hoax.”

It was a lot of things. It was not a hoax.

The Christian Front in New York really did make bombs and stockpiled a huge amount of weaponry, including military-issue guns and explosives. And they did train for and plan for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government, the installation of the kind of fascist dictatorship that Father Coughlin so admired overseas.

The good news is that the arrests of the New York Christian Fronters in 1940, that may have stopped them from going ahead with their attack plan. But the prosecution itself really was an abject failure. After the Christian Fronter defendants all walked, the federal government, in the wake of that trial, they were facing this brand new reality:

The threat of actual violence from ultra-right groups, some getting support from the Hitler government abroad, the rise of an anti-democratic, violent movement on the right, here, that was well-organized, well-supported, well-armed. It was a real thing. And it wasn’t just coming from this group of guys in Brooklyn, the ex-salesman in Boston, the radio priest in Detroit. What the U.S. government knew by then was that the Hitler government in Berlin was also running some kind of significant operation from the very center of American democracy itself.

Radio Announcer: Senator Ernest Lundeen reported killed today in the crash of a Pennsylvania Central Airlines plane.

Maddow: It was just a few weeks after that failed prosecution of the Christian Front that Minnesota Senator Ernest Lundeen died in that mysterious plane crash.

So at that point, the government had just failed to put a group of guys behind bars, who were plotting to violently overthrow our democratic system. Immediately in the wake of that failed trial are the now-public revelations that a serving U.S. Senator was also tied-up with the Hitler government in a different plot to undermine our democracy.

How many plots like this were out there? And were they connected?

By the time the government— the Justice Department— had started asking those crucial questions, it was too late.

Radio Announcer: At least nine powder houses blew up this afternoon. The rapid series of explosions started fires which are still burning, but no one yet knows how many victims there are.

Maddow: Real violence. Real attacks. And a federal government that cannot figure out what to do about it. Not yet.

That’s next time.

“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio.

The series is executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz, and it's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Our Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. Madeleine Haeringer is our Head of Editorial. Archival radio material is from NBC News, via the estimable Library of Congress, with additional sound from CBS News.

Special thanks to Father Charles Gallagher. You should read his book. It's incredible. It's called “Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front.”

You can find much more about this series— you can even see the photo of the guys with guns that so freaked out college sophomore Charles Gallagher— at our website: MSNBC.com/ultra

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Gallagher: In fact, I gotta say it, it really hit me when I, I went to a Catholic retreat at a retreat house in Manhasset, Long Island, just after, 9/11. And I was driving back in a taxi to get to the train station and the taxi driver and I looked out and saw the skyline of New York and, and the two twin towers were, were missing. And he started making derogatory comments about religion being kind of the effective kind of motivator for terrorism that allowed those, those buildings to be, to be attacked. And I, I got kind of angry sitting in the back of that taxi and I blurted out, I said, “You're wrong. Did you know that the first military or the first religiously motivated terrorist attack in the United States was put forward by Christians who armed themselves in 1940 to overthrow the government of the United States and created bombs and trying to, try to, foment a, a revolution, in the United States?” I was a little agitated.

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Episode 3

Oct. 17, 2022, 10:21 AM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 3: The Day

A devastating explosion rips through a munitions plant in a small New Jersey town. And the American public is left with the chilling fact that the federal government had been warned about such an attack almost a year prior. The tip had come from a private spy ring operating in Los Angeles that was intent on doing what law enforcement had largely failed to do. Infiltrate far-right groups plotting violence across the country, and foil their plots before it was too late.

Rachel Maddow: About an hour west of New York City is a town in New Jersey called Kenvil. Small town. Small population. But in 1940, Kenvil was home to one major employer: one huge industrial plant. It was sited on a parcel of land that was bigger than 900 football fields.

Given its huge size, that industrial plant had a fitting name. It was called Hercules. The Hercules Powder Plant. That plant started off making dynamite for the mining industry, but by 1940, it was making gunpowder for the U.S. Army.

Now in 1940, the U.S. of course had not yet joined World War II. The Pearl Harbor attack that would bring us into the war, that wouldn't happen until the end of the following year, 1941. But in the summer of 1940, the U.S. was bracing – and the government was preparing – for what might be coming. By that summer in 1940, Germany was conquering all of Europe. Just that summer, France had fallen to Germany. Britain was facing very long odds of survival as the German Air Force just pounded them in the Battle of Britain.

The U.S. government ordered American munitions factories into overdrive to start churning out the kind of material the U.S. would need if and when we joined the fight. And that mobilization included the oldest continuously operating dynamite plant in the whole country, that huge Hercules Powder Plant in Kenvil, New Jersey, now repurposed to supply the U.S. military, and running full tilt to do it.

Until one cool Thursday afternoon in September 1940, when it all blew up.

Radio Announcer: One of the worst munitions disasters in American history tore the heart out of the great Hercules Powder Company’s plant. Fires and explosions raked the area all afternoon and night, leaving an estimated 50 dead, 200 injured, and more than two million dollars in property damage.

Maddow: At 1:30 PM on September 12th, 1940, two separate explosions, one after the other, ripped through the Hercules powder plant. 25 tons of smokeless gun powder – tons – erupted in a fireball. The blast punched a hole in the earth 13-feet deep. The ground shook 90 miles away. Every single pane of glass was broken in several nearby towns. Cars passing by were thrown off the road. A woman on her afternoon commute said the bus that she was riding in got tossed a full foot off the ground.

Radio Announcer: The rapid series of explosions started fires which are still burning. Firemen have been ordered back because of the danger of more explosions. The flames are not far from vaults containing stores of nitroglycerin.

Maddow: Roughly 400 people were working at the Hercules Powder Plant the day it exploded.

The blast went off right at a shift change, which maximized the number of potential casualties. After the explosion, the factory's onsite physician said the majority of the plant had been leveled. He told the New York Times, "When I say leveled, I mean literally, not figuratively."

Radio Announcer: At least nine powder houses blew up this afternoon. The President has ordered the United States Army and Red Cross to provide relief for the victims, but no one yet knows how many victims there are.

Maddow: It was 52 people who were killed, ultimately, in the Hercules Powder Plant explosion. 52 dead. Hundreds more people were injured. More than half of the plant’s entire workforce was either injured or killed. So many people were hurt they had to be laid out on the lawn in front of the local hospital.

It was one of the worst disasters of its kind in the history of the United States.

Radio Announcer: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has sent investigators to the scene of today’s explosions in the Kenvil, New Jersey plant of the Hercules Powder Company.

Maddow: An investigation started immediately into what had set off the explosions at the Hercules plant. Nothing anywhere near this bad had ever happened before at Hercules. There were no unusual conditions that day, there was no extreme heat, there were no known problems. The day after the explosion, the New York Times reported on a murmur among the investigators at the site; a murmur of the possibility of sabotage.

Radio Announcer: The cause is under investigation. Sabotage is suspected.

Maddow: “Sabotage is suspected.” But in the absence of clear, physical proof that the blast definitely had been deliberately caused, the FBI downplayed the possibility of foul play. They said as far as they could tell, it was probably just an accident. And that did remain a credible working theory, until two months later – to the day – when it happened again.

Radio Announcer: It was one of three factory explosions in widely-separated places, all happening in the space of an hour. Too much of a coincidence not to be sabotage, they think. So do I.

Maddow: Two months exactly after the explosion of the Hercules Powder Plant in Kenvil, New Jersey, three other plants – plants that made torpedoes and signal flares and other munitions – they all exploded, too; three of them within 20 minutes of each other. One of those plants, like the Hercules plant, was in New Jersey. The two others were in Pennsylvania. Altogether, 16 Americans were killed in that next round of explosions; dozens more people were wounded.

After the Hercules disaster two months earlier, these three further explosions in three separate factories all at the exact same time, it just seemed impossible that these could all be accidents.

But the FBI agents dispatched to investigate these three newly exploded plants, they didn't need to interview eyewitnesses or sift through the rubble as their only means of trying to find out what happened. Because it turns out, the U.S. government already knew about a plot to turn American munitions plants into ash and rubble. They'd been warned who was gonna do it before any of those plants blew up. And we know now who tipped them off in an effort to save the country from those who sought to destroy it.

This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”

(OPENING TITLES)

Steven Ross: They talk about Der Tag all the time, “The Day,” meaning the day that they’re going to blow up and take over America.

Bradley Hart: He wants to build an American version of fascism. His followers are armed. They are violently committed to this mission.

Ross: We’re gonna hang them and while they are dangling on the rope, we’re going to shoot them full of lead.

Hart: He actually says outright: I intend to overthrow the U.S. government

Ross: They don’t call themselves right-wing fanatics. They’re patriots who are saving America.

********************************

Maddow: Episode 3: The Day.

Leon Lewis is a 40-something Jewish lawyer living in Los Angeles in the 1930s. He's a veteran of World War I. He's an activist with the Anti-Defamation League. And Leon Lewis is unnerved by what he sees happening around him in LA. Here's historian Steven Ross.

Ross: The Nazis in Los Angeles hold their first open meeting just outside of downtown LA. And they get a large crowd coming out there and the crowd listens to their minister of propaganda lecturing on the new Germany and the wonderful things that Hitler is doing. How Germany would rise again because Hitle would save it. And that, they announced the Friends of New Germany would save America by defeating the country's two greatest enemies: Jews and communists. And at the end of the meeting, they asked for people to join. And the next day, the front page of the LA papers had five Brownshirts in Nazi uniforms giving the Hitler salute. A man named Leon Lewis reads this article and he says, “Oh my God, I know what they're doing.”

Maddow: It was Steven Ross who got access to Leon Lewis's files and who unearthed Leon Lewis's heroic, strange, personal role in this part of the story.

Ross: Leon Lewis thought, “The hell with it.” He was watching all this on the sidelines, but once Nazis held their first open meeting, he realized somebody had to do something and it would be him, because nobody in power cares.

Maddow: During the lead up to America's involvement in World War II, Southern California offered more opportunities than you might think to celebrate days like Hitler's birthday, if you were so inclined.

A German-American group operated a private park in La Crescenta, California. They called it Hindenburg Park. They had Hitler Youth summer camp there. And in fact, they had two thousand people show up for a Hitler's birthday party with pro-Nazi speakers and swastika banners and marching paramilitary groups.

German-American groups also operated a property, a German House, in downtown LA, complete with an onsite gift shop, which was called the Aryan Bookstore. The Aryan Bookstore sold Nazi books and pamphlets. They screened German propaganda movies. They were organizing right out in the open.

And when Leon Lewis realized that local law enforcement didn't seem to much care, he decided he would take it upon himself to figure out what exactly these groups were up to, what they intended, and what they were capable of.

Ross: He was a member of both the disabled American veterans and a member of the American Legion. He recruited four men who are all members of the Disabled American Veterans and, in two instances their wives, and he asked them all to go undercover to join every Nazi and fascist group in LA, to rise to positions of leadership, to send him daily reports so they could trace their activities.

Maddow: Leon Lewis's network of undercover agents managed to embed themselves inside German-American groups with ties to the Hitler government and also native-born, American fascist groups that they were working with.

It was one of Lewis's agents who told the government – who told Congress in public testimony – that the Hercules Powder Company was going to be a target for sabotage. A controversial House committee was investigating mostly communist, but also fascist organizing inside the United States. And in October 1939, that committee heard testimony from one of Leon Lewis's agents, a man named Neil Ness. Ness told the committee that he had firsthand knowledge these groups that he had joined, that he had been part of, were planning a series of attacks here at home.

Ross: Ness testifies in 1939 saying, Look, these Nazis are dangerous, and they are violent, and they are going to start– they talk about Der Tag all the time, “The Day,” meaning the day that they’re going to blow up and takeover America. And he uncovers a series of plots. Amongst them are Nazis are planning to blow up military and defense installations. He says, “You know, we talked about blowing up the Hercules Powder Plant.”

Maddow: “We talked about blowing up the Hercules Powder Plant.” This was eye-popping testimony, but almost too much so. The committee – and the press – they just didn't know what to make of it. It was shocking, obviously, and really specific. But it also just seemed really far-fetched. Until 11 months after that testimony, when it happened.

Radio Announcer: One of the worst munitions disasters in American history…

Maddow: After the Hercules Powder Company explosion in 1940, the chair of the congressional committee that had received the warning about it, he told reporters, “Everyone laughed when a man named Ness testified before our committee a year ago about plans to blow up the Hercules Company. When the plant blew up, it happened the way he said it would.”

That chairman also told reporters that a full record of Ness’s testimony had been turned over to the FBI at the time Ness gave his warning. Which means the FBI got a copy of his testimony, they got his warning, almost a year before the explosion. And yet…

Radio Announcer: The rapid series of explosions started fires, which are still burning…

Maddow: The Hercules Powder Plant was blown up anyway. Neil Ness had not given his testimony in secret, behind closed doors. It was public testimony. It was sensational enough that it got covered in the press when it happened. It was sensational enough, and also worrying and specific enough, that the congressional committee that heard the testimony handed it over to the FBI for them to investigate right away. But law enforcement apparently didn't act on that warning, not until it was way too late.

If you step back a second, it's worth noting that this is all taking place over a period of less than three months in 1940. Between late June and mid-September 1940, we've got a hugely high-profile federal sedition prosecution against a heavily armed, ultra-right group with machine guns and bombs plotting a violent attack against the U.S. government. That prosecution of the Christian Front fails, they all get off. They literally get their guns back and pronounce themselves vindicated.

Then, another federal criminal investigation into a sprawling plot to spread Nazi propaganda in the U.S. using members of Congress and U.S. senators, some of whom are being paid off to do it. A U.S. senator at the center of the investigation and three members of the FBI and the Justice Department, all dead in a mysterious plane crash before the case can come to trial.

And then the munitions plants start blowing up. A private spy operation on the west coast had warned in advance that it would happen. A private spy operation, convened only because the authorities – law enforcement – didn't seem to care.

All of this in the space of less than three months. Something had to change. If something was gonna change, Leon Lewis's private spies were turning up plenty of places for that change to start.

Agents working for Lewis had infiltrated one group that was planning to snowstorm a Jewish community event in San Diego. A snowstorm was where these groups would drop threatening leaflets from tall buildings, so the papers would flutter down onto the street.

You'd find these antisemitic, “blame the Jews, kill the Jews,” flyers fluttering in the air and then littering the ground, and it would seem like they came from nowhere. By the time these things hit the ground, the people who'd thrown them off tall buildings would make sure they were out of sight.

Lewis's agents tipped off the police so this time the perpetrators could be caught. And in arresting them, the police found that one of the guys – a convicted felon – had a big studded club on him, a foot and a half long bludgeon that he bragged was specially designed for killing Jews.

As a felon in possession of a dangerous weapon, police were able to hold that guy overnight. They also were able to search his car.

Leon Lewis's agents had told the police they needed to search that guy's car. Because in the car police would find a briefcase, and in the briefcase they would find some very important information.

Ross: In the briefcase, they find this plan for an elaborate overthrow of the American government.

Maddow: The briefcase contained detailed information about German agents operating inside the United States, contacts in the German government for those U.S. agents, and yes, detailed plans for a coup against the US government. It was supposed to take place just after the 1940 presidential election.

This group expected that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would win re-election comfortably in 1940, but they knew that critics of Roosevelt on the right would be angry and dissatisfied with that result. So right after the election, they planned to channel that dissatisfaction into violent action. It would be led by armed cells of 13 men each that they had set up all over the country.

Ross: They’re going to divide the country into a whole series of cells, and each cell will have 13 members. In those days, you could buy either a pistol or a rifle from the National Rifle Association through the mail. You could order weapons through the mail, get them delivered to you, and so they were urging their members to get fully armed through the NRA and wait for the signal for Der Tag.

Maddow: One of the guys who was set to give the signal, one of the coordinators of the plan, was a well-connected, white nationalist leader from West Virginia, whose name was George Deatherage.

Ross: I love the name Deatherage. What better name for a killer than Deatherage?

Maddow: George Deatherage was a longtime Klansman. He was a trained engineer. He had lived all over the world. He spoke multiple languages. And he had the stated goal of uniting all the various fascist groups across the United States.

In 1938, the Nazi government had invited Deatherage from the United States to Germany to attend something they called the World Conference of Anti-Semites. At that conference, in front of an audience of Nazi leaders, Deatherage called America the greatest Jew ridden country on earth. He called for international help to overthrow the U.S. government and impose Hitler-style Nazism in the United States.

Deatherage’s plan to kick it off in 1940 was for these 13-man armed cells to quietly procure the necessary weapons. And then after the election, the cells would then be instructed to strike all over the country, all at once. It would be a burst of armed, targeted violence, widespread and simultaneous, shocking the country. It would throw the U.S. into internal chaos, and then these guys would take advantage of the chaos to seize power, to overturn the presidential election results by force and install their own leader.

The details of these cells, names of leaders and subleaders, their geographic distribution, their specific plans, here it all was in black and white, in that briefcase, in that car, which Leon Lewis's agents had all but hand-delivered to the police.

Ross: This was not just a fantasy. These cells are actively meeting.

Maddow: And like the plot to blow up the Hercules Powder Company, this was not information the government had turned up on its own. This was stuff that had been turned up because of Leon Lewis and his little band of undercover activists operating in Southern California.

Leon Lewis and his network of agents, they kept infiltrating these groups. They kept uncovering these hair-raising plans for violence from German-American pro-Nazi groups planning sabotage to Nazi acolytes like George Deatherage, and ultimately to one guy who just flat out said he wanted to be known as America's Adolf Hitler.

Hart: He actually says outright, “I intend to overthrow the U.S. government.” He's open about these objectives, and his supporters are armed and ready.

Ross: He’s got an elaborate blueprint of where all the ammunition is kept, where all the heavy weaponry are kept, where the officers quarters are.

Hart: This is a group that, that I think is a very serious national security threat.

Maddow: That's next.

********************************

William Dudley Pelley: We are talking about both a cultural and economic state where the high ethical principles and precepts of the Christ are established politically.

Maddow: That man speaking there is named William Dudley Pelley.

Hart: William Dudley Pelley is really a fascinating figure.

Maddow: This is historian Bradley Hart.

Hart: Pelley really deserves the distinction of being called the first native fascist. He wants to build an American version of fascism.

Maddow: William Dudley Pelley founded a fascist group in the United States called the Silver Shirts. They were modeled after Hitler's Brownshirts in Germany. Here again is historian Steven Ross.

Ross: The day after Hitler came to office, William Dudley Pelley – who had been a Hollywood screenwriter and a very successful one, had won an O. Henry Award for short stories, was writing major films, making a good deal of money, but left because he hated the Jews he had to work with. And the day after Hitler came to power he said, “If a painter can become Reich Chancellor of Germany, I can start the Silver Shirts in America.” Hitler has the Brownshirts, Mussolini has the Blackshirts, and now America will have the Silver Shirts.

Maddow: The Silver Shirts ultimately had thousands of members across the country all declaring their allegiance to William Pelley, all united in his stated aim of installing Nazi-style fascism in the United States.

Hart: Pelley’s people were ready to rise up and fight on behalf of the Nazis domestically.

Maddow: William Pelley believed Hitler's path in Germany – Hitler's rise to power there – could absolutely be replicated here in America. He told his followers he was proud to be called America's Adolf Hitler, and said publicly that when the Silver Shirts succeeded in their aims and the U.S. government was toppled, he would be the new leader, and he said he would treat Jews here the way Hitler treated Jews in Germany.

Hart: Pelley goes around bragging to people about the fact that these are his plans. He plans to take over the United States on a pretty quick timeline. He actually says outright, “I intend to overthrow the U.S. government.” He's open about these objectives and his supporters are armed and ready.

Maddow: The membership of the Silver Shirts by all accounts was fairly middle class. It was made up of businessmen, teachers, lawyers. All with guns.

Hart: Pelley tells his recruits to literally prepare for racial warfare and they are required under Pelley's statutes to stockpile ammunition and have weapons at home in preparation for this. He tells his followers, you know, the racial war is coming soon. We've gotta be ready for it. They are violently committed to this mission.

Maddow: William Pelley outfitted his Silver Shirts in matching uniforms: blue pants, standard issue matching ties, and indeed a silverish shirt with a giant red “L” across the chest, which supposedly stood for Legion, as in Silver Legion. When you look at it now, it sort of has more of a Laverne from Laverne and Shirley vibe with the big “L.” That is definitely not how they meant it.

Hart: What makes the Legion so dangerous is simply the amount of weaponry that they acquire in some ways. You know, there are accounts of, of Silver Legion members having tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition stashed in their homes. They're a numerically small group, but they're incredibly heavily armed. And so from the government's perspective, I mean, a, a small group of people who have experience and the weaponry, launching a strategic strike could do a great deal of damage to the government.

Pelley himself always wore a gun. He traveled with a platoon of 40 conspicuously armed Silver Shirt bodyguards.

Hart: Pelley sort of puts on this traveling road show throughout the late 1930s, where he and, and a bunch of armed supporters show up into small towns and hold a rally. And, in fact, they're so heavily armed on various occasions, they sort of invite the local sheriff or invite the police to try to do something about it and no one is willing to risk the shootout with these guys.

Maddow: The headquarters for Pelley's organization was in North Carolina, but the group maintained a heavy presence in California.

That's where Leon Lewis's group of private undercover agents was doing the painstaking, dangerous work of infiltrating groups like this and uncovering their activities, the plot to blow up munitions factories like the Hercules Powder Plant, the plans for violence by Klan-adjacent fascist leaders like George Deatherage.

What historian Steven Ross discovered as he went through Leon Lewis's notes and files is that Lewis' agents had also uncovered a series of violent plots that the Silver Shirts were involved in, including one plot to target and kidnap and kill a group of 20 prominent Jews across Los Angeles.

Ross: On the appointed day, we are going to kidnap 20 of Los Angeles’s leading Jews and we are going to bring them out to an isolated park, and we’re going to hang them. And while they are dangling on the rope, we’re going to shoot them full of lead. And the hope is they shoot them full of enough bullets that they sever the trunk. And that once this is done, they will call the local newspapers and tip them off and say, come to such-and-such a park, you’re going to find something, and bring photographers. To have the picture of the Jews hanging in – 20 of the most powerful Jews in America – he was convinced this would set off the war against the Jews.

Maddow: Silver Shirts plots like this, as insane as they sound, these guys weren't just daydreaming. They were working toward this.

Leon Lewis' undercover agents were inside the group. They were also in contact with one operative who’d penetrated a National Guard unit in San Francisco, and he had started detailed preparations for the Silver Shirts mounting an armed takeover of three different U.S. military armories on the west coast.

Ross: He’s got an elaborate blueprint of where all the ammunition is kept, where all the heavy weaponry are kept, where the officers quarters are, and where the enlisted men’s quarters are. And he then goes down to San Diego and does the same thing working with Nazis and Silver Shirts in San Diego who are out in the desert training.

And on the appointed day, they were going to burst into the armories in all three cities at the same day at the same hour with guns drawn, and they will round up all the officers and the enlisted men and offer them the following choice: Do you want to save America by helping us defeat the Jewish-Communist threat to our nation? Everyone who said yes would be welcomed into their new army. And everyone who said no would be murdered on the spot.

These people all saw themselves as patriots. They don’t call themselves right-wing fanatics. They’re patriots who are saving America from the Communist-Jewish threat.

Maddow: The “Communist-Jewish threat” that controlled Washington, the communist-Jewish threat that controlled the highest levels of the government, where surely President Roosevelt was a secret Jew.

This was the same nonsense, this was the same message that Father Coughlin was using to radicalize his Christian Front units in places like New York and Boston. It was the same message that the radical German-American groups were preaching while they were planning sabotage attacks against U.S. defense targets. And here was William Pelley and his Silver Shirts, same message, same justification for mass violence.

Leon Lewis's agents were not just gathering this intelligence for their own benefit. They gathered it so Lewis could pass it along to law enforcement, to federal government agencies, to anybody who had the power and the authority to intervene.

Ross: When Leon Lewis did this, he did it as an attorney, not as a spymaster And his plan was he would gather enough information – admissible information – that he could then go to the police or sheriff, turn it over, and let them run the operation. Because after all, that is what they do. They’re in law enforcement.

Maddow: But when Leon Lewis did take these threats that he had discovered to law enforcement, when he brought them the evidence, when he went personally to the Chief of Police in Los Angeles, it was quickly made clear to him that he was alone on this.

Ross: In a memo that I read – and when I opened the box, it was almost like I could feel the heat of the memo coming out 80 years later – Leon Lewis says, I’m writing this memo just after leaving the Chief’s office. I introduced myself, I told them my background in the service, that I had also done some intelligence work and that here’s what my spies uncovered. And before I could proceed, two minutes into it, he stops me and he says, “You don’t get it. Hitler’s only trying to save Germany from the Jewish problem. And that the real threat in LA is not from the Nazis and fascists, but it’s from all those Communists in Boyle Heights”, which was the Jewish neighborhood. And basically says to him, “I know every Jew’s is a Commie, and every Commie’s a Jew.” And he throws him out of his office, says, “There’s nothing I can do for you.”

So he goes to the sheriff and he presents the same evidence to the sheriff, but it turns out the sheriff happens to be very good friends with the Nazi consul in LA. And the sheriff throws him out. Says you know, again, sheriff, same thing. It's, it's those Jewish Commies who are the threat, not the good German fascists.

Maddow: Leon Lewis and his agents had reason to believe that not only was local law enforcement uninterested in pursuing groups like the Silver Shirts, they were getting information that some LAPD officers were active members of the Silver Shirts, to the point where officers had been seen around town, in uniform, handing out Silver Shirts literature while they were on duty as cops.

Given that, Leon Lewis figured he needed to cast a wider net, beyond just local law enforcement.

Ross: No one really believes Leon Lewis, but he is sending information constantly to the FBI, to Army military intelligence, and to Naval intelligence. Well, the only group that is listening to him is naval intelligence.

Maddow: After getting a tip from Leon Lewis, U.S. Naval intelligence agents did go out and arrest two Marine corporals who were stationed in San Diego. Those Marines had been illegally trafficking government firearms – military guns – to Silver Shirts in San Diego. It was Naval intelligence of all places that finally took some action. But at least it was action.

Leon Lewis hadn't been able to get any traction with local law enforcement. He couldn't get interest or significant action from federal agencies like the FBI, who really were seemingly more concerned about communist threats than any threats from the ultra-right. When his agents like Neil Ness took evidence of actual detailed plots to the government, even to the Congress, like his warning in advance of the plot to target the Hercules Powder Company, they were laughed off. They were ignored.

So, Leon Lewis just did what he could. He infiltrated these groups and tried to foil the plots from the inside. He sowed discord and distrust among members of these groups. He made them paranoid about spies in their midst. He even orchestrated lawsuits against individuals and organizations involved in these plots in an effort to bankrupt them, or at least to bog them down and distract them from their planning. It was a catch-as-catch-can strategy to beat back these threats however he could with whatever resources he could cobble together. And that was basically the measure of the fight.

Until finally. That unseasonably cool Thursday in September 1940, when things actually started blowing up.

Radio Announcer: The rapid series of explosions started fires, which are still burning. Firemen have been ordered back because of the danger of more explosions.

Maddow: That explosion at the Hercules Powder Plant in September 1940 was an alarm bell for the federal government to catch up, wake up to the threat of violence, sabotage, sedition from the ultra-right. An undercover agent who had infiltrated pro-Nazi groups told them in advance that that would happen. Why hadn't they believed it? Why hadn't they investigated? Why hadn't they acted?

There was the paramilitary Christian front, armed to the teeth with stolen U.S. military weapons and explosives, planning a government coup with backing from the Hitler government. The government's botched prosecution of the Christian Front in 1940 meant that those guys had gotten away.

Then, the mysterious 1940 plane crash that killed a U.S. Senator and three members of the FBI and the Justice Department, followed soon by the first public newspaper reports that that sitting senator who died in the crash had been working to spread Nazi propaganda all over the country.

By the end of 1940, the government decided finally, maybe it was time to put somebody in charge of working on this, somebody to do kind of a top down assessment, somebody to marshal the weight of the Justice Department and the FBI to try to confront the threat from the ultra-right.

Over the course of that man's investigation, not only would he find that these extremists had planted deep roots in this country, but he'd find that they had support from people in surprisingly high places, from people with a surprising amount of political power. By the end of it, more than a few sitting members of Congress would find themselves exposed for their support, for their involvement, not only with a foreign government that was an enemy of the United States, but also with violent insurrectionists at home, who really were bent on bringing down the whole U.S. government by force.

Young: Republicans are just feeling very defeated as if there’s nothing that they can do. And I think that for some, playing footsie with fascists was a good idea, they thought.

Hart: I do think that some of the members of Congress who were involved probably didn't know how deep they were in it.

O. John Rogge: I was told by Attorney General Clark that I could make public any evidence of Nazi penetration that I might find. And why did he change his mind? Because 24 Congressmen are mentioned in this report that I’ve prepared. Now, do you think that's a sufficient basis to keep these facts from the American public?

Maddow: All that is still ahead.

“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.

This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is Executive Produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz, and it's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Our Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. Madeleine Haeringer is our Head of Editorial. Archival radio material is from NBC News via the oddly crush-worthy Library of Congress with additional sound from CBS News.

A special thanks to historian Steven Ross. You should definitely check out his amazing book, “Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.”

You can find much more about the series and see a photo of William Dudley Pelley in his definitely-not-Laverne-from-Laverne-and-Shirley shirt at our website, msnbc.com/ultra.

********************************

Ross: When I first started this and I went into the Cal State Northridge archives, there are over 300 boxes. It is very hard to figure out who the agents are at first. You've gotta go through a lot of boxes because Leon Lewis knew that the Nazis and fascists knew who he was, and he was constantly afraid they would break into his office and try to steal his files. And so he made sure there were no central lists of who the agents were. Everyone had a number and it took me a while. I was in there for several weeks and I couldn't figure out, how is this working, what's going on here? Cause everything is so fractured, which was purposeful. And then I'd been told that in fact, Joe Roos had a unpublished autobiography that was at USC in their special collections. So I went over there and I remember reading the first 30 pages and jumping up, running out of the special collections room, and calling my wife and saying, I know what the story is now. I got a book. This guy's just laid it out in the first 30 pages. Now everything I've read makes sense.

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Episode 4

Oct. 24, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 4: A Bad Angle

A paid agent of Hitler's government ramps up a targeted propaganda effort aimed at weakening democracy and supporting the fascist cause in America. His base of operations... the center of American democracy itself— the United States Congress. Sitting members of Congress, and the America First movement, take part in an elaborate scheme to subvert democracy. Laundering millions of pieces of Nazi propaganda through Congress and into the hands of the American people.

Norma Lundeen: Ladies and gentlemen, I come to you on a mission which is unprecedented in radio broadcasting.

Rachel Maddow: “A mission which is unprecedented in radio broadcasting.” Kinda sounds like melodramatic radio-age hyperbole, I know. But the speaker was in fact doing something unusual. She had essentially just been handed the airwaves at NBC, at the National Broadcasting Company, set loose to say whatever she wanted. Now, that was unusual because she did not work for NBC. She wasn’t a reporter, or a paid commentator, or a politician, or even a well-known public figure. And random people don’t just get to jump on a national radio broadcast whenever they feel like they have something to say. But the woman behind the mic that day, she was someone who was in a unique and interesting situation.

Norma Lundeen: I am the widow of Ernest Lundeen, United States senator from Minnesota, who was killed in an airplane crash on August 31, 1940.

Maddow: The widow of Senator Ernest Lundeen. Her name was Norma. When Norma Lundeen took to the airwaves that Sunday in May 1941, she and her family were very much still in the throes of grief. It hadn’t even been a year since her husband had died in that terrible, mysterious plane crash.

But that’s not exactly what Norma wanted to talk about when she stepped behind the mic that day. What she was there to do really was, as she put it, something unprecedented in radio broadcasting.

Norma Lundeen: Only a few days after the husband and father we loved had been laid away, this storm of malice broke. This is the man, who after the grave had closed on him, and he could no longer defend his good name, has been ruthlessly slandered by repeatedly suggesting that Senator Lundeen was not a loyal American. This statement is malicious and atrociously false.

Maddow: In the wake of the plane crash that killed Minnesota U.S. Senator Ernest Lundeen, a scandalous story had begun to unspool about how the Senator was tangled up with a Nazi agent. He was under federal investigation for, effectively, colluding with a hostile foreign power.

These allegations were being reported by crusading journalists, some of them with national reach. And it was a hot story: the worst civilian air crash in U.S. history, a Senator killed, three members of the justice department on the plane with him, killed in the same crash, the cause of the crash totally unclear; the reporting on his ties to the Hitler government, which was soon bolstered by legitimately shocking photos that emerged of Senator Lundeen standing under a giant swastika banner.

In late 1940 and early 1941, the Ernest Lundeen story… it started off bad, it took a hard right turn, but then it just kept getting worse and worse all the time with each new revelation.

And after about eight months of reading these reports about her deceased husband in the papers, hearing about them on the radio news, Norma Lundeen decided that she’d had enough.

Norma Lundeen: The dead cannot be hurt by vilification. It is those who love the dead, and who all the years of their lives will bear his name with pride, they are the ones who feel the force of the dagger driven into the back of the dead.

Maddow: Norma Lundeen made her case, defending her husband passionately and directly to the public. She also went right after the journalists who she said were responsible for the smears against him.

Norma Lundeen: A pair of columnists had written that two Department of Justice agents were on the plane with my husband when it crashed, that they had been assigned to watch him. All accusations of this nature are emphatically denied in the letters of the Attorney General Jackson and J. Edgar Hoover.

Maddow: Norma contacted the news networks directly, demanding that they put a gag on any journalist who wanted to talk about her late husband. And sometimes they did. We found correspondence from a Vice President at NBC telling Norma Lundeen that he personally had intervened to delete mentions of Senator Lundeen from two different broadcasts.

She threatened to sue one radio journalist who had reported a story about her late husband. She complained to the radio stations who carried his reporting, trying to get him taken off the air; she threatened the sponsors who advertised on the broadcasts in which he appeared.

And even beyond going after reporters, Norma denied what was inarguably clear to anyone with eyes. That picture of Ernest Lundeen, standing under that giant swastika? Norma had an answer for that. She said it was a big misunderstanding.

Norma Lundeen: A number of photographs of my husband were taken while he was speaking. One of those photographs was taken at such an angle as to convey the impression that my husband was standing beneath the swastika. As a matter of fact, he was standing under the stars and stripes. I have beside me four photographs proving the truth of my statement.

Maddow: It was just a bad angle. Just a misunderstanding. Don't believe your lying eyes.

But Norma Lundeen was just getting warmed up. Because what had really ticked her off was not just the reporting that her husband was being tailed by the FBI, or that he was under investigation for being in cahoots with a Nazi agent, or that he made a practice of standing under a big swastika banner. No, the thing that Norma was really set on denying first and foremost was the allegation that someone other than her husband had been writing his speeches.

Norma Lundeen: Innuendos have been made that a certain individual wrote my husband’s speeches. This is a deliberate falsehood designed to mislead. No one wrote my husband's speeches. He was fully capable of writing his own, and he wrote his own.

Maddow: And that right there, that is where Norma Lundeen slipped up. Because not only did she know for a fact that that allegation was true, that in fact an agent from Hitler's government really had been writing speeches for her Senator husband, she knew that it was true. And she knew that she herself had just hidden away the evidence that would prove it. That evidence would not stay hidden forever.

This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”

(OPENING TITLES)

Bradley Hart: His initial idea is that he's going to have a US Senator spreading Nazi propaganda on the floor of the Senate. The biggest names really in Republican congressional politics, they all fall under the spell of this sort of Nazi propaganda operation.

Radio Announcer: You’re about to hear an address delivered before a meeting of the America First Committee.

Nancy Beck Young: This group of people, if they were anything first, it was their own political success and careers first.

Hart: It's really a scheme of, of genius in some ways. I think we would say evil genius.

********************************

Maddow: Episode 4: A Bad Angle.

Radio Reporter: Senator Ernest Lundeen reported killed today in the crash of a Pennsylvania central airlines plane.

Maddow: After the plane crash that killed her husband, Norma Lundeen traveled to Washington D.C. The history books remember the senator’s widow as a tall, confident, well-spoken woman. She had a taste for flamboyant hats. And less than 48-hours after her husband had died, she — in one of her memorable hats — marched into his Senate office in the U.S. Capitol. Again, this was less than 48 hours after the crash that killed her husband.

But when she turned up at his office, she wasn’t there to comfort his staff, or to speak with his colleagues, or collect his personal effects. She did not want the photos of his kids off his desk. She was looking for something very specific. She told the staff that she wanted the Viereck files. She asked them to give her the Viereck files and she took them away with her. That was all she asked for. Here are historians Nancy Beck Young and Bradley Hart.

Young: Norma Lundeen directed, upon her husband's death, to have given to her all the Viereck files.

Hart: This was a closely guarded sort of set of correspondence that Norma Lundeen did not want out in the wider world.

Maddow: The Viereck files. Viereck was not some kind of code word. It was the last name of a guy: a guy named George Sylvester Viereck. Senator Ernest Lundeen and George Sylvester Viereck were old friends. And that Viereck file that the Senator's wife was looking for and that she took away so soon after her husband died, that file contained more than a decade's-worth of correspondence between Lundeen and Viereck.

In the immediate wake of her husband’s death, Norma Lundeen had a good reason for wanting that correspondence to never see the light of day. Because George Sylvester Viereck was not the kind of a person who ought to have been a long-standing close friend and work-collaborator with a sitting U.S. Senator.

Young: Viereck is a spy for the German government, part of his responsibility being cozying up to those in power in U.S. politics to gather as much information as possible and to try to get them to do things that will forestall U.S. entry into the war. That's Viereck's portfolio from Germany.

Maddow: George Sylvester Viereck was an agent working on behalf of the fascist government in Germany. He was kind of their top banana here. They funneled millions and millions of dollars through him and his various U.S. efforts on behalf of the German government.

His very, very well-funded mission in the United States was two-fold: to try to keep the United States from getting into World War II, but also to soften us up, to mess with us, to make us just less effective as a country, by finding and exploiting what the Germans called "kernels of disturbance" in the United States.

In 1941 in New York, a big academic study was done of Germany's propaganda efforts here to try to figure out why the Hitler government was putting so much effort, so much money, into propaganda targeting americans. What was Hitler trying to do?

The study explained that Berlin had charged German agents in the U.S. with finding these kernels of disturbance, which were described as, "racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life, differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the "frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians." Germany's agents operating in the U.S. were tasked with finding those things and exploiting them here, in the interest of "national demoralization.”

And George Sylvester Viereck was the top German agent in charge of executing that mission in the United States. This was Viereck’s life's work. He was very good at it. And he was a high profile person. His work, his identity, it really wasn’t a secret. He basically operated in plain sight in the United States for years.

Hart: This is a man who is a fairly known quantity. This was in no way a secret and Lundeen must have known the man he was dealing with was at least pro-German, if not actively working on behalf of the German government.

Maddow: One of the reasons Viereck operated so successfully for so long had something to do with the way he did business. He didn't just churn out propaganda and disinformation himself, although he did do plenty of that. His real talent was recruiting sympathetic Americans to do the work for him; recruiting Americans sometimes with cash, but sometimes just with his charm, with his powers of persuasion. And some Americans didn’t need much persuading. They were all in on the cause.

Radio Reporter: George Sylvester Viereck, the man who has been prominent for several years as a Nazi propagandist…

Maddow: Do you remember Francis Moran, the leader of the Christian Front in Boston? Remember the thousands and thousands of Nazi propaganda books and leaflets and pamphlets that he disseminated all over Boston and the Northeast? Well that material was supplied to Francis Moran by George Sylvester Viereck. And then it was Moran and his chapter of the Christian Front that so energetically distributed it.

That was classic Viereck. Material created by or approved by the Hitler government in Berlin, provided to viciously anti-Semitic groups, linked to both street violence against American Jews and also violent armed plots against the U.S. government; Viereck using kernels of disturbance here in American life to drive us apart from one another, to drive us apart from our allies, to destabilize life here at home, to scare us, to make fascism seem like it was on the march, and on its way here, and maybe we should welcome it.

Viereck supplied the Christian Front and other violent ultra-right groups around the country. He supplied high-profile and low-profile members of the America First movement coast-to-coast.

He operated all over the country in the lead-up to America entering World War II. But his biggest, boldest, most successful operation, is the one he ran from the seat of American democracy itself.

Hart: His initial idea is that he's going to have a U.S. Senator spreading Nazi propaganda or anti-war propaganda on the floor of the Senate.

Maddow: When George Viereck was looking for a member of Congress to rope into his new scheme to have the Hitler government advance its work through the U.S. Congress, Senator Ernest Lundeen was perhaps an obvious first target for him. And in more ways than one.

Senator Ernest Lundeen: I have never heard a German, or a German born American, with the gall to ask that we help Germany, but 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, decadent, and dying empires.

Maddow: Senator Lundeen had built his career on being outspoken against the US joining foreign wars. He was something close to famous for his opposition to World War I. That's when he had first gotten to know Viereck. And then in the run-up to World War II, he was basically the poster child in the Senate for leaving Germany alone to just do its thing.

But Senator Lundeen was also someone who always had money on the mind. In his time in the Senate, was accused of demanding kickbacks from his employees. His employees would get paid a salary by the Senate, but he would then demand that they hand over a portion of that salary back to him.

Young: Lundeen was someone who was maybe hurting a bit for money and open to questionable sources of financial support. He sees Lundeen as an easy mark.

Maddow: The deal that Viereck was offering to Senator Lundeen, it was a lucrative one.

Young: Once Lundeen was approached by Viereck, Lundeen was all in.

Maddow: Viereck told Lundeen that he had a plan by which they could make some pretty serious cash. Viereck would arrange for speeches that he wrote for Lundeen to be printed in major American magazines and newspapers. These speeches would run as articles, under Lundeen’s byline, as if the senator had written them himself. And they’d get paid for it.

Hart: We have a U.S. Senator with a quite literal German agent of influence sitting in his office, writing speeches for him, writing pieces that are paid pieces. When these speeches are published, he's actually splitting the profits with this German agent of influence.

Maddow: This wasn't just pocket money, this was a whole new second stream of considerable income for the Senator. Viereck wrote speeches and articles for Lundeen about how our supposed allies were weak and hypocritical and corrupt and doomed, how American democracy was corrupt and rigged, how the fascist government in Germany was strong, how the United States government should stay out of Germany’s way. Viereck would supply this material, supply these speeches to Lundeen, Lundeen would take them and read them verbatim on the floor of the Senate.

Young: The relationship that the two of them come up with is that Viereck will function as speech writer for Lundeen. That's a charitable way of putting it. Viereck wrote Lundeen's speeches. Lundeen might have added a comma, or changed the spelling of a word, but Lundeen did not do any significant, or even mild editing to the prose provided to him by Viereck.

Hart: What we know is true is that Viereck is receiving much of the material for these speeches from the German embassy itself. And Lundeen, from the archival record, seems to be making great use of what Viereck gives him.

Maddow: George Syvester Viereck, as a highly-paid, highly-ranked agent of Hitler’s government, he had his marching orders. He was trying to sow dissension among the American public about the war effort and about our own system of government, to spread misinformation that was favorable to Germany and disfavorable to us and our allies. And while he was doing that, he was also wheedling his way into the heart of American power.

Viereck's plan was working. He did manage to turn a sitting U.S. senator into a paid mouthpiece for a foreign fascist government. But that was only step one. He wanted this propaganda effort to have a broader reach. Much broader.

Hart: So what Viereck has done is he's realized that there's a way to game the American Congressional system against itself.

Maddow: This was the early 1940s. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, there was no news on TV. There were newspapers, the radio, newsreels at the movies, and then there was the mail.

If you were trying to reach Americans in their homes, if you were trying to influence Americans’ opinions and political leanings, and fundraise, and all the rest of it, you sent them mail. And members of Congress, importantly, were able to do that for free. It’s a Congressional privilege that’s called franking, which still exists today. And the old-fashioned idea behind it is that members of Congress should easily be able to communicate with their voters back home about what they’re doing in Washington. It should literally be free to send their constituents mail about any government business. What George Sylvester Viereck figured out was that he could weaponize that against the American people.

Hart: What Viereck realizes is that members of Congress have unique privileges relating to the words that they speak on the floor of the House or Senate and to the Congressional Record itself. He starts asking for huge numbers of these speeches to be printed — which are printed at government expense, of course — then he actually adds to this and begins asking staffers to provide him with franked envelopes, which can be mailed through the U.S. postal service for free.

Maddow: So Viereck would get pro-German speeches from the Hitler government, from the German embassy. Senator Ernest Lundeen would then deliver those speeches on the floor of the Senate, enter them into the Congressional Record. Viereck would then order Lundeen’s staff to print off gazillions of copies of those speeches, which would then be sent in pre-paid government envelopes to unwitting members of the public.

Young: Viereck would stand in Lundeen's office and use Lundeen's Senate phone to make phone calls to conduct their Nazi business in the United States, disseminating Nazi propaganda to unsuspecting Americans and it's not costing us, German Nazis, a single reichsmark. American tax payers were paying for Nazi propaganda with American tax dollars. Bold.

Maddow: By 1940, George Sylvester Viereck and Senator Ernest Lundeen were a well-oiled, two-man propaganda machine. It went on for years, right up until the day Lundeen died with one of Viereck’s speeches in his pocket. But for this scheme to be truly successful, Viereck needed his propaganda to go beyond Senator Lundeen’s reach with his constituents in Minnesota. Viereck needed to reach large numbers of Americans, to start turning the tide of public opinion away from U.S. interests and towards Germany. He needed to reach millions of Americans.

To reach that kind of scale, he needed more speeches. He needed more pre-paid envelopes. He was gonna need more Senators.

Hart: He realizes very quickly that one Senator isn't enough here.

Maddow: That’s next.

********************************

Maddow: When Senator Ernest Lundeen died, there was a stack of smoking-gun evidence locked inside a filing cabinet in his Senate office in the U.S. Capitol. It was all the correspondence between him and a man named George Sylvester Viereck. It was direct documentary evidence that the Senator had been colluding with a Nazi agent. Perhaps that is why the Senator's wife, Norma, took that file from his office and hid it away in the days after his death, in the hopes that that secret would follow Senator Lundeen to the grave.

Young: Norma Lundeen is going all spouse-proud and, "My husband was not a Nazi," saying things like that to the press. But historians who've studied this have made the very obvious point, how could she have not known his connection to Viereck and the Nazis? In that demand for the papers, there is what could be read as an acknowledgement of guilt.

Maddow: Despite her efforts to hide her husband's relationship with Viereck, her removing the documentary evidence from her husband’s office right after his death. Despite Norma's best efforts, the secret was getting out in the press and, soon, in court.

The previous 12 months had shown that the federal government, time and again, was behind the eight ball when it came to this gathering threat at home from the ultra-right — the plotting and planning of extremists in this country who were inclined towards violence and, in many cases, hooked up with the Hitler government.

The Justice Department had failed to convict the members of the Christian Front who tried to overthrow the government. They had failed to act on advance warning of explosions at American munitions plants, planned as sabotage. Private activist groups operating outside law enforcement were tracing stolen U.S. military weapons and complex, violent plots involving homegrown violent fascists with help and financing from Berlin. Amateurs were turning this stuff up, not the authorities.

To make up for lost time, to get out from behind the eight ball, the Attorney General finally decided to appoint a special prosecutor, someone to start paying attention to these kinds of threats to our democracy. The prosecutor who was appointed was named William Power Maloney.

William Maloney was an experienced federal prosecutor. He’d spent years at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York handling high-profile federal cases of fraud and corruption. William Maloney had managed to run up an eye-popping, 400-to-nothing record as a prosecutor there. He’d never lost a case.

And as soon as he was assigned to this new job by the Attorney General, Maloney began putting the pieces together, starting with Ernest Lundeen and George Sylvester Viereck and what sure seemed to be an improper relationship there. Lundeen might be dead, but George Sylvester Viereck was still out there. And so, newly appointed by the Attorney General, William Power Maloney decided to move quickly.

He executed a court-ordered search warrant on an apartment belonging to a D.C. publicist, a guy who they believed to be Viereck's employee in Washington. As far as prosecutors could tell, this D.C. publicist, and Senator Ernest Lundeen, and Viereck the Nazi agent, they’d all been involved together in a scheme to secretly disseminate pro-Nazi disinformation and propaganda. The German agent would provide speeches to Senator Lundeen, Lundeen would then deliver on the Senate floor, they’d get tons of copies made, then the publicist would run logistics on getting those copies mailed out to the public.

So when federal agents raided the publicist's apartment that day, what they expected to find was a bunch of stuff involving Ernest Lundeen. They expected to find evidence of that scheme that they knew about: notes, documents, records of payments, other evidence linking this Nazi agent to Senator Lundeen. That's what they were expecting. But what prosecutor William Power Maloney actually found during that raid, it set him back on his heels.

Because apparently it wasn't just this one Senator, this one recently-deceased Senator Ernest Lundeen who had been involved. Looking around the publicist's apartment that day in Washington, William Power Maloney took in the sight of hundreds of documents and envelopes bearing the names of all sorts of members of Congress: Republican Congressman Stephen Day of Illinois, Democratic Congressman Martin L. Sweeney of Ohio, Democratic Senator David Worth Clark of Idaho, Republican Congressman George Tinkham of Massachusetts, Republican Congressman Jacob Thorkelson of Montana, Republican Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota,

it just went on and on.

Envelopes bearing the names of Senators Rush Holt and Senator Burton Wheeler and Congressman Clare Hoffman, and all sorts of others. They were all being held in that D.C. apartment raided by William Maloney that day.

All these sitting members of Congress. From both parties. All of them, Maloney now realized, apparent participants in this operation funded and run by the Hitler government to disseminate Nazi propaganda to the American people. How many members of Congress were in on this thing? How far did it go?

With the help of his pal, Senator Ernest Lundeen, George Sylvester Viereck had roped in dozens of sitting members of Congress to help him launder and disseminate Nazi propaganda using the resourcces of the United States congress.

Hart: We have a number of the biggest figures in American politics in this period, men who are truly household names, the biggest names really in Republican congressional politics, they all fall under the spell of this Nazi propaganda operation.

Maddow: This turbocharged Vierck’s operation. It helped him transform his scheme from a two-man band into a kind of assembly-line of Nazi propaganda being pumped out of the U.S. Captiol and into the mailboxes of unsuspecting Americans from coast-to-coast.

Hart: What Viereck does is he combines this incredible power of essentially unlimited copies of the congressional record printed at government expense, envelopes that are pre-franked, could be mailed a government expense. And so the American taxpayer in this period is paying for well-meaning Americans to receive Nazi propaganda that’s produced by George Sylvester Viereck and his allies, and being mailed through the U.S. Postal Service at essentially their own cost. It's really a scheme of genius in some ways, I think we would say evil genius. But it's almost something from a James Bond film.

Maddow: The scale of this operation, it kind of takes your breath away.

Kelsey Desiderio: How many Americans were actually receiving Nazi propaganda in their mailboxes as a result of this scheme?

Hart: We believe it's millions of Americans. Millions of Americans receive pro-Nazi, anti-interventionist content in this period.

Maddow: Millions of Americans. The members of Congress who were working with this Nazi agent, they were members of both the Senate and the House. They represented a bunch of different states, up and down the political spectrum. They were mostly Republicans, but also some Democrats. But besides their connection to this German foreign agent, they did all have one other thing in common.

(CROWD CHEERING AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN)

All of those members of Congress tied up in Viereck’s scheme, all of them were associated with something called the America First movement.

Radio Announcer: You’re about to hear an address delivered before a meeting of the America First Committee in Madison Square Garden in New York City.

Maddow: The America First Committee started up in 1940 as a pressure group, to try to stop the United States from getting involved in the Second World War. “America First.” That tight-little, patriotic-sounding populist slogan was both a don't-get-involved-in-the-war rallying cry, and a good, profile-boosting vehicle for members of congress who — for whatever reason — were opposed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was just an electoral juggernaut at the time. In 1940, FDR was running for an unprecedented third term as US president.

Hart: America First becomes a grab bag of everything, anti-Roosevelt. Many of the members of Congress who have been involved with the Viereck scandal and tend towards the anti-interventionist, anti-Roosevelt side of the aisle find themselves as prominent figures in America First.

Young: Republicans are just feeling very defeated as if there’s nothing that they can do to stop Roosevelt. And I think that for some, playing footsie with fascists was a good idea, they thought.

Maddow: This idea that there was American unanimity against the Nazis, this sort of wishful historical nostalgia we have for an era in which Amerians were supposedly all on the same page about the need to fight Hitler, for the need to pull together to meet this grave global challenge, that is a tidier, happier memory than what is justified by the real history.

In reality, a number of the most high-profile America First members of Congress were in cahoots with a paid agent of the Hitler government who was supplying them with propaganda intended not just to keep the U.S. out of World War II, but also to divide Americans along political lines, racial lines, religious lines, class lines, all in the interest of “national demoralization." George Viereck and the Nazi government were using the America First movement and America First members of Congress for those ends.

Young: This group of people, if they were anything first, it was their own political success and careers first. If they could advance their career by playing footsie with Nazis, and if that meant winnowing away the strength of American democracy, then so be it.

Maddow: In the year following the death of Senator Ernest Lundeen, newspaper and radio journalists began to figure out what exactly Lundeen had been up to with this German agent, George Viereck. Despite the loud protests of the senator’s widow, Norma Lundeen, on the radio — her threats to sue reporters into submission, her attempts to gaslight the American people that her husband wasn’t really standing in front of the swastika — despite all of that, the details of her husband’s relationship with this Nazi agent, those details began to get out.

But the other members of Congress, that band of America Firsters who were all in on it, too, they were still flying under the radar. No one in the public knew that they too had been aiding and abetting this paid agent of Hitler’s government. Not yet.

Justice Department Prosecutor William Power Maloney had identified the threat. He had begun to identify those who had been involved in the scheme. Thanks to that raid on that D.C. apartment, he now had names and literal receipts of the other members of Congress who had been involved. Armed with that information, William Maloney took action.

Radio Reporter: George Sylvester Viereck, well-known publicist, has been indicted by a grand jury which pictures him as using congressional franks to send-out his material. Special Prosecutor William Power Maloney spoke of Viereck as one of the most serious menaces to this country.

Maddow: William Power Maloney arrested and indicted George Sylvester Viereck. He was criminally charged for his role in the scheme that he ran through Congress, which was a shot across the bow to all the members of Congress who had helped Viereck carry out the scheme. It immediately led them to start wondering: Were they next?

Hart: Many of these men begin sort of searching their own files, trying to find out what their legal exposure might be.

Maddow: Once George Viereck was arrested, the members of Congress who had participated in this scheme, they knew that prosecutors were onto them. They knew that William Power Maloney was very likely hot on their trail. So at that point, they had two options: fess up, give up the game, cooperate with the investigation; or, try to burn the whole thing down. They ultimately chose option two.

Radio Reporter: Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a leader of the America First Committee, has threatened to demand a Congressional investigation of the way the Justice Department has been handling the prosecution of Nazi sympathizers.

Hart: This is a moment of great political danger, I think for these men.

Young: Wheeler used his position as a sitting member of the United States Senate to lobby the Justice Department to fire Maloney.

Maddow: And that is next time.

“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.

This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is Executive Produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz, and it's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Our Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. Madeleine Haeringer is our Head of Editorial. Archival radio material is from NBC Newsvia the Library of Congress, which you really should visit. Have you visited? With additional sound from CBS News.

A special thanks to historian Bradley Hart. His excellent, excellent book is called “Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States.” Highest recommendation, 12 stars out of ten!

You can find much more about this series — you can see what we mean about Norma Lundeen's hat problem and that "just a bad angle" photo of her husband — all at our website: MSNBC.com/ultra

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Library of Congress Engineer: Cut B-4 sounds like a dynamite record. Disc 20612 Side A from Box T41-26. May 18, 1941, 11:30 to 11:45pm, the NBC Blue Network. Mrs. Ernest Lundeen speaks and apparently she's speaking in reply to certain statements about her husband made by Walter Winchell in his broadcast. This promises to be good.

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Episode 5

Oct. 31, 2022, 10:04 AM UTCOct. 31, 2022, 10:04 AM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 5: Shut It Down

The walls begin to close in on members of Congress, and members of the America First movement, who are actively involved in a Nazi plot to spread misinformation and propaganda across the country. With a crusading newspaper reporter and a Justice Department prosecutor each peeling back the layers of the scheme, the members of Congress involved in the plot launch a desperate effort to shut down both the reporting and the federal investigation into their activities.

Rachel Maddow: It’s a Friday in September 1941. And there’s a reporter from the Washington Post in a taxi. He has told the cab driver to follow a truck through the streets of Washington D.C.

That reporter in the cab, his name is Dillard Stokes. Stokes has gotten a tip from a trusted source involving a secret federal investigation. The source told Dillard Stokes that a man who lived in an apartment a few blocks away from the White House had just been served a federal grand jury subpoena. An urgent one.

The guy had been served the subpoena on a Thursday night, but it said he had to appear before the grand jury the very next day, on Friday. Reporter Dillard Stokes didn't have much to go on besides that tip and the man's address. But on Friday morning bright and early, he hailed a cab and went over to that address to see what he could see.

When he got there, Stokes saw two men dragging heavy bags out onto the street. The bags had been inside an apartment that was the address on the subpoena. Two men were dragging all these bags out of that apartment onto the street, and then putting them into a truck that was parked out front of the apartment building. Dillard Stokes couldn’t tell exactly what was in the bags. But he could tell they were full and heavy. He could also tell that the guys moving them appeared to be in a real hurry. Also grumpy. Stokes saw one neighbor yell at the guys, complaining that they were making too much noise so early in the morning. The truck driver yelled back at the neighbor, “I shouldn't be doing this.”

From his seat in the taxi cab, reporter Dillard Stokes watched as this all unfolded. He watched the two guys drag the bags out of the apartment building, load the bags up into the big truck, he saw them slam the door shut, and then the truck sped away. And then it's one of those cliche moments from the movies: “Cab driver, follow that vehicle!”

With Dillard Stokes following behind in that taxi, the truck sprinted into downtown D.C., and it made two stops. Both of which were intriguing enough that Dillard Stokes knew his tipster had put him on to something here. Something that looked like it might be a pretty good story.

He didn't necessarily know what this federal grand jury subpoena was all about, or why it was so urgent. He hadn't seen any cops or federal agents around all morning. But when that truck carrying the bags out of that apartment had started to make its stops in downtown D.C – when it made its first stop at the U.S. Capitol – Dillard Stokes was pretty sure something newsworthy was going on here. He watched as the guys in the truck unloaded about half of those big bags into part of the capitol complex that houses offices for members of the House.

Then he watched as the truck left there, and it moved on to a second location just down the street from the capitol. And there it unloaded the rest of the bags. That was at the Washington D.C. headquarters of the America First Committee. Why did that truck take all of those bags in a hurry from a residential apartment where some guy just got a subpoena? And then why did it unload that stuff at some congressional office, and then at the America First Committee? What was going on here?

Dillard Stokes was determined to find out. He knew there was a story here. And he started digging. He started looking into which office exactly had received the first drop-off of all those heavy bags at the U.S. capitol. He also went back to the second location where the truck had dropped stuff off at the America First Committee. And at the America First Committee headquarters, Dillard Stokes decided that he might just lurk around. See if anything happened. That paid off.

Because in the middle of the night, Washington Post reporter Dillard Stokes was there. He was watching as someone from the America First Committee started to haul those big, overstuffed, heavy bags out into the alley behind the building. They started emptying out the bags, taking whatever it was that was inside them and putting that stuff into big metal trash cans in the alley. And then they set it all on fire.

O.K. So at this point, Dillard Stokes knows for sure that he has a story. Boy does he. But it is a story that will leave marks. It will get him denounced by name and threatened by powerful politicians on the floor of the U.S. Congress. It will get his bosses at the Washington Post threatened with federal investigation or even arrest, as if they're criminals just for employing him. It will see Dillard Stokes hauled before the grand jury himself to give crucial evidence for a blockbuster federal criminal trial about a plot by a hostile foreign power to use members of Congress to subvert American democracy. And it will see that prosecution itself blown up into a huge scandal.

But what are you gonna do? They really were trucking off the evidence into a dark alley and setting it on fire. Dillard Stokes really did catch them doing it. He had them. He had the story. But this wasn't gonna end well. For anyone.

This is Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.

(OPENING TITLES)

Representative Hamilton Fish: I have no patience with those Americans who tremble every time Hitler sneezes or get jittery every time he opens his mouth.

Nancy Beck Young: When I say that Fish was friends with Nazis, I mean that Fish was friends with Nazis.

Bradley Hart: The members of Congress who are involved in this don’t really know what to say when this news first comes out.

Reporter: A federal grand jury here returned an indictment today against George Hill, who is secretary to Representative Hamilton Fish of New York.

Hart: This is a moment of great political danger, I think for these men.

********************************

Maddow: Episode 5: Shut it Down.

In September 1941, on orders from the Justice Department, prosecutor William Power Maloney had convened a federal grand jury in Washington D.C. to investigate Nazi penetration of the United States. He had peeled back the layers of Senator Ernest Lundeen’s involvement with this Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck, involvement that lasted right up to Lundeen's death in a plane crash, with three members of the justice department dying alongside him.

In following the Lundeen-Viereck line of inquiry, Maloney had sent a subpoena to a man who was an employee of Viereck, a D.C.-based publicist. When the publicist didn't respond to the subpoena, the court gave Maloney and his men the go-ahead to bust in and raid the publicist's apartment. That's where, to his surprise, Maloney found troves of documents linking Viereck not just with Senator Lundeen, but with other members of Congress as well.

But what Maloney and his agents turned up in that raid – that was only what was left in the apartment by the time Maloney got there. The place had actually been mostly cleaned out before Maloney and his agents arrived. What Washington Post reporter Dillard Stokes saw from his taxi cab that Friday morning in D.C at that apartment that he had gotten the tip about was someone taking a ton of material out of that apartment before prosecutors could show up and find it.

So now there are federal prosecutors who are clearly investigating what's going on here. But there's also the Washington Post – their reporter Dillard Stokes – who knows that federal prosecutors are onto something interesting. But he also knows that there's a cover-up underway. Someone is trying to hide evidence from these investigators. Someone maybe in Congress?

Dillard Stokes is a veteran investigative reporter. He knows what he’s doing. And he just goes after this story. He is soon able to report where exactly those bags were dropped off by that truck that drove from the apartment building straight to the U.S. Capitol. The bags had been left at a storage room inside the Capitol that was controlled by a specific congressman. Dillard Stokes figured out which congressman. And Dillard Stokes figured out that it had been a staffer from that same congressman's office who arranged for that truck to go out that morning to that apartment to pick up all those heavy bags.

The congressman in question, the congressman whose office was apparently running this coverup, he is a congressman with a name you will not soon forget. His name was Hamilton Fish. Hamilton Fish III, actually. He came from a long line of Hamilton Fishes.

Radio Reporter: Tonight, Representative Hamilton Fish, Republican of New York, and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House speaks to you from Washington.

Maddow: Hamilton Fish, Ham to his friends – yes, Ham Fish, I’m not kidding – he was from a very distinguished family. His ancestors had held jobs like U.S. Secretary of State, and governor of New York, and U.S. Senator. Our Hamilton Fish was a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives when FDR was president. And our Hamilton Fish had a deep and abiding hatred – a lifelong hatred – for President Roosevelt. Here’s historian Nancy Beck Young.

Young: Fish later said when he was interviewed on his 100th birthday that he didn't hate people, I just detested Roosevelt. What's the difference between hating and detesting? I don't know.

Maddow: By all accounts, the depth of feeling – the animosity Congressman Fish had against FDR – it was all consuming for him. And it was apparently mutual. FDR hated Ham Fish as much as Ham Fish hated him. And that may have had something to do with the fact that Congressman Fish was technically FDR's own member of Congress.

Young: Hamilton Fish's congressional district contained Hyde Park, New York, home of none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And it drove FDR nuts that Ham Fish was his congressman. He liked the microphone. He liked to talk. And he really loved jabbing at the President who lived in his district.

Fish: President Roosevelt is a number one warmonger in America. If a young schoolboy had made such a remark, he would have been spanked and put to bed. President Roosevelt, ashamed or afraid to make such a false and vicious statement, uses the camouflage of a White House spokesman to incite the passions and hatreds of our people and spread his war propaganda.

Maddow: In addition to his fire-and-brimstone hatred for FDR, Hamilton Fish was part of the America First movement.

Young: He was a dedicated America Firster. He exaggerated his points in opposition to the New Deal, in opposition to U.S. foreign policy positions.

Fish: I accuse the administration of instigating war propaganda and hysteria to cover up the failure and collapse of the New Deal policies. I accuse the administration of leading the American people to a rendezvous with war, death, and bankruptcy.

Maddow: The combination of Hamilton Fish's high profile and his vehemence on the subject made him effectively the standard bearer – kind of the team captain – for the America First movement in the House.

Fish: The American people have no intention of sending any of their youth to be slaughtered overseas to cover-up the failures of the New Deal. I hope the American people heard those remarks of Hitler. Let us hope that this will put an end to the hysterical propaganda emanating from spokesmen of the White House.

Maddow: Ham Fish wasn't the only America First member of Congress. Far from it, there were tons of them. But there was something more sort of concentrated, maybe even more extreme, about his particular take on the issue of World War II.

Fish: I have no patience with those Americans who tremble every time Hitler sneezes, or get jittery every time he opens his mouth.

Young: When I say that Fish was friends with Nazis, I mean that Fish was friends with Nazis. You know, palling around with them.

Maddow: In 1933, just after Hitler became chancellor in Germany, Congressman Hamilton Fish had contributed to a book about how Hitler and the Nazis had had saved Germany from Communism. How Hitler and the Nazis had done the world a big favor.

Congressman Fish rented one of his apartments in New York City to a Nazi government official, a nice place on East 77th Street.

In 1938, Congressman Fish headlined a big pro-Germany rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. They played the Nazi anthem, there were swastika flags, the crowd did the Hitler salute, and Republican Congressman Ham Fish was the honored guest and main speaker.

The year after that, in 1939, Congressman Fish flew to Germany. He met with senior officials from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Nazi foreign minister, von Ribbentrop, loaned Congressman Fish his official government plane, in which the congressman then flew around to different countries in Europe, basically urging them to accommodate Hitler and Germany, and not fight them. When Congressman Fish was on that trip in 1939, he spoke with reporters from Berlin. He told them, quote, "Germany's cause is just."

Nazi leaders on trial for war crimes after the war would later explain that Congressman Fish had given them great advice on that trip he took to Germany. Great advice for what sort of strategy the Nazis should take toward the United States. They said he was a lot of help – to them.

So, if you were a highly-ranked German agent operating in the United States at the time, if you were already doing your work for the Hitler government through one particularly compliant U.S. Senator, if you were looking to expand your operation to include more members of Congress, well, who else might be on your short list of members willing and maybe even eager to help?

If you were George Sylvester Viereck, the top propaganda agent of the Hitler government operating in the United States, who in Congress would you approach?

Fish: Why all this propaganda and war psychology about Germany, Italy and Japan? Not one of these totalitarian states has the slightest idea or capacity of attacking or invading America.

Maddow: On the Senate side of the U.S. capitol, the Nazi agent Viereck had set up shop in the offices of Senator Ernest Lundeen. On the House side of the Capitol, he set up shop with Congressman Hamilton Fish.

Here are historians Bradley Hart and Nancy Beck Young.

Hart: Hamilton Fish's office becomes the center around which Viereck builds actually the more insidious part of his operation, where he asks Hamilton Fish's staff to help him mail out millions of speeches of this sort of laundered Nazi propaganda material.

Young: Fish's office was command central for the franking scheme whereby these congressional speeches were disseminated around the country.

Maddow: The German government was providing material and financial support to violent, ultra-right groups in the United States. That included their top propaganda agent, George Sylvester Viereck, using homegrown fascist groups like the Christian Front to pump his propaganda into America's streets.

But with these serving members of Congress, like Ernest Lundeen and Hamilton Fish, Viereck had figured out a way to effectively super-charge that effort. Because members of Congress had this one great perk: They had the right to mail out anything they wanted, in any quantity, at government expense.

Viereck used that. He used these members of Congress and their franking privilege to target millions of Americans with messages that the Hitler government in Berlin wanted them to hear.

Young: We have Fish aiding and abetting the Nazi propaganda initiative in the United States out of his House office. Fish worked to sabotage American democracy from the center of American democracy, the U.S. Capitol.

Maddow: And with Congressman Fish, Viereck also got access to a very skilled congressional staffer. One who was more than happy to help.

Hart: George Hill is one of the key figures in the Viereck scheme and really becomes the man around which Viereck begins building the infrastructure for his propaganda operation.

Maddow: George Hill, a congressional staffer in Hamilton Fish's office, was kind of an obvious target for Viereck to recruit.

Hart: George Hill is quite the man about D.C. in this period. He has multiple girlfriends. He's a, a big spender and, and routinely spends beyond what his congressional salary can provide for him. One way that Viereck sort of gets to him, apparently, is by offering him some sort of kickback or financial incentive to grab, for instance, hundreds of thousands of franked envelopes, or to facilitate these copies of speeches from the Congressional Record. So, George Hill is profiting personally from this.

Maddow: It was this staffer, George Hill, in Congressman Fish’s office who facilitated Viereck’s efforts to go big, to launder fascist propaganda through Congress, into the hands of millions of Americans. George Hill was thrilled to be paid so well to do this job. He was also really good at it.

Young: Hill was the person who was most regularly in contact with Viereck. Hill would talk to Viereck on the phone from his desk in Fish's congressional office and would say, “Okay, so we've got another mailing list for you. You need to order a hundred thousand copies of this speech.” He's also procuring franking envelopes from other members of Congress.

Maddow: With help from this congressional staffer, George Hill, the Nazi agent Viereck spreads his wings and starts using a whole cadre of sympathetic, sitting members of congress to supply him with millions of pre-paid franked envelopes which he uses to spread Nazi-approved propaganda here in the United States. And Hill’s boss, Congressman Hamilton Fish, he wasn’t blind to any of it.

Young: It might be worth for a moment just pausing and talking about the size of a congressional staff then versus now. Members of Congress, their staff might be no more than two or three people at the most. And so it's a much smaller operation, which means that there's much more proximity between the member and anyone on the staff. So Hill and Fish are close. There's not much that Fish is doing that Hill doesn't know about. And there's not much that Hill is doing that Fish doesn't know about.

Maddow: And now the whole country was about to know about it, too. Because Reporter Dillard Stokes followed up on that tip, he had followed that truck, he had found the bags of evidence stashed in Hamilton Fish's storage space in the capitol, and he had nailed George Hill in Fish's office as the man who’d arranged for all that evidence, those 20 bags of evidence, to be spirited away ahead of federal investigators. Dillard Stokes had the story.

And he put it all on the front page of the Washington Post. "Fish's Office Helped Remove Data Wanted in Nazi-Agent Inquiry." Shocking headline. Big print. Page one of the paper.

When Hamilton Fish’s name started turning up in headlines like that – his congressional office facilitating the removal of evidence being sought by a federal grand jury investigating an alleged Nazi plot in Congress – when that went public, Congressman Fish went ballistic.

He told the Associated Press the reporting was “fake,” and a “complete frame-up.” He said he might sue both the reporters and the newspapers that were printing these allegations against him. He said on the House floor about Dillard Stokes, “These smear charges from beginning to end are based on a series of lies.”

But he had more than just the press to worry about. Because it was prosecutor William Power Maloney, too, who now also had the story.

Maloney hauled in for questioning Congressman Fish's staffer, George Hill. Whereupon George Hill proceeded to lie to the grand jury, under oath. He claimed that he had nothing to do with transporting anything out of that publicist’s apartment. He denied knowing anything about this Nazi agent, Viereck, who had been orchestrating the propaganda plan in Congress. He denied ever having met the guy at all.

George Hill lied under oath about all of that. And Maloney and his agents could prove that he was lying. And so George Hill, top aide to America First Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish, was criminally indicted.

Radio Reporter: A federal grand jury here returned an indictment today against George Hill, who is secretary to Representative Hamilton Fish of New York. The indictment was the result of the grand jury’s investigation into the activities of foreign propaganda agents in the United States. The prosecutor said the congressional secretary was the key man in a campaign to distribute Nazi propaganda in this country, masterminded by German agents. The indictment was on two counts of what was termed corrupt perjury.

Maddow: Corrupt perjury. The top aide to one of the most high-profile Republicans in Congress indicted on multiple felony counts for lying to investigators about what amounted to a Nazi plot operating inside the U.S. Congress.

Hart: The public reaction to the Viereck scandal is absolutely massive. And we can imagine a scandal like this happening in our own time, where members of Congress cooperating with a hostile foreign power, or sort of repeating propaganda being written by a foreign, hostile embassy on the floor of Congress, and then cooperating to use taxpayer dollars to do a direct mail campaign of this propaganda directly to Americans. It would be unfathomably bad. What's terrifying in some ways about the Viereck scandal is that the members of Congress who were involved in it don't really know what to say when this news first comes out. I mean, certainly if you're Hamilton Fish III, the fact that one of your senior staffers has been arrested for perjury for denying that he knows a Nazi spy is certainly not good.

Maddow: It really wasn’t a good moment for Congressman Hamilton Fish. There is a national uproar. The implications of what George Hill was involved in; what Congressman Fish's office was up to; what George Hill was lying to investigators about; who he might be lying to protect; it was just a shocking thing.

Ham Fish decided to push back against it all with a hundred percent defiance. He continued to denounce the prosecution of George Hill. He said the indictment of Hill was not not just a smear, it was a travesty. It was a political put-up job. It was an illegitimate use of the Justice Department's power to go after him and the whole America First movement, all for political reasons. He even led a group of members of Congress to move to put up the bail money for George Hill.

But George Hill was ultimately put on trial for corrupt perjury. Prosecutor William Maloney made his case to the jury. And George Hill was quickly convicted on all counts.

Radio Reporter: George Hill, who was a secretary to Representative Fish, was convicted this afternoon of perjury. He was charged with making false statements before a grand jury in connection with its investigation of Axis propaganda.

Maddow: Prosecutor William Power Maloney in court described George Hill as “an important cog” in a propaganda machine so effective, “it was able to reach in and use the halls of our own Congress to spread its lies and half truths to try to conquer and divide us.”

George Hill was sentenced to more than two years in federal prison. But after his conviction, things suddenly and unexpectedly got worse for the members of Congress who had been wrapped up in this conspiracy. Because after he was convicted, George Hill had an attack of conscience. He told prosecutors he was ready to tell the truth.

He told them that when he was questioned by a Justice Department prosecutor, quote, "The main thing I recall was that he reminded me I was an American citizen. That worked on my mind. And a couple of days later, I decided I would tell the truth."

Young: Upon further questioning, Hill pretty much gives up the game as to what happened.

Maddow: George Hill testified in open court that not only had he been personally involved in the propaganda operation with Viereck, the Nazi agent, he testified that he had been instructed to take part in it by his boss, by Congressman Hamilton Fish. He explained that Congressman Fish had introduced him to Viereck. Congressman Fish told him to do what Viereck wanted. Congressman Fish knew Viereck was paying George Hill for what he was doing.

Members of Congress who had been involved in this mess, they had maybe thought they could save themselves by somehow rallying behind George Hill, by saying the case against him was a big put-up job, a big hoax. That was no longer going to work. Not with George Hill now telling the truth. All of them who had been in on this thing, they knew they were now in the crosshairs of this investigation, this investigation which now had a star cooperating witness who knew everything. What were they going to do?

Hart: This is a moment of great political danger, I think for these men

Maddow: That’s next.

********************************

Radio Reporter: George Hill, who was a secretary to Representative Fish, was convicted this afternoon of perjury.

Maddow: Justice Department prosecutor William Power Maloney was on a roll. Maloney had indicted and convicted George Hill, top aide to sitting Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish. And then he’d flipped him into a cooperating witness.

Maloney also indicted George Sylvester Viereck himself, the top Nazi propaganda agent in the United States, the mastermind behind this audacious plan to run a industrial-scale Nazi propaganda scheme through the U.S. Congress.

Radio Announcer: George Sylvester Viereck, well-known publicist, has been indicted by a grand jury which pictures him as using congressional franks to send-out his material. Special Prosecutor William Power Maloney spoke of Viereck as one of the most serious menaces to this country.

Maddow: When prosecutor William Maloney put Viereck the Nazi agent on trial, Viereck's defense called a surprise witness on his behalf. They called Norma Lundeen, the widow of Senator Ernest Lundeen, who had died in that mysterious plane crash.

Norma Lundeen: I am the widow of Ernest Lundeen, United States Senator from Minnesota, who was killed in an airplane crash on August 31, 1940.

Maddow: Norma Lundeen told the jury that Viereck, this Nazi agent, had never seemed all that un-American to her. She was asked by prosecutors to produce the file of correspondence between Viereck and her late husband, the one she had flown across the country to take out of her husband's senate office less than 48 hours after he died. She replied calmly from the witness stand that while yes, she had taken that file, it was gone now. She said there had been a break-in at her home, and that particular file must have been taken by the burglar. Yes, it must have been a burglar. Hundreds of pages of correspondence from that file would later turn up – not burgled at all – in the Lundeen family archives.

But prosecutor William Power Maloney had figured out the whole Viereck-Lundeen scheme. Viereck was convicted on all counts, just like George Hill was. Maloney wasn’t nearly done yet, though. He was just getting started.

You might recall the bags of evidence that started all of this, the bags of evidence being trucked out of the D.C. apartment that day that were not just headed to Congress for the use of Hamilton Fish and George Hill. Some of those bags went to the headquarters of the America First Committee in D.C. That’s where reporter Dillard Stokes saw an America First staffer setting them on fire.

Well prosecutor William Maloney followed that trail, too. He brought in reporter Dillard Stokes to testify to the grand jury. He even brought in the disgruntled truck driver from the steal-the-evidence early morning rush job at that D.C. apartment. Maloney and his agents also got permission from the court to raid the offices of the America First Committee. They managed to recover some of the evidence that was being stashed there. What was left of it, at least. The stuff that hadn’t gone up in smoke in the alley.

The America First Committee would end up surfacing again and again in Maloney’s investigation of Nazi penetration of the United States. It wasn’t just that the headquarters of the America First Committee were being used to hide and even burn evidence of the Viereck plot in Congress. Maloney and his investigators kept bumping up against the America First Committee and its members, its speakers, its leading lights.

Maloney turned up evidence that the head of an Ohio chapter of the America First Committee was being paid by the Hitler government to promote and distribute fascist propaganda. Maloney got him, too. He was indicted by Maloney’s grand jury and pled guilty to accepting thousands of dollars from the Nazis, and operating as a secret foreign agent.

Not long after that, Maloney also secured the conviction of a famous celebrity pilot linked to America First. Her name was Laura Ingalls.

Radio Reporter: Miss Ingalls is shown here preparing to challenge the women's transcontinental record then held by Amelia Earhart Putnam.

Maddow: Aviators – pilots – were big celebrities at the time in the United States, and they didn’t get much bigger than Laura Ingalls. Amelia Earhart and Laura Ingalls, they were the two most famous female pilots in the world. And in the late 1930s, Laura Ingalls also happened to be one of the most popular nationwide speakers for the America First Committee.

Hart: She actually travels the country giving speeches on behalf of America First, becomes something of a leader in the organization.

Maddow: That was right up until she was called in for questioning by William Maloney's grand jury. She was then arrested and indicted for being a paid Nazi agent. William Maloney got her, too.

Among the uncomfortable public revelations from the Laura Ingalls trial was that her handler, who was the head of the Gestapo in this country, he told Laura Ingalls specifically that her being a speaker for the America First Committee would be, quote, “the best thing you can do for our cause.”

William Maloney's investigation kept turning up worrying evidence like that about the America First Committee and about America First-linked members of Congress. But it’s also important to note that the America First movement was big. It was probably the biggest political pressure organization in the country at the time. It was mainstream, powerful, it was full of well-connected politicians and business leaders. And here was William Power Maloney turning over that very impressive, influential rock and showing all the creepy crawlies underneath.

Maloney was going after powerful people who were used to getting their way, who were not used to being messed with. People who were getting more and more upset and even panicked about what he was finding out. It was a fragile, fraught moment for the investigation. And then Maloney went even bigger. He decided to take a big swing at the whole Nazi operation that had been operating in this country.

All at once, William Power Maloney indicted nearly 30 people and charged them all with sedition, with scheming to subvert democracy and overthrow the government of the United States.

Radio Reporter: The Department of Justice has indicted 28 men and one woman, accused of sending seditious papers and pamphlets to members of the armed forces, the Silver Shirts, the Black Legion, the Crusader White Shirts, the Protestant Gentile League and so-on.

Maddow: Maloney’s federal grand jury indicted:

William Dudley Pelley, the head of the Silver Shirts, whose organization had been plotting a takeover of US military armories, and an armed overthrow of the whole U.S. government.

Also Hermann Schwinn, the pro-Nazi organizer who had been involved in the sabotagte plots against U.S. munitions plants, including the targeting of the Hercules Power Company.

Also George Deatherage, the white supremacist former Klansman who’d been plotting that violent coup to take place right after the 1940 election.

All of these individuals, all of these groups who Leon Lewis and his team of private undercover agents had been tracking for years while law enforcement authorities couldn’t be bothered – well, they were all now being wrapped up.

Steven Ross: You know there’s an old expression, if you live long enough you’ll win all the awards. Well, he may not won all the awards, but he earned the admiration, or at least the respect, of the American government.

Maddow: That’s historian Steven Ross.

William Maloney’s prosecutors visited Leon Lewis and his agents out in Los Angeles, and they just hoovered-up the information that Lewis had been collecting all those years.

Ross: People from the FBI, Army intelligence, Military intelligence, immigration, Treasury Department, every major government department coming into their offices in L.A. because very few of them had ever accumulated any information. And so, they were providing not just witnesses, but they were providing all of the paperwork and spy reports dating back to August 1933, when Lewis first began the spy operation.

Maddow: It took them a while to get there, but now the federal government was making up for lost time. That indictment stands today as the largest mass sedition indictment in U.S. history. But it didn't just include guys with guns and bombs, these armed militant cells secreted around the country.

What Maloney had identified in the course of his investigation was essentially a dual threat. It was ultra-right organizations plotting violence, arming themselves, planning, and in some instances, carrying out violent attacks. Basically, American fascists who in many cases were being actively supported by the Hitler government.

But it was also members of Congress, members of the America First movement, also helping the Hitler government. In their case, helping them to launder Nazi propaganda and send it, in bulk, to the American people. And to that end, because of what the Justice Department believed was that two-pronged threat, Maloney also included in his sedition indictment:

Prescott Dennett. He was the D.C. publicist who was Viereck’s employee in Washington. It was Presscott Dennett’s apartment that was the subject of that all-important raid that implicated all those members of congress and that set reporter Dillard Stokes off on his red-hot reporting trail.

Maloney also put in the sedition indictment George Sylvester Viereck, again. Maloney had of course already got Viereck convicted as a Nazi agent. But now Viereck would be part of the sedition case as well. In other words, the operation that Viereck was running with all those members of Congress, that was now being charged by the U.S. Justice Department as an act of sedition against the United States.

Members of congress who had been part of that plot with Viereck, if the alarm bells weren't ringing for them before, they definitely were now.

And it wouldn’t be just Hamilton Fish going ballistic this time. This time they all did.

Republican Congressman Clare Hoffman of Michigan took to the floor of the House and said the sedition indictment was an act of religious bigotry. He said the defendants were poor, persecuted Christians. Congressman Hoffman also demanded that Dillard Stokes and his boss, the editor of the Washington Post, should both be hauled before Congress and compelled to testify.

Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota yelled in the Senate, “These people are no more guilty than I am!” Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, one of the most prominent and influential Republicans in the whole country, he wrote to one of the people just indicted for sedition, this violently anti-Semitic preacher in Kansas. Senator Taft told the man that William Power Maloney and others at the Justice Department ought to be disbarred for what they were doing. They ought to be disbarred as lawyers for this investigation.

Eventually, the unified strategy of these members of these members of Congress emerged. They focused-in on one determined effort to not just get themselves out of the Justice Department's crosshairs, but to get rid of the investigation altogether. To get rid of William Power Maloney.

The effort would be spearheaded by a U.S. Senator named Burton Wheeler.

Event speaker: I have the honor to present the Honorable Burton K. Wheeler, United States Senator from – [crowd applause].

Maddow: Wheeler had been involved in the propaganda scheme on Capitol Hill. He was also a leading light, one of the most prominent figures in the America First movement.

Senator Burton Wheeler: I only wish there were more Americans in the United States of America who loved America First.

Maddow: There is a famous photo of Senator Burton Wheeler at an America First event in May 1941. He’s standing next to Charles Lindbergh and other America First worthies who are all giving these enthusiastic Hitler salutes. And Senator Wheeler is there with them. He’s wearing a white suit, he’s got a cigar in hand. And he is giving his own version of the salute. It looks a little flaccid compared to his colleagues up there on the stage, but it's pretty unmistakable what he’s doing.

Senator Wheeler’s congressional frank had been used by George Viereck to distribute Nazi propaganda across the country. Evidence of Senator Wheeler’s involvement was found in the raid of that D.C. publicist’s apartment. And it was really Senator Wheeler who led the charge against the investigation into what he and other America First members of Congress had been up to. And who with.

Radio Reporter: Here in Washington, Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a leader of the America First Committee, has threatened to demand a Congressional investigation of the way the Justice Department has been handling the prosecution of Nazi sympathizers. Mr. Wheeler says he thinks it’s a disgrace the way 28 persons were indicted here in Washington on charges of sedition.

Maddow: Senator Wheeler took aim not just at the Justice Department. He also took aim at the press, at Washington Post reporter Dillard Stokes.

Radio Reporter: Mr. Wheeler attacked the Washington Post as a stooge of the Department of Justice, and called its reporter a spy. He added that he thinks reporters and newspapers who have helped to indict the defendants are engaged in a dirty business, and predicted that the day will soon come when they will all regret it.

Maddow: “They will all regret it.” That was the threat from Senator Burton Wheeler. He also began directly taunting the Attorney General in public. Senator Wheeler accused him of overseeing what he called “one of the most disgraceful proceedings ever carried on in this country.” Senator Wheeler said the sedition case had been brought solely for the purpose of smearing the America First movement.

Young: Wheeler made the argument that this is a politically-motivated prosecution, that Roosevelt was trying to go after his political enemies. He made that argument forcefully with people that he knew in the Justice Department.

Maddow: People he knew in the Justice Department up-to-and-including the Attorney General himself.

Young: Wheeler used his position as a sitting member of the United States Senate to lobby the Justice Department to fire Maloney.

Maddow: Senator Burton Wheeler decided to pay a private visit to Attorney General Francis Biddle at his office inside the Justice Department. In what was described as a stormy and violent session, Senator Wheeler reportedly threatened the Attorney General that he as a Senator would launch an investigation not just of Maloney and the sedition case. He would launch an investigation of the entire Department of Justice, from the Attorney General personally on down, unless the Attorney General fired Maloney and took him off the case.

Attorney General Francis Biddle in the face of that threat, he caved. He gave in to that pressure from Senator Wheeler and the other members of Congress. He fired William Maloney from the investigation. Maloney himself got the news while he was sitting at his desk, working. First he’d heard of it was when a newspaper reporter called him up to ask his reaction to getting fired. He'd had no idea. They hadn’t bothered to tell him.

In the middle of his investigation, William Maloney was removed as prosecutor because of pressure from members of Congress who themselves were implicated in his investigation. After Attorney General Francis Biddle made that stunning decision to remove Maloney from the case, The Washington Post published a blistering editorial criticizing the decision.

The Post said, “In this case, the public could have been sure that Mr. Maloney would have pulled no punches, whether the evidence incriminated a conspirator or embarrassed one of his friends in Congress. Maybe that was why Congressional friends of the defendants hated and feared this prosecutor and publicly harassed the Attorney General with windy threats of investigation, with boasts of what they would do to the Department of Justice unless they got Mr. Maloney’s scalp. Well now they have it.”

If this investigation was going to continue, if the trial of these indicted seditionists was gonna take place, somebody new would have to come in and take over and face down the same sorts of threats and harassment from those members of Congress who saw themselves in danger, who saw themselves implicated and who had just used their power and influence to vanquish the threat. Or so they thought.

Radio Reporter: The federal grand jury has indicted again 28 men and women on charges that they have conspired to establish a Nazi government in the United States.

Radio Reporter: If what we’ve seen so far is any forecast of things to come, this is going to be a legal three-ring circus.

O. John Rogge: My conscience wouldn't let me do anything else than make those facts public at one time or another.

Hart: The courtroom accounts from this trial are absolutely astonishing.

Maddow: That is still to come.

“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.

This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is Executive Produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz, and it's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Fact checking support from Nina Bisbano. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. Out Head of Editorial is Madeleine Haeringer. Archival radio material is from NBC Newsvia the eighth wonder of the world, the Library of Congress. With additional sound from CBS News.

Special thanks to historian Nancy Beck Young. You should definitely check out her excellent book. It’s called “Why We Fight: Congress and the Politics of World War II.”

You can find much more about this series – you can see Montana U.S. Senator Burton Wheeler giving his squishy, little Hitler salute; you can see a photo of William Power Maloney's raid on the America First committee; you can see Hamilton Fish make an awkward cameo in a Warren Beatty movie from the 80s – you can see it all at our website: MSNBC.com/ultra

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Young: If a particular family did not have a family member fighting in the war, they were still touched by the war through rationing and price controls. So women could not buy stockings because silk was being rationed to make parachutes. People could not buy new tires for their car because rubber was being rationed. Tin was being rationed, so fewer canned goods to be purchased. And Americans were taught to save and recycle, including recycling cooking grease for the war effort. To the day she died, my mother saved her cooking grease for that, that reason. She had been trained so well in the 1940s. Everyone was shaped in some way, shape, or form by the war.

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Episode 6

Nov. 7, 2022, 12:01 PM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 6: Bedlam

The most high-profile sedition trial in American history kicks off inside a Washington, D.C. federal courtroom. The members of Congress who attempted to quash the investigation are now faced with a super-charged indictment and a brand new Justice Department prosecutor who is battle tested and up for the challenge. What he finds as the curtain rises on the trial, though, is something that he is wholly unprepared for: pre-planned, unmitigated chaos.

Rachel Maddow: The note was written in black pencil, on cheap white paper. It said: “You will die before Wednesday if you don’t get out of this city. We just paid 18-thousand dollars for your death. You must die.” And then the note was signed. It was signed, “The Bullet Gang.” And tucked inside the envelope with the note were two 38-caliber bullets. That death threat was addressed to a lawyer, a man named O. John Rogge.

John Rogge was a young man, but he was a big deal in the Justice Department already. He had risen fast at D.O.J. He’d become the head of the criminal division at Main Justice before he was even out of his 30s.

But the night those two bullets rolled out of that envelope with his name on it, and into the palm of his hand, John Rogge was on assignment for the Justice Department far away from his impressive office in Washington, D.C. He’d been sent down to Louisiana to work on a big and dangerous case.

Radio Announcer: The National Broadcasting Company brings you an address by the honorable Huey P. Long, United States Senator from Louisiana.

Maddow: United States Senator Huey Long – the former Governor of Louisiana – he was a god-like figure in Louisiana politics.

Governor Huey Long: Get out! Organize your friends! Let’s make the fight! Let’s make the politicians keep the promises, or vote somebody into office that will keep the promises! That in this land of abundance, none shall have too much! None shall have too little!

Maddow: Huey Long was the very definition of populism. A man of the people. Somebody who would fight for the little guy.

Long: How many men ever been to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what's intended for nine tenths of the people to eat. The only way you'll ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some that grub he ain't got no business with. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

Maddow: Huey Long as Governor of Louisiana, he was just a huge political presence. He was such a good speaker. He sold his brand of populism so effectively, he became not just important in his home state or in the south. He became a national force. And then he came to Washington. He was elected to the U.S. Senate on his trademark promise to share the wealth to “make every man a king.”

Long: So I give you that plan of our Share Our Wealth society for the sponsoring of which I am labeled America’s menace and madman and pied piper and demagogue!

Maddow: America's menace and mad man and pied piper and demagogue. Huey Long was a lot of things. He was called a lot of things. He was also – to put it mildly – wildly corrupt.

Radio Announcer: The voice of the demagogue is heard in the land. Senator Huey Long of Louisiana. He makes his bid to become dictator of America.

Maddow: Huey Long brought the whole state of Louisiana under the control of his political machine. He ran it like a mob boss. Everybody kicked up to him. He had a piece of everyone's action. He took total control of all elections in the state. Also all appointed offices. He stacked every level of state government and even local government with people who answered only to him. He used bribes and threats to just take anything he wanted, including from the state legislature.

He was also vicious to his enemies. He was accused of kidnapping. He was accused of trying to arrange the murder of a political opponent. It's cliché to say that powerful elected officials see themselves as above the law. Huey Long took that to another level. He would say, “I am the Constitution.”

But then, at the peak of his power and his influence, as a rising national figure, as a potential contender for the presidency, Huey Long was killed in 1935. He was the first-ever U.S. Senator to be assassinated while in office. He was home in Louisiana. He was at the state capitol at Baton Rouge, and he was ambushed and shot.

Radio Announcer: A target of an assassin’s bullet was Huey Long, Louisiana’s bombastic strongman of the Bayou.

Maddow: Even after the death of Huey Long though, the political machine that he had built in Louisiana, it kept going. The election rigging, the violence, the gangster tactics, the extortion, just the profound corruption that he had overseen, it kept going after his death.

And so, in 1939, the Justice Department sent down to Louisiana a high-powered, high-profile lawyer to investigate. A hot shot prosecutor. They sent John Rogge to investigate how the Huey Long machine was working and whether it could be broken up. That's why those two bullets rolled out of that envelope and into John Rogge’s hand.

Rogge was in Louisiana to try to dismantle the Huey Long political machine to clean up all of that corruption. The bullet gang that sent Rogge that death threat, whoever they were, they were trying to scare him off. They were going to make sure he would not succeed in that mission in Louisiana.

The night he received that death threat, with the bullets in the envelope, Rogge gave a statement to reporters. He told them, “I can only say, any threat like [t]his will only make me strive harder to uncover any scandal in this state, or any other place. The United States Department of Justice cannot be threatened.”

And then Rogge made good on that promise. He pursued his investigation. He brought federal charges. He got federal convictions against every level of Huey Long's Louisiana machine, including one of the men who succeeded Long as Governor. Rogge got him a decade-long prison sentence. It was big, national news. Those indictments, those convictions, they were called sensational in papers like The New York Times. Taking down the invincible Huey Long machine – that was a career-making triumph for a man who frankly was already on the fast track to the top of the Justice Department.

After his success in Louisiana, John Rogge returned to Washington with that feather in his cap. Now more than ever, he was a man to watch. John Rogge was therefore the obvious choice for what would be the next higher-than-high-profile case that the Justice Department was about to take to court.

Radio Announcer: In New York, the alleged ringleaders of a fantastic Christian Front plot to overthrow the United States government by force are now behind federal bars.

Maddow: The Christian Front case. When the FBI and the Justice Department arrested and brought charges against 17 members of Father Coughlin’s Christian Front militia in 1940 – the guys who were stockpiling bombs, and ammunition, and U.S. military heavy machine guns, training for a violent takeover of the federal government – the man the Justice Department tapped to try that case in federal court was that rockstar lawyer, John Rogge, who had just come back from his triumph in Louisiana.

It was Rogge’s job to prove to that Brooklyn jury that these 17 members of Father Coughlin’s Christian Front were guilty of sedition. But that is not how it worked out. He didn't get any of them. When that case fell apart in the summer of 1940, when it fell apart in spectacular fashion, and the Christian Fronters were all set free and even given their guns back, that was on John Rogge’s watch. He had been brought in specially from Main Justice to be the very high-profile prosecutor in that case.

So in very quick succession, he went from triumph against all the odds in Louisiana, to failure despite all the evidence in New York. That failed prosecution of the Christian Front was not just a high-profile embarrassment for the U.S. Justice Department. For John Rogge, it was a high-profile personal failure, as well. He really fell from a great height there in terms of his reputation.

But you get back up again. Sometimes you get a chance at redemption. And it turned out that the Christian Front trial would not be John Rogge’s last shot at locking up a band of violent seditionists set on ending American democracy and overthrowing the U.S. government.

Through a very unusual series of events, John Rogge was about to take over the single biggest sedition case in United States history. The case charged dozens of Americans with trying to violently overthrow the government. That implicated dozens of sitting members of Congress, as well. Elected officials from both parties, who, amazingly, had just managed to pressure the Justice Department, pressure the Attorney General, into firing the prosecutor who had led the investigation and who had been in charge of the case.

But when they got prosecutor William Power Maloney fired from the sedition case in Washington, the Senators and Congressmen linked to the plot, who pressured the Attorney General to get rid of Maloney, those members of Congress actually only got half of what they wanted. Yes, they did get William Maloney fired. But they didn't get the investigation canned altogether.

Maloney was out, but this new prosecutor came in and took over his work: John Rogge. A man who had faced down actual bullets meant to scare him off a case. A man who had made his name exposing wrongdoing at the highest levels of government. A man who was not built to be intimidated either by insurrectionists or by their protectors in Congress, even if his bosses were.

This is Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.

(OPENING TITLES)

Radio Announcer: The federal grand jury has indicted again 28 men and women on charges that they have conspired to establish a Nazi government in the United States.

Nancy Beck Young: You have the leading American fascists and Nazi sympathizers on trial here in the United States.

Radio Announcer: 22 defense lawyers – count ‘em, 22 – raised legal pandemonium yesterday.

Radio Announcer: If what we’ve seen so far is any forecast of things to come, this is going to be a legal three ring circus.

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Maddow: Episode 6: Bedlam.

John Rogge was German-American. He grew up speaking German at home with his immigrant parents. He graduated college at the age of 19. He then ripped through Harvard Law School in two years. He was the youngest person who had ever been awarded a Harvard Law Degree.

But as quickly as he ascended and as high as he flew, Rogge was now facing the daunting, even humbling, task of inheriting the highest-profile case in the whole country. Inheriting it midstream from another prosecutor whose career had just been ended by the same case.

Radio Announcer: There is no doubt the government will bear down strong following the statement of special prosecutor William Power Maloney.

Maddow: Special prosecutor William Power Maloney did not get to finish the case that he started. After he was specially assigned by the Attorney General to investigate Nazi penetration in the United States, William Maloney had swung for the fences. He had indicted more than two dozen Americans for sedition – for conspiring to violently overthrow the government of the United States, to replace democracy with a form of American fascism.

Radio Announcer: The Department of Justice has indicted 28 men and one woman…

Maddow: Maloney’s sedition indictment wrapped up ultra-right groups and fascists planning violence against government targets. It also included individuals linked to a Nazi plot in Congress, a scheme in which members of Congress helped a German agent send Nazi propaganda to millions of Americans homes.

This was stuff written by or approved by the Hitler government in Berlin to try to exacerbate internal conflicts and resentments here among Americans. To make us distrust and dislike and lose faith in our allies who were fighting Germany in Europe. Also to just soften up any hard feelings Americans might have toward Hitler and the Nazis, and fascism in general. One congressman, Jacob Thorkelson of Montana, worked with George Viereck, the Nazi agent, to mail out five thousand copies of a friendly, sympathetic interview with Adolf Hitler.

Radio Announcer: From our Washington studios, we now bring you an address by Representative J. Thorkelson of Montana.

Maddow: Congressman Thorkelson was given this friendly Hitler interview by the Nazi agent George Viereck. The Congressman added his own supportive comments, and then he mailed out thousands of copies of it from his congressional office, with the printing and postage costs covered by the U.S. taxpayer.

Franked envelopes from Congressman Hamilton Fish's office were used to send out literature from the armed fascist group the Silver Shirts, as well as a mail-order form for people to receive copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Jewish forgery promoted by the Nazi party and by anti-semites all over the world.

William Power Maloney's indictment hit the armed fascist groups and also the Nazi propaganda operation in Congress. Maloney had even tiptoed into the very controversial territory of issuing federal grand jury subpoenas to members of Congress, starting with Hamilton Fish. But right in the middle of his investigation, Maloney was suddenly out, removed from the case, when members of Congress implicated in the propaganda scheme pressured the Justice Department into firing him. When Maloney was fired from the sedition case, it was John Rogge who was handed the reins to take over.

Bradley Hart: O. John Rogge in this period is approaching a household name if he is not already. Rogge is seen as a rising star in the Department of Justice.

Maddow: That’s historian Bradley Hart. John Rogge was a big deal – he was this wunderkind attorney who had taken down Huey Long’s political machine in Louisiana. But he's also the guy who had then face-planted in the trial of the Christian Front in New York.

Hart: Rogge has a mixed record as a prosecutor. But he is not mixed at all in his commitment to try to shut down these extremist groups whenever possible. When Rogge sort of takes on the sedition trial, I think there's this perception that this is the right man for the job, that he is a crusading Department of Justice leader, that he has the most experience perhaps of anyone in prosecuting pro-Nazi organizations, and that he will be dogged in his pursuit of these people. He sees this as his wartime duty in some ways, that this is his way of contributing to the war effort and ensuring that Nazi efforts to subvert the U.S. are not successful.

Maddow: John Rogge knew how important the case was to the country, but he also knew what had happened to his predecessor who developed the case in the first place.

So he started by stripping the case down to the studs. Taking it apart. Rogge set aside the indictments that had already been handed down by Maloney’s grand jury. He started a top-to-bottom review of the whole investigation up to that point. He pored over volumes of grand jury testimony that had been gathered. He hauled back in some of the witnesses who had already testified to Maloney’s grand jury. He brought them in front of his own grand jury. And he called some new witnesses, too.

Rogge conducted this intensive review behind closed doors for nearly a full year, presumably to the delight of the members of Congress who had forced the firing of his predecessor. They bought themselves a year of breathing room. It looked like maybe they bought themselves the Justice Department being off of their back entirely.

Until a few days after New Years in 1944, when John Rogge burst back into public view to show the country and the world what he had been up to. He basically said, O.K., my review is over. Now, it’s showtime.

Radio Announcer: The federal grand jury has indicted again 28 men and women on charges that they have conspired to establish a Nazi government in the United States.

Maddow: Indicted again. And the members of Congress involved with Nazi agent George Sylvester Viereck, they were not off the hook after all.

Radio Announcer: George Sylvester Viereck, you remember the man who has been prominent for several years as a Nazi propagandist, heads the list of those who've been indicted.

Maddow: John Rogge's indictment landed like a bomb in Washington. Those members of Congress who had forced out his predecessor William Maloney, they did that for a reason. They wanted this whole sedition case to go away. They wanted the investigation to stop.

Well, Rogge had not only not stopped it, he had sharpened it. He focused the sedition allegations on the troops. On the armed forces. Targeted efforts to recruit guard, reserves, and active-duty U.S. troops to get them to join these ultra-right groups and arm and train them for the overthrow of the U.S. government. The effort to demoralize U.S. troops, and even their families, to turn them against the allied side in the war and toward the Nazis.

Here’s historians Nancy Beck Young and Steven Ross.

Young: They've been charged with trying to undermine the U.S. military both in terms of military morale and military effectiveness. So, they're charged with essentially trying to create a revolt among the ranks of the troops.

Steven Ross: These people are all, at one point, either calling for the overthrow of the American government, or something that is also illegal is, you cannot tell men to avoid a draft and not serve in the armed forces. That is a crime.

Maddow: So when John Rogge inherited this case, he focused the sedition allegations on the undermining of the U.S. armed forces specifically. He also tightened the focus on Germany.

According to Rogge’s new indictment, the defendants “unlawfully, willfully, feloniously and knowingly conspired with officials of the Government of the German Reich and leaders of the Nazi Party.”

Radio Announcer: 28 men and two women are indicted on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government, and demoralize the armed forces. Such names as Hitler, Goring and Goebbels appear in the indictment –

Radio Announcer: – for allegedly conspiring with the Nazis to stir up trouble in our armed services.

Maddow: Conspiring with the Nazis. In other words, Rogge was charging them with collusion. He named German Nazi leaders in the indictment. And he prepared evidence that the defendants in the case weren’t just Americans who happened to share goals and a world-view with the Nazis. He prepred evidence that they were working with the Nazis toward a common aim.

Hart: Certainly people have the First Amendment right to speak out against the government and to criticize what elected officials are saying and the policies the administration is pursuing. On the other hand, these people have gone a little bit further than that. I mean, these are people who have gone to Nazi Germany. They actually have relationships with people in a hostile government effectively. And there's certainly evidence that suggests that the things that they were doing in the United States, if not done at the direct behest of Nazi Germany, were deeply influenced by Nazi Germany's interest.

Maddow: You might remember that one of the sedition defendants – a man named George Deatherage – had been caught planning a nationwide burst of violence to overthrow the 1940 presidential election results by force. One of the unnerving things about that plot was that when Deatherage was making those plans, he had just returned from Germany, where he had been a guest of the Nazi government.

Rogge collected evidence for his sedition indictment that it wasn't just Deatherage, it was defendant, after defendant, after defendant who had actually been brought over to Germany by the Hitler government and then sent back into the United States to resume their work. Rogge had copies of the defendants’ correspondence, writing to the German government in Berlin, asking for instructions and assistance, asking for funding. He had correspondence from the German government commending them for their work and offering further help.

Young: They are a list of the who's who of the extreme right in the United States, all with Nazi ties in some way, shape, or form. You have the leading American fascists and Nazi sympathizers on trial here in the United States.

Maddow: So, imagine how this all landed with the members of Congress who were tied up in this thing. By this time in 1944, America was beyond fully engaged in the war against the Nazis. And this was a trial in Washington D.C. of accused Nazi sympathizers and Nazi agents. Fascists who were allegedly trying to overthrow the U.S. government and set up a Hitler-style regime here. Defendants who in some cases were traveling back and forth to Germany as guests of the Nazis, corresponding with them, taking funding from them, and trying to sabotage the U.S. military.

You want to be the member of Congress who's exposed as working with these folks? Taking money from some of the same sources? Using your America First mailing lists to help out this cause, and help out these people? This was a trial that promised to expose all of that.

Members of Congress thought they’d successfully eliminated the threat of this investigation when they got John Rogge's predecessor fired. But now they saw this case revived, even bigger this time, and coming right at them. When John Rogge got this case into the courtroom, though, he would come up against his toughest challenge yet. A new enemy that he hadn't foreseen: chaos.

Radio Announcer: If what we’ve seen so far is any forecast of things to come, this is going to be a legal three-ring circus.

Hart: The courtroom accounts from this trial are absolutely astonishing.

Radio Announcer: Probably nothing so daffy has ever been put on in the history of American courts.

Hart: It really just becomes a fiasco very quickly.

Maddow: That’s next.

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Radio Announcer: (NEWSREEL MUSIC) Sedition trial opens in Washington. The FBI dragnet brings in a strange assortment of people, 30 in all, charged with scheming to establish a Nazi government in the United States.

Maddow: On April 17th, 1944, the curtain was officially raised on the biggest sedition trial in U.S. history. The trial was held at the federal courthouse in downtown Washington, D.C. And it was in every newscast in the country. It was on the front page of all the papers.

Radio Announcer: Chief Justice Edward C. Eicher presides at the trial of 30 alleged seditionists. The government’s case is presented by special assistants to the Attorney General, prosecutor O. John Rogge.

Maddow: Usually even big, splashy front-page-news court cases start out on the boring side. At least they all start off predictably, with the boilerplate procedural stuff that has to start every trial. But when the biggest sedition trial in U.S. history gaveled into session in April 1944, it didn't start slow. There was a big surprise right from the beginning. One of the defendants was missing.

Radio Announcer: Among the defendants rounded up by the FBI, Edward James Smythe, delaying the trial’s opening by his failure to appear.

Maddow: When the clerk called the roll on day one of the trial, one of the alleged seditionists, Edward James Smythe – who had headlined joint rallies between the Klu Klux Klan and the German American Bund, who had corresponded with the German Government asking their help in propagandizing the American people and targeting Jews – Mr. Smythe, when it came time for him to face trial, he was gone. Even his lawyer said he had no idea where he was.

It took a few days, but they eventually did find him. When Mr. Smythe was hauled back into court, he told the judge that the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding. He just got his dates mixed up. That seemed slightly implausible given the fact that they had caught him about 40 miles south of the Canadian border, and still heading north.

Radio Announcer: ​​Smythe was picked up near the Canadian border.

Maddow: The FBI said he appeared to be on his way out of the country masquerading as a vacationing fisherman.

That delay while the FBI had to go hunt down one of the defendants, that unexpected disruption on day one, that might have been a bit of a sign.

Radio Announcer: If what we’ve seen so far is any forecast of things to come, this is going to be a legal three-ring circus.

Maddow: 30 alleged seditionists, 22 defense attorneys, the prosecutors, the judge, the jury pool, reporters – lots of reporters reporters – members of the public, everybody in the same 38-by-40 foot room. The inside of that courtroom in downtown Washington D.C., it was absolutely packed. It was also tense. And soon it was cacophonous.

Radio Announcer: They may get around to picking a jury for Washington’s super-colossal sedition trial. 22 defense lawyers – count ‘em, 22! – raised legal pandemonium yesterday.

Maddow: If you’re hired as a defense attorney, your job is to seed doubt in the minds of the jury, to rebut the allegations of the indictment, to puncture the prosecution's case for your client's guilt. In the case of the mass sedition trial, the sheer size of the indictment, the sheer number of defendants – that gave defense lawyers an opening to at least sow confusion, to make it as difficult as possible for the prosecution to present their case, or for the jury to be able to follow along with what was happening.

Young: Let's stretch this out as much as we possibly can by introducing complex motion after complex motion, most of them also ridiculous. But the judge is gonna have to read these motions and then rule on them.

Maddow: The Washington Post reported that defense attorneys “resorted to every legal trick at their command to forestall the proceedings and suppress the painstakingly gathered evidence.” The 22 defense lawyers argued that the whole investigation was illegal, and that of course all the charges should be thrown out.

They made multiple accusations that the judge was biased, insisting that he had to recuse himself from the case. When those demands were denied by the court, they filed appeals in higher courts, and then lost those appeals, too.

They moved to subpoena prosecutor John Rogge himself, to put the prosecutor on the stand. They accused Rogge of bribing witnesses, of paying witnesses. They also said the court reporter should be removed from the case because she worked for a company that employed a Jewish executive. That actually ended up being kind of a theme for the defense lawyers and for their clients.

Radio Announcer: The pick of the bunch of pro-Hitlerites is Mrs. Lois de Lafayette Washburn, a flamboyant notoriety-seeker who rips off a Nazi salute to her hero, Mr. Schickelgruber.

Maddow: On the steps outside the courthouse, one of the defendants repeatedly giving Nazi salutes, trying to upset onlookers and the press. Another defendant decided one afternoon to not show up. He didn't go on the run, exactly, like Mr. Smythe did, he just decided he wanted to keep an appointment with his dentist. The defendants, the defense lawyers, the jury, the prosecutors, the judge, everyone in court was left twiddling their thumbs for close to an hour while they waited for the guy's dental appointment to finish up. Another of the defendants claimed that he just felt like he didn't belong. That the whole vibe of the trial was just a little crimey for his taste.

Radio Announcer: Lawrence Dennis’s counsel doesn’t like the court’s atmosphere. He says lining up defendants under heavy guard gives the whole proceeding an air of criminality.

Maddow: An air of criminality. At a criminal trial. The defendants not only took aim at the judge and the prosecution. They also went at it with each other.

Radio Announcer: Not only don’t the defendants agree with the government, they can’t agree with each other. Viereck’s lawyer dually disclaims any connection with any defendant who will leave this court and give a Nazi salute in the streets. Viereck’s lawyer also has disparaging remarks on his post-war planning colleagues, who want the trial held up until they can call Adolf Hitler, Joseph Paul Goebbels, Rudolph Hess, and Winston Churchill to witness the innocence of their clients.

Maddow: Oh, they planned to call Winston Churchill, too, as a witness for the defense.

If it sounds like a circus, that’s because it was a circus. At one point The New York Times led a front page story on the trial with news that the judge himself had been driven out – he had left the courtroom because of what the Times described as a "violent uproarious argument" among the defense lawyers and defendants. The judge just couldn't stand the screaming anymore, so he got up and left.

Hart: The courtroom accounts from this trial are absolutely astonishing. There are people who are willing under oath to repeat vile antisemitic lies. Many of the people on trial here have no qualms about showing themselves to be Nazi sympathizers. We have people who are giving the Nazi salute to reporters and in the courtroom. We have people who are willing to testify on the stand about supposed Jewish world plots and things of that sort.

Maddow: The judge allowed defense counsel to ask prospective jurors if they were Jewish, if they had Jewish relatives, or if they read Jewish publications. And it got even weirder than that. Prospective jurors were asked by defense counsel: "What does Jew mean?" "What does international bankers mean?" "What is meant by Mongolian Jew?" "What is zionism?" "Do you think the Jews are an international people?" "Do you think Jesus was a Jew."

The judge allowed defense lawyers to ask those questions, and then to reject prospective jurors based on their answers to these questions. The resulting 12-person jury had zero Jewish people, zero African-Americans, and at least three German-Americans.

One defense lawyer told the jury that the government’s case was a “Jewish conspiracy.” He also railed in court about "Jewish international bankers" and tried repeatedly to introduce the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence.

The judge allowed the trial to get so out of hand that the chaos in the courtroom ended up becoming a bigger story than the sedition charges themselves. The headlines from the time make it clear:

“Uproar Halts Sedition Trial.”

“Tumult is raised in Sedition Trial.”

“Sedition Defendants’ Tactics Irritate Judge, [and] Entertain Spectators”

Radio Announcer: This morning in the 5th week of Washington’s 29-ring sedition trial, we finally got a jury after the judge has beaten down a lot of post-war planning lawyers.

Maddow: Because of all the antics and the outbursts and the violent uproars and unscheduled breaks for dental care, and all the rest, it took so long to seat the jury that one of the defendants up and died during the process. Of the original 30 defendants, only 29 of them actually ended up making it to opening statements.

But finally, in mid-May 1944, more than a month after the trial was supposed to start, John Rogge would finally get to make his opening statement. He would finally get to state his case. At least in theory he would.

In the end, in that particular courtroom before that particular judge, he couldn’t do it. Or at least he couldn't do it in a way that anyone could hear. It was just bedlam, right from the moment John Rogge attempted to start his opening argument.

Radio Announcer: Well, they should have held the sedition trial in Madison Square Garden or in Bedlam. Probably nothing so daffy has ever been put on in the history of American courts. The case finally got started today, and the prosecution tried to make opening statements. John Rogge tried to talk through cat calls and comments from the defense tables. Defense attorneys were popping up all over the place with motion after motion, and the 29 defendants themselves indulged in asides, shouts, stage whispers, and at one point broke into a kind of derisory chant.

Maddow: Cat calls and comments. Shouts and chants – they were chanting. At one point, the defendants banded together and repeatedly shouted at John Rogge to sit down and shut up.

Hart: You have dozens of defendants, all potentially with their own legal teams, you have this, this extensive Department of Justice, you know, prosecutorial contingent, and you have dozens of, of defendants who have the right to be in the courtroom here for these, this trial that drags on day after day, month after month.

Maddow: At a crucial point in his opening statement, the defendants and their attorneys hurled objections at John Rogge for more than thirty minutes straight. The Washington Post described it as “bedlam [breaking] loose in the courtroom. [Defense] lawyers in every corner of the court room shouting their objections, the din becoming so intense, they could not hear [even] their own voices.”

Radio Announcer: Sometimes the prosecutor’s voice was drowned out by a chorus of objections from defense attorneys. And now and then, such strident screams from defendants as “that’s a damn lie” or “I’m a republican, not a Nazi.”

Maddow: The New York Times described it as an “uproar with the judge rapping for order and marshals stepping in to attempt to restore order.” Prosecutor John Rogge wasn't able to choke out more than a few words at a time. Nobody could hear him.

Radio Announcer: It took a half a dozen marshals today to keep them quiet enough to let the government merely state its case. They don’t seem to have any more sense of self discipline in court than so many jackrabbits.

Maddow: John Rogge’s opening statement was scheduled to take two hours. Because of the environment in the courtroom, though, it took all day. And nobody really knows how much of it the jury could hear over all the noise and the chaos.

But when you go back and read those parts of the court transcript from Rogge’s prepared opening statement, you strip out all the yelling and the screaming and the chanting and the booing, you can see that what Rogge is trying to do is explain to the jury what was at stake for us as a country. What it means for there to be a concerted ongoing effort by some Americans to end our democracy, especially when they have the help of powerful allies inside our government. Rogge was trying to explain, over the pandemonium, what we as a nation stand to lose if we don’t do something about it.

Here is O. John Rogge, from his prepared remarks to the jury. He said:

“[The defendants] intended to impose on us a one-party system, just as the Nazis had done before them in Germany. The evidence will show that they intended to abolish the Republican and the Democratic parties. The evidence will show that they intended to abolish freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom from arrest without cause, and all the other civil liberties guaranteed to us by the constitution.

Thereafter, the evidence will show they intended to run this country not according to our constitution, but according to the so-called ‘fuhrer’ principle and the Nazi concept of Aryanism

The evidence will show that the defendants themselves talked in terms of bloodbaths, or blood flowing in the streets, [or] hanging people from lamp posts, of pogroms. One of the defendants stated that our pogroms in this country would make Hitler’s look like a Sunday school picnic.

The evidence will show that the defendants regarded themselves as enemies of democracy. According to them, democracy was decadent. It was weak, false, rotten, corrupt. It was senseless and dangerous. It was a monstrosity of filth. There was no principle, according to the defendants, that was as wrong as that of democracy.

The Nazis, and the defendants, were going to destroy it throughout the world.”

When the sedition trial would finally come to its shocking end later that year in 1944, no one would remember the substance of the prosecution's case, John Rogge’s warning about the type of threat this was and about the powerful Americans involved in it.

And that’s not just because of the bedlam in the courtroom. It was because the powerful Americans involved in this stuff, members of congress and senators, they were about to turn up the volume to add to the cacophony themselves.

And the judge who had completely lost control of that courtroom, who had already allowed it to spin into such chaos. The judge’s role was about to take a shocking turn. That no one had planned for. And no one knew how to handle.

It would drive the prosecutor in the sedition case to go rogue.

Radio Announcer: The prosecution had not even come close to presenting its side of the case.

Radio Announcer: The Justice Department official said the current trial will have to be terminated and hearings started all over again.

Hart: The government is left with this position of what do we do about this?

Maddow: And that is next time.

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“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.

This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is Executive Produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz, and it's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Our Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. Madeleine Haeringer is our head of editorial. Archival radio material is from NBC Newsvia the tall, dark, and handsome Library of Congress. With additional sound from CBS News.

You can find much more about this series – you can see the indictment that John Rogge brought against the sedition defendants, you can see one of the defendants throwing her Nazi salutes in front of the courthouse, you can see more about the creepy questions that defense lawyers asked potential jurors – all at our website: MSNBC.com/ultra

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Long: The Lord has answered the prayer. He has called the barbecue. "Come to my feast," he said to 125 million American people. But Morgan and Rockefeller and Mellon and Baruch have walked up and took 85 percent of the vittles off the table. (LAUGHTER/APPLAUSE) Now, how you going to feed the balance of the people? What's Morgan and Baruch and Rockefeller and Mellon going to do with all of that grub. They can't eat it. They can't wear the clothes. They can't live in the houses. Give 'em a yacht! Give 'em a palace! Send them to Reno and get them a new wife when they want it, if that's what they want. (LAUGHTER) But when they've got everything on the God's living earth that they can eat and they can wear and they can live in, and all that their children can live in and wear and eat, and all their children's children can use, then we got to call Mr. Morgan and Mr. Mellon and Mr. Rockefeller back and say, "Come back here. Put that stuff back on this table here that you took away from here – that you don't need. Leave something else for the American people to consume."

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Episode 7

Nov. 14, 2022, 10:51 AM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 7: Rinse, Repeat

The largest mass sedition trial in American history churns on. And continues descending into chaos. But the dozens of sedition defendants attempting to wreak havoc on the proceedings would soon get a high-profile assist. From serving members of Congress injecting themselves into the trial and coming to the defense of the accused seditionists standing trial. Before a verdict can be reached, one final twist calls into question whether the Justice Department will see the case to the end, or cut bait entirely.

Rachel Maddow: The governor of North Dakota was in trouble. William Langer, Bill Langer — he was known around his state as “Wild Bill”.

Nancy Beck Young: I think the first thing to say about William Langer is to draw focus to his nickname, “Wild Bill” Langer, and maybe that tells you all you need to know.

Maddow: That’s historian Nancy Beck Young. “Wild Bill” Langer was born in Casselton when it was still Dakota Territory. His dad was a member of the very first state legislature convened when North Dakota became a state. Young Bill did great in school, he went off and got a degree at Columbia in New York City. He was first in class there, he was class president. But then he came back to North Dakota to make good, to make a difference in his state. And he very quickly established himself as a political force to be reckoned with.

Young: He was not someone who practiced the fine art of reason and compromise. His style was aggressive and in your face.

Maddow: Bill Langer became an elected prosecutor in the state, and then he became Attorney General, and then he moved up to the top job of Governor. And in the summer of 1934, Governor Bill Langer was in trouble. He was involved in a scheme in North Dakota politics in which he was raising money for himself and his political party by effectively extorting the state’s employees.

Langer made all state employees redirect a part of their salary to pay for a subscription, a subscription to a weekly newspaper that was owned by officials in his political party. So if you’re a North Dakota state employee, each paycheck — say goodbye to a little portion of that because it’s being effectively kicked back to the Governor and his party. It generated a lot of money for his political party. It stuffed his friends’ pockets.

But this tidy little money making operation hit a snag when it came to one specific set of state workers: employees in the highway department. Now, they were technically state employees — they worked under the Governor — and so, like everybody else, cough up the cash out of your paycheck.

But importantly, highways are also federally funded. So if you work for the North Dakota highway department, because the federal government funds highways, your salary is paid in part by the feds. And for North Dakota Governor Bill Langer, that detail had potentially criminal implications. Because if it was federal funds that were being extorted, being diverted to private use, that might be a federal crime.

The U.S. Attorney in North Dakota, the top federal prosecutor in the state, opened an investigation. And Bill Langer, North Dakota’s sitting Governor, was charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.

While serving as Governor, Langer was put on trial in federal court. He was convicted. And then he was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. As a result, the state Supreme Court ruled that Bill Langer had to be removed as Governor. The state’s Lieutenant Governor would take over — which is all dramatic enough, but it got even more dramatic when Langer refused to go.

He refused to accept his conviction as legitimate. He said it was a politically-motivated prosecution. He rejected the court’s order that he be removed as governor. He hunkered down with a group of his political supporters in the state capitol. He declared martial law in the state. He attempted to declare North Dakota independent from the U.S. federal government. He physically barricaded himself inside the Governor’s office and refused to leave.

Langer's supporters marched on the state capitol, demanding that he be reinstalled in power. His supporters then started to march to the hotel where the Lieutenant Governor was staying. The lieutenant governor was named Ole Olson. As the Langer mob marched toward his hotel, one of them was heard shouting, “Shoot [Olson] at sunrise.” The result was a multi-day standoff.

In the end, Bill Langer did eventually give up physical control of the Governor’s office, but he didn’t go away quietly. He said he was the victim of “political persecution.” He said it was the U.S. Justice Department that ought to be investigated for their handling of his prosecution. And he insisted for a long time that he was still the rightful Governor. It was all a little bit crazy.

But it wasn't the end of the road for Wild Bill Langer. Because despite all of that, Bill Langer still had the full support of the Republican Party in the state of North Dakota. Republicans in North Dakota, after all that, they put Bill Langer forward as their party’s nominee for the United States Senate.

Senator William Langer: As long as I’m in the Senate, I will be in there battling for North Dakota, and for the United States of America.

Maddow: Bill Langer eventually managed to get his federal conviction overturned on appeal, but he really had staged an insurrection, declared martial law, declared his state independent from the United States. He’d physically barricaded himself in the state equivalent of the White House to try to hold power by force. And still, the Republican party put him forward as their party’s candidate in the 1940 election for U.S. Senate.

And then Langer won that election. Which meant Wild Bill Langer was now not just North Dakota’s problem, now he was a problem for the United States Senate.

Young: There were enough, enough people who protested his election that he was not automatically seated in January of 1941 when the new session of Congress convened.

Maddow: After he was elected to the Senate in 1940, Bill Langer was tentatively sworn in to take his seat. But the Senate immediately started a formal investigation into whether he was actually fit to serve in that body. They investigated Langer for more than a year.

Young: He was charged with being financially corrupt and moral turpitude.

Maddow: At the end of their investigation, the committee investigating Bill Langer accused him of having a “continuous, contemptuous, and shameful disregard for high concepts of public duty.” They described years of lawlessness, violations of his oath. The investigation concluded that Bill Langer had forfeited his right to serve as a U.S. Senator. They said on grounds of moral turpitude and corruption, Langer was unfit to serve in the United States Senate and he should not be allowed to take his seat. The full U.S. Senate then spent two weeks debating that recommendation.

His supporters argued that the voters of North Dakota knew who he was, they knew what they were getting, and they voted for him anyway. They argued that Langer’s disregard for the rule of law was seen at home as, essentially, a plus — a feature, not a bug.

And so, when it finally came up for a vote, the full Senate voted and they decided to seat Bill Langer. Yes, yes, armed insurrection, total lawlessness, yes. It’s fine.

Young: The Senate ultimately maintained a fairly low bar for admission to their ranks. His misdeeds were not viewed as worthy of his not being seated.

Maddow: Bill Langer serving in the United States Senate — a Senator who himself had been accused of federal crimes and definitely had a personal vendetta against a Justice Department he thought was out to get him — Bill Langer serving in the Senate in Washington, that was about to come in handy for a whole bunch of accused insurrectionists and seditionists who themselves were standing trial in Washington, and who were about to find out just how many friends they had in high places.

This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra.”

(OPENING TITLES)

Radio Anchor: Today, in the sixth week of our big sedition trial, they may reach the first witness. Then again, they may not.

Young: He goes on a rampage defending the defendants against the charges.

Radio Anchor: Twenty-seven defendants have been on trial, accused of conspiring to set up a Nazi-form of government in this country. The courtroom reached such a pitch that Justice Eicher was forced to resort to numerous contempt fines.

Young: He wants this to go away and he wants to use his power as Senator to make it go away.

Bradley Hart: I think they were in great legal jeopardy.

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Maddow: Episode 7: Rinse, Repeat.

Judge Edward C. Eicher had lost control of his courtroom. He was seven months into this trial that he was presiding over, the biggest sedition trial in U.S. history, and things had pretty much descended into total chaos.

Radio Announcer: Today in our big sedition trial, they may reach the first witness. Then again, they may not.

There were defendants who went on the lam: one on a run to the Canadian border, one on a run to the dentist, but at least those were unauthorized absences. The judge also allowed some other defendants to leave for a while if they had other stuff to do. Defendant Joe McWilliams, who was nicknamed Joe McNazi in the press, the judge allowed him to take up a regular factory job instead of coming to court for his trial each day.

Radio Anchor: Those indicted include such people as Elizabeth Dilling, author of “The Red Network.”

Maddow: The judge allowed another defendant, Elizabeth Dilling, to resume her day job as well. Her day job was touring the midwest with a pro-Nazi preacher who was running for President on the banner of something called the America First Party. At his rallies, it was Elizabeth Dilling's job to lead the crowd in singing antisemitic songs. The judge in the sedition trial let her leave court to go do that job during the middle of the trial.

Radio Anchor: But the pick of the bunch of pro-Hitlerites is Mrs. Louis de Lafayette Washburn, a flamboyant notoriety seeker.

Maddow: The other female defendant in the case would occasionally show up in the courtroom in a blue satin nightgown saying that her clothes had been stolen.

Radio Anchor: Among the defendants rounded up by the FBI is Edward James Smythe.

Maddow: Defendant Edward James Smythe, when he made it to court, he was believed to regularly show up drunk.

The defendants themselves, and the nearly two dozen defense lawyers who represented them, they frankly succeeded at overwhelming the judge and taking over the courtroom to such a degree that even dedicated reporters and observers soon couldn't follow what was happening.

But one day, about seven months in, something happened in the courtroom that, even for that trial, it seemed too much to believe. A group of the sedition defendants lined up in a kind of assembly line to stuff envelopes in the courtroom during the trial. They'd take one envelope, stuff it with a document, hand-address it, seal it, put it in a pile, and then they’d move on to the next. They were doing this in a group. It was an organized effort. They had a whole big stack of envelopes that they were working on. It was odd, even for a trial with lots of oddities.

One journalist who was watching them noticed that these weren’t regular envelopes the defendants had stacked up in front of them. They were congressionally franked envelopes from the office of a Republican U.S. Senator: William Langer of North Dakota.

What the defendants were busy stuffing into those envelopes was a speech that Wild Bill Langer had delivered on the Senate floor. A speech in which he offered a full-throated, guns-blazing defense of them, of the defendants, who at that moment were standing trial in D.C.

Young: He takes to the floor of the Senate and delivers a two-hour speech to his colleagues, two hours worth of Langer talking and defending the quote-unquote "good names" of the defendants in the case.

Maddow: In his senate speech, Langer had described the sedition defendants who were being held in the D.C. jail during the trial as “political prisoners.” He demanded that the charges against all of them be dropped. He said they were being “railroad[ed].” He singled out a bunch of them out by name.

Sedition defendant Lawrence Dennis, the author of "The Coming American Fascism," he’d been flown over to Germany by the Nazis, he was on the payroll of the Hitler government's propaganda agencies. Senator Langer described Dennis as “a man of moderate means.”

George Deatherage, the former Klansman who had also been brought over to Germany by the Nazis, who had set up armed cells around the country for a coup to overthrow the government after the 1940 presidential election, Senator Langer described George Deatherage blandly as an “industrial efficiency engineer with a son fighting in the service.”

Young: He saw this as a headline-grabbing moment to go speak out on behalf of the defendants and so he went with it.

Maddow: Senator Bill Langer gave his two-hour speech on the Senate floor about how all these people charged with sedition, they were all great people, they were great Americans.

The speech then went in the congressional record. He got the speech copied at taxpayer expense, he got lots of postage-paid envelopes from his Senate office, and then he enlisted this very weird little secretarial team of accused Nazi agents at their trial to stuff the envelopes in the courtroom so he could mail that speech out around the country, postage to be paid by the U.S. taxpayer.

The judge in the sedition case, as much as he'd let everyone get away with, this stunt from Senator Bill Langer was too insulting, even for him. The judge reportedly considered a blanket contempt of court citation for all the defendants, one that could result in him locking up the remaining defendants who weren't being held in jail during the trial already. The judge even reportedly considered holding Senator Langer himself in contempt, potentially threatening the Senator with jail time, too. The judge considered it, but he didn't do it.

Judge Eicher was reportedly concerned about all the members of Congress who were already expressing hostility to the trial, worried enough that he thought a contempt citation for the Senator — or for these defendants setting up a little congressional mailroom for the Senator in the courtroom — he worried it might spark even more harassment and antagonism and criticism from Capitol Hill. So he let it slide.

But it's worth considering that the envelope-stuffing thing in the courtroom wasn't a one-off disruption from a member of Congress. It was only the latest in a long line of them.

One day in September, Senator Bill Langer had come into the courtroom and thrown his arms around a number of the defendants who were there waiting for the proceedings to begin that day. He sat there talking for over an hour with four or five different defendants, including the convicted Nazi agent George Viereck.

In front of reporters, Senator Langer was whispering with the defendants, laughing, making his presence in the courtroom in support of them as ostentatious as he possibly could. Newspapers reported that his behavior with the defendants created a stir in the courtroom.

Young: He goes to the courthouse and visits with the defendants. Kind of glad-handing them and atta-boying them, so that's a bit of a problem, probably not wise for a sitting member of the Senate.

Maddow: Arguably not wise, but Senator Bill Langer was undeterred. During the course of the trial, he made regular visits to the sedition defendants who were being held in the D.C. jail. For the ones who weren't in jail, Senator Langer liked to be seen escorting some of them around town.

He took special interest in two of the jailed defendants who had been convicted once already of sedition in a case in California. They had told American men being drafted for the war that they should refuse to fight because they'd only be fighting for the Jews. They told American troops in uniform to switch sides and fight for the Nazis. They made public threats that American cities with large Jewish populations would be turned into slaughterhouses. Senator Bill Langer visited them in jail. and for some reason he sent one of them money.

Langer also said in the Senate that convicted Nazi agent George Viereck should not only be freed from jail, he should be paid reparations by the government, and the Justice Department should be investigated for having charged him as a Nazi agent in the first place.

But Senator Bill Langer wasn't the only member of Congress who was effectively adopting the sedition defendants. The other Senator from North Dakota, Senator Gerald Nye, was known to host weekly meetings in his Senate offices for the lawyers for the sedition case defendants. They met in Senator Gerald Nye’s Senate office to plot their courtroom strategy. Senator Nye also considered defendant Lawrence Dennis — the “Coming American Fascism” guy — he considered Dennis to be a close, personal friend. They knew each other from the America First Committee, where both were regular speakers.

There were a lot of America First Committee connections at the trial.

Hart: Some of these people, of course, we have to remember, are known to them. Some of these people had appeared in America First events.

Maddow: That’s historian Bradley Hart.

One of the defense lawyers in the trial had been the Oregon State Chairman of the America First Committee until he was forced out when it was revealed that he’d accepted funding for the group from a Nazi-controlled German organization.

One of the defendants had been quoted in LIFE Magazine in 1942 saying, "We would like to ban the Jews and emphatically burn them out. The Jews control the White House, the President is a Jew, his wife a Jewess, and Jews are running Washington and the nation. To get rid of the Jews, we will have to burn and kill them off." He was now a defendant at the sedition trial, but he had previously been the leader of the Pontiac, Michigan chapter of the America First Committee.

Another one of the defendants had personally been the organizer of paid appearances at America First rallies for Montana Democratic Senator Burton Wheeler. With all the America First Committee connections at the trial, it's perhaps not a surprise that the most high-profile America First members of Congress started to inject themselves into the trial, in all sorts of ways. Chief among them: Senator Wheeler, that America First all-star in the U.S. Senate.

Senator Burton Wheeler: I only wish there were more Americans in the United States of America that loved America First!

Maddow: Senator Burton Wheeler was very tightly associated with the America First Committee. He headlined rally, after rally, after rally for them. That famous photo of him had run in papers all across the country — that photo of him and Charles Lindbergh giving a stiff-armed salute at an America First event in 1941. During the course of the sedition trial, Senator Burton Wheeler took up for the defendants publicly, aggressively, and repeatedly.

Young: He is speaking out that this trial is wrong, it's politically motivated, this is un-American to do this, this sort of thing and is regularly speaking out for the defendants in the trial.

Maddow: Like Senator Bill Langer, Senator Burton Wheeler also sent money to one of the sedition defendants in jail. Wheeler also took to the floor of the Senate during the trial to describe the case as “one of the most disgraceful proceedings in American judicial history.”

Hart: I think a lot of this actually is self preservation. I mean, these are men who have been in touch with some of these groups and organizations for a number of years. The fact that there's an active trial that's on the front page really of, of the newspapers on a regular basis involving people that, that are not that far separated from the America First committee, or from some of these politicians directly, it's certainly causing people to sweat.

Maddow: Senator Burton Wheeler was so aggressive in his denunciations of the trial and in support of the defendants, that one of the defendants — the publicist who worked for Nazi agent George Viereck in D.C. — he told reporters during the trial that he was confident his friend Senator Burton Wheeler would quote, “ruin the case.”

Young: Burton Wheeler has more than a little concern about his own political security, in that, are charges gonna be brought against me as well? And so it's, I think from that place more than any other, that he goes on a rampage defending the defendants.

Hart: Wheeler and Nye both know that they were involved with Viereck. They know that that information is in the hands of the Department of Justice.

Maddow: Senator Burton Wheeler was not a disinterested, impartial observer. He had been part of the operation to launder Nazi propaganda through Congress. He was a big part of the America First committee which was up to its gills in this case. And Senator Wheeler had personally seen to it that the original prosecutor, William Power Maloney, had been fired off of this case. Well now, with the sedition trial finally in the courtroom, with this new prosecutor John Rogge at the helm, Senator Burton Wheeler just picked up right where he left off.

Young: It's essentially a wash, rinse, and repeat of his efforts to have Maloney fired by calling out Rogge as engaging in political persecution, that this guy, this guy needs to go. It's again, more self preservation on Wheeler's part. He does not want any negative press about his association with Viereck.

Hart: Probably there's some amount of fear here as well for people like Burton Wheeler who have been cavorting, we know, with some fairly extreme people for a number of years at this point. What is Wheeler afraid might come out in court? What documents might be introduced? What testimony might be made that might put him in a tough political spot?

Maddow: What might come out at the trial? What might come out in court? At one point in the trial, prosecutor John Rogge introduced evidence, a letter from Silver Shirts leader William Dudley Pelley, that described Pelley’s plans to have a retired general play a key role in the Silver Shirts’ plot to storm U.S. military armories and overthrow the government. This was a controversial, decorated former general who was flirting openly with fascism and antisemitism. He was seen as a hero in the America First movement.

The Silver Shirt leader, William Pelley, wrote to the general to enlist him in his plan for an armed coup against the government. He said to the general in that letter, “the weapons are in our hands.” He said that his next step would be that he planned to contact America First leader Charles Lindbergh, and also Montana Senator Burton Wheeler.

Serving members of Congress like Burton Wheeler and Hamilton Fish and Gerald Nye, they were at the center of the activities and the conversations of these defendants that were all now coming up at trial.

Hart: I think there's a certain amount, as well, of guilty conscience here, too. What if John Rogge decides to take a slightly different tack and starts indicting people who are associated with Viereck as well? I think they were in great legal jeopardy.

Young: He wants this to go away and he wants to use his power as Senator to make it go away. Wheeler is not as deep in as someone like Hamilton Fish, but he does not want the negative press.

Maddow: Hamilton Fish, for his part, he was also busy doing what he could to help stymie this prosecution. But Ham Fish took a slightly different tack. In the months leading up to the trial, Congressman Fish introduced a bill in the House to change the law, to change the Sedition Act, to basically remove the legal basis for the prosecution altogether.

Hamilton Fish’s congressional staffer George Hill was already convicted at this point. When Hill turned state's evidence and proved willing to testify about Fish's involvement, with the men that Hill conspired with also now facing trial, Congressman Ham Fish was doing anything he could to stop it.

Hart: I think the isolationists see this as a political opportunity as well. And they are very open about saying, you know, this is the Roosevelt administration overreaching, this is a form of tyranny.

Maddow: Portray the prosecution as politically motivated. Portray the defendants as small fry, innocent victims. Even change the law to make the prosecution impossible. Deflect and distract in order to obscure their own role in various parts of this scheme. It was a strategy from these members of congress. And it did create even more of a circus atmosphere surrounding the proceedings. More chaos and unpredictability in the courtroom, more pressure on the already overwhelmed judge.

Radio Anchor: The courtroom reached such a pitch that Justice Eicher was forced to resort to numerous contempt fines.

Radio Anchor: Chief Justice Eicher today dismissed defense attorney James J. Laughlin of Washington from having any other part in the mass sedition trial. Laughlin had demanded the impeachment of Justice Eicher. The justice also heard today about the ribbons the defense attorneys were sporting, calling themselves members of the Eicher Contempt Club because of the fines that had been assessed against them. The judge decided it was all very childish and unworthy of disciplinary action.

Maddow: The trial had started in April 1944. It was chaotic from day one. Through April, May, June, July, all through the summer and into the fall, the bedlam in the courtroom, and the criticism and stunts and political pressure from these America First members of Congress, it had just built and built and built.

The judge, Judge Edward Eicher, was being attacked from the right, from the defendants and their supporters on Capitol Hill. He was soon also being attacked and even mocked in the press for letting those defendants and their supporters make this case into a clown show. It stretched on month after month after month after month with no end in sight, and all the time getting worse and not better.

Until the day in November 1944 when Senator Bill Langer was having the defendants line up in the courtroom to form an assembly line stuffing envelopes for him. By the time that day arrived, Judge Edward Eicher had already ruled on more than 500 defense motions for a mistrial. He had heard 72,000 objections made by counsel in the case: 72,000!

He had levied contempt fines on seven different defense attorneys. He considered contempt charges against at least that one U.S. Senator who repeatedly showed up in court to make an ostentatious mockery of the proceedings. The defendants had launched an effort to have Judge Eicher impeached, not just recused from the case, but thrown off the bench altogether. They had brought lawsuits against the prosecutors. They had sung and chanted and screamed their way through such an array of delaying tactics, that by that day in November, there had already been 3 million words entered into the trial transcript. 18 thousand pages of a still-growing court record.

And it was nowhere near even half over. The prosecution said they planned to bring roughly 200 witnesses. By that day in November, roughly seven months in, they hadn’t put up their 200 witnesses, they had put up 39 of them. They still had that far to go. And then once the prosecution would be done mounting its case, then the defense would get its turn. There really was no end in sight.

Judge Edward Eicher was presiding over an unmitigated fiasco, and the people trying to make it a fiasco, trying to make it even worse, they knew it. And they kept upping, and upping, and upping the pressure. Until it got to the point where things finally, inevitably broke.

Radio Anchor: The prosecution had not even come close to presenting its side of the case.

Hart: The government is left with this position of what do we do about this?

Maddow: That’s next.

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Maddow: On the night of Wednesday, November 29th, 1944, the day Senator Bill Langer had the sedition defendants start stuffing envelopes for him in the courtroom, Judge Edward Eicher considered, but decided not to hold them all in contempt of court. He was worried about further provoking these members of Congress who had been criticizing the sedition trial so vociferously. He was worried. But he also just seemed a little off.

One of Judge Eicher's law clerks noticed that something seemed wrong. It seemed like maybe he wasn't feeling well. He kept turning his back to the court during the proceedings. It looked to her like he was gasping for air. The clerk begged the judge to adjourn court early, to go home and get some rest. Judge Eicher said it was just indigestion and he pressed on.

In a quiet voice, he tersely overruled the remaining objections voiced in the courtroom that day. At quitting time, he finally gaveled down, he announced that the court would be in recess til the following morning. Judge Eicher went home, he had dinner, and then he died in his sleep that night.

Radio Anchor: The farce that’s been playing in Washington under the title of the mass sedition trial had a tragic ending today. Presiding Justice Edward C. Eicher died at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, and a Justice Department official said the current trial will have to be terminated and hearings started all over again.

Maddow: His wife went to go wake him at 6 o’clock the next morning, but she found him dead. Judge Eicher, at the age of 65 years old, had suffered a massive heart attack.

Radio Anchor: Eicher, who believed that to be patient is a branch of justice, put up with all sorts of antics during the seven months the defendants have been on trial, accused of conspiring to set up a Nazi form of government in this country.

Maddow: When you look back at the news coverage during the great sedition trial in 1944, in retrospect now it seems clear that something was going to break, that it was just too out of control. But at the time, it was an absolute shock when Judge Edward Eicher died in the middle of the proceedings.

The following day, another judge from the D.C. District Court gaveled the court into session to announce Judge Eicher's death. And then the judge quickly gaveled the court back out of session to give everyone a chance to figure out what was going to happen next. Because now amid that shock, there was the suddenly very pressing matter of what would happen to the trial that Judge Eicher had been overseeing, the trial that needed some kind of resolution. But it was such a mess when the judge died, it wasn't clear how it could be brought to an end.

Radio Anchor: The prosecution had not even come close to presenting its side of the case. Meanwhile, one defendant had died, three others had been granted separate trials, hundreds of mistrial motions had been admitted by defense attorneys, some of the defendants had wandered away and hadn’t been seen in the courtroom for weeks.

Maddow: Could the government continue with the case? Would the entire thing have to start over from scratch? If this really was the end, were all of these defendants just going to be let off the hook?

Hart: This presents the Department of Justice with really not a lot of great options. But the government is left with this position of what do we do about this? You can't simply slot in a new judge. You would essentially have to start the trial over again.

Maddow: They couldn't simply slot in a new judge and pick up where the trial left off when Judge Eicher died. The defendants were asked, but they wouldn't consent to it, and it was their right to say no. That meant there would be a declaration of a mistrial in the sedition case, which is an ending of a sort. But it's not the same as an acquittal.

With a mistrial declared, the Justice Department would now have to decide if they wanted to bring the case again. Bring in a new judge to hear the case, and start it all over again from the very beginning, this case that was universally acknowledged to be a total debacle.

Radio Anchor: The mistrial ruling today now puts the matter up to Attorney General Biddle. He can order a new start, or he can forget the whole thing.

Maddow: A new start, or forget the whole thing. It was the Justice Department’s decision now how to proceed, if at all. Begin all over again with a new judge, or cut bait and walk away. Which do you think they chose?

Hart: And so, the Department of Justice simply abandons the case.

Maddow: In the wake of Judge Eicher’s death — facing the prospect of needing to start the whole proceeding all over again from jump, recognizing what a chaotic mess it had been the first go-around, and how much it was stirring up criticism of the Justice Department on Capitol Hill among the defendants' allies and fellow travelers in Congress — the Justice Department decided to give up. They threw in the towel.

Which, for prosecutor John Rogge, was crushing. He had tried and failed to convict members of the Christian Front in New York in the last big sedition trial of the era. He had now tried and failed to convict this band of alleged seditionists as well, many of whom had been working with members of Congress — members of Congress who had injected themselves into this trial. And in this case, he didn’t even get the chance to have a jury render a verdict. This was his own side just giving in.

For the defendants, the decision was obviously a win. At least for those of them who weren't already in jail on other charges, they'd get to walk out the front door of the courthouse. They'd just get to slip back into society to get back to their work.

But it was also a huge win for the members of Congress who had been involved in these schemes, who were involved in these efforts to subvert democracy, who had used the power of their offices to obstruct the investigation and then to delegitimize the prosecution. The death of the judge and the end of the sedition trial, that presumably would mean the end of any legal accountability for them, too.

Young: It provides a hall pass, if you will, for these individuals. It provides an excuse, a justification. I think that they set a precedent making it okay for elected officials to abrogate their constitutional oath by aiding and abetting the Viereck scheme. Their defense of and cheerleading for the defendants in the trial creates another dangerous precedent. They did establish precedence that we have seen far, far, far exaggerated in our own moment, to our peril.

Maddow: Those members of Congress, they got away with it. The end of the trial made sure of that, at least it seemed. Except, John Rogge wasn’t finished yet.

The trial didn't work. The trial arguably had killed the judge. The Justice Department was walking away, but John Rogge was not.

Hart: So in the course of the sedition trial, John Rogge receives a letter, seemingly out of the blue, from a captain who is actually in occupied Germany. And this captain tells Rogge some startling things. The captain says, you know, we've been recovering various documents from the Nazi archives and various places around Germany. We also are securing interviews with various surviving Nazi big wigs and things like that. And he says, you know, what we're finding is there is an incredible network of Nazi sympathizers all around the United States.

Maddow: Amidst the collapse of the sedition trial, John Rogge is alerted to more evidence that exists, evidence looking at all of this from the other side of the Atlantic. The trial, of course, has been happening at the same time that World War II has been happening. And as American soldiers advance toward Berlin, they’re recovering reams of previously secret Nazi documents — documents that, it turns out, detail from the German side the Hitler government's plot to undermine American democracy. German government documents that name names: American businessmen, far-right American fascists aligned with the Nazi cause, members of Congress.

Hart: It in fact includes great detail about the Viereck plot, including the names of all of the members of Congress who were involved in it. Rogge believes rightly that this is an absolute gold mine.

Maddow: An absolute goldmine. When the mistrial is declared, and the Justice Department doesn’t restart the case, the sedition defendants and the implicated members of Congress assume that they’ve gotten off scot-free. But John Rogge doesn't give up. He gets this information from this U.S. Army captain in Germany. Rogge then goes to Germany and he gets to work: pouring over these recovered documents that had been swept up from Nazi archives, personally interviewing high-ranking Nazi officials who had been captured on the battlefield.

Hart: Rogge comes back with I think probably the deepest understanding of anyone in the United States, if not the world, as to what the Germans had been up to in trying to subvert the United States.

Maddow: And then John Rogge comes home with all that evidence. And that is next time, in our final episode.

********************************

“Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra” is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.

This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series is Executive Produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It's produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our Associate Producer is Janmaris Perez. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Our Senior Executive Producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our Web Producer is Will Femia. Madeleine Haeringer is our Head of Editorial. Archival radio material is from NBC News, via the national library of the United States, the one and only Library of Congress, the biggest and most important library in the whole world, I could go on! With additional sound from CBS News.

You can find much more about this series — you can see all 18 thousand pages of the trial transcript boxed up at the national archives; you can see Wild Bill Langer's supporters storming through the streets of Bismarck, North Dakota to try to keep him in power — you can see it all at our website, MSNBC.com/ultra.

********************************

Young: Some of the evidence that comes out proving Langer's moral turpitude, in addition to his financial irregularities while governor, also dug back into his days as a defense attorney. He had one client in jail for — I don't remember what now. Said client was divorced and the only witness against Langer's client was the client's ex-wife. So Langer kidnapped the client from jail and the client's ex-wife, and drove them across the state line and forced them to get married again because the wife would not be compelled to testify against her husband because of spousal privilege. The ex-wife wasn't too keen on this scheme, but Langer promised her that as soon as the court case was over, her divorce would be filed and she would be free to go on about her life. She did. She remarried. And then she found out, much to her chagrin, that she was guilty of bigamy because Langer had never successfully filed the divorce paperwork for round two.

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Episode 8

Nov. 21, 2022, 12:39 PM UTC

Transcript

Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra

Episode 8: Ultra Vires

In the wake of the sedition trial's collapse, Justice Department prosecutor John Rogge travels overseas and uncovers a bombshell. He finds evidence of a coordinated effort to subvert American democracy… as well as the names of high-profile Americans involved. Rogge then returns to America... and goes rogue. Risking his career as a prosecutor, he makes public what he's discovered about the fascist threat and the Americans who supported it. And he offers a prescient warning about an American criminal justice system that is ill-equipped to defend democracy from those who seek to destroy it.

Carl Bates: Mutual invites you to "Meet the Press." This is Carl Bates speaking to you from Washington, D.C., where four of the country's ace reporters are gathered around the microphones ready to fire questions at Mr. O. John Rogge, former Special Assistant to the Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division --

Rachel Maddow: Justice Department prosecutor John Rogge was sitting at a bank of radio microphones on the set of “Meet the Press”. He was waiting to face questions from a phalanx of the country's top reporters.

Albert Warner: Mr. Rogge, and the things he has been saying, have been front page news all over the country.

Maddow: The reason John Rogge was front-page news all over the country was because of a cascading series of events that had just culminated in him being fired.

Doris Fleeson: Mr. Rogge, in plain American, you were fired. And I believe you believe that you got a raw deal.

Maddow: John Rogge had been head of the Criminal Division and Main Justice. He was a high-profile DOJ leader, almost a household name.

He had dismantled the Huey Long political machine in Louisiana. He'd taken the lead on some of the Justice Department’s highest-profile criminal cases.

But here he was getting ready for his grilling on "Meet the Press" because he'd been fired, and because of why he'd been fired, and because of what he'd been doing in the whirlwind that led up to it.

John Rogge had just spent the better part of a year prosecuting more than two dozen alleged seditionists in what Rogge had charged in court as a plot to subvert American democracy, to overthrow the American system of government, to institute fascism here.

In the courtroom, the sedition trial had descended into chaos, which was very much to the benefit of the defendants.

And then the whole thing had been upended -- suddenly -- with the surprise death of the judge in the case.

Radio Announcer: Associate Justice Proctor declared a mistrial because of the death last Friday of Chief Justice Edward C. Eicher.

Maddow: The sudden death of the judge overseeing the trial, which caused a mistrial in the case. The aggressively disorderly behavior of the dozens of sedition defendants and their lawyers. The intense criticism of the trial by members of Congress who had been involved with some of the defendants -- their intervention in the courtroom during the trial. The fact that it seemed like the trial would never come to any kind of end at all.

The Justice Department had had enough of all of it. They did not want to retry the case. And that may have been an unavoidable conclusion.

Rogge himself ultimately told the Justice Department that new Supreme Court decisions that had been handed down after the sedition trial started raised doubts about whether any convictions for sedition could survive an appeal.

He told the Justice Department, "I have come to the unpleasant conclusion that the Supreme Court will reverse any verdict which the government obtains in the sedition case."

After the judge died, and the mistrial was declared, it was clear that the case itself would come to an end. But Rogge believed the evidence collected for the trial exposed a massive and ongoing national security threat. And he had an additional problem, which is that the evidence just kept coming.

Late in the game, while the sedition trial was still technically in court, Rogge had received an extraordinary tip that he believed was too important not to chase down.

It was a tip from an American servicemember -- an Army captain -- who told Rogge that a whole trove of evidence had been found, in Germany, about the Nazi effort to undermine American democracy and about high-profile American citizens the Nazis had been working with to do it.

Rogge got permission from the court and from DOJ to go to Germany, to follow up on the tip. His team that went to Germany -- his whole operation -- consisted of himself, one other lawyer, two stenographers with two portable typewriters, and a single FBI agent who wasn't even allowed to stay for the whole trip.

At least Rogge himself was fluent in German. That ended up being crucially important.

In the 11 weeks that he and his team spent in Europe, Rogge interviewed dozens of Nazis who had been captured by the U.S. military, including high-ranking officials like Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, just before he was hanged; and former Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, who would soon kill himself with a cyanide capsule while he was on his way to being hanged.

Rogge conducted all those interviews. He reviewed thousands of secret Nazi government files. There were files about America. It was about the Hitler government’s work inside the United States, up to and during the war. It was also about who they worked with here. Rogge brought all of that home to tell the country about it.

Whether or not this sedition case was ever going to be settled in court in a criminal trial, Rogge wanted this information to be known.

And that is why John Rogge was now sitting in the studios of "Meet the Press" in Washington, newly fired from the Justice Department, and as fired up as you can possibly imagine, to talk about it.

Fleeson: Do you think the President fired you or ordered you fired?

Maddow: Yes, actually. The President of the United States had personally ordered him fired. Because John Rogge went rogue, because John Rogge decided that what he had was too important to keep quiet. It was definitely beyond his authority to do it, but he did it anyway. And he paid the price -- to warn us, to warn the country.

This is the final episode of "Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra."

Steven Ross: Whenever somebody says it's time to move on, let's heal and move on, that's always a mistake.

John Rogge: My conscience wouldn't let me do anything else than make those facts public at one time or another.

Bradley Hart: What I would argue is perhaps the most explosive political report of the 20th century.

Bates: He insisted that the facts of his report be made public.

Rogge: If democracy is going to work, if our assumption is correct, that people can make wise choices on issues, it can only be if they know the inside story.

Hart: There's no way this can come out. This is just far too explosive for the American people to handle.

Maddow: Episode 8: Ultra Vires.

Rogge: I've studied fascism both here and abroad for almost four years. And I think I know something about the fascist pattern. So long as people want to hear what I have to say, I'm of course going to tell them what I know.

Maddow: John Rogge was bursting to tell what he knew.

He had just returned to the United States after a hair-raising trip to Nazi Germany, which saw him sitting face-to-face with captured Nazi leaders. He was more than a little alarmed by what he had learned there, by what he had uncovered about the ultra-right in America, about individuals here who had been working to advance the Nazi cause.

Hart: Rogge comes back with I think probably the deepest understanding of anyone in the United States, if not the world, as to what the Germans had been up to in trying to subvert the United States.

Maddow: That’s historian Bradley Hart.

When Rogge got back from Germany, he got to work compiling a report on his findings for the Justice Department.

Hart: The report is absolutely explosive.

Rogge documents the business ties between Nazi Germany and major American corporations. He has documented Nazi payoff efforts against various Americans who become Nazi agents. And there's big names that appear in this report.

Maddow: Big names up-to-and-including serving members of Congress.

Hart: People like Wheeler or Nye, these sort of leading lights of isolationism, they all appear in the report in great depth.

Maddow: John Rogge and the Justice Department, of course, had already known about the involvement of some members of Congress in a plot to spread Nazi propaganda around the United States. They knew that because they had uncovered it in their own investigations here.

They had also known about ultra-right violent groups spreading the same kind of propaganda, and planning violence, up to and including the overthrow of the U.S. government.

But Rogge was now looking at evidence -- in black and white -- from the Nazi side of things, from their own secret files, and from out of their own mouths. Goering and Ribbentrop had even told Rogge about a multi-million-dollar plan by the German government to interfere in the 1940 presidential election, in favor of the republican candidate.

Hart: He sees this stuff as critically important to Americans' understanding of what's happened. And I think, as well, critical to averting this from happening again.

Maddow: John Rogge assembled his explosive report on what the Nazis had done. and which Americans had been actively aligned with them.

American groups that were getting support and instruction and even funding from the Nazis. American businessmen who were not just personally sympathetic to the Nazi cause -- they were finding ways around the law to continue doing business with the Nazis even during the war.

And these American political figures. It turns out, the Nazis had kept meticulous records about which members of Congress were the most help to them, which might be the most help to them in the future after a fascist takeover of the United States, and which were on the payroll or otherwise involved with their senior propaganda agent in America, George Sylvester Viereck.

Hart: Rogge details in great depth, the extent of involvement between members of Congress and George Sylvester Viereck.

Maddow: Rogge’s report identified 24 members of Congress who had been tied up in some form with the Nazis. Rogge submitted that report to his boss, the Attorney General Tom Clark.

Rogge said he had been told before he left for Germany, that upon his return, the Justice Department would make his report public as an official document.

But that is not at all what happened.

When Rogge turned in his report, the Attorney General then brought it to the White House and shared it directly with President Harry Truman.

Hart: Truman essentially decrees that this report should never see the light of day. It is simply too explosive. He orders this report to be classified as secret and essentially forbids Rogge from ever publishing or ever even discussing the contents of what I would argue is perhaps the most explosive political report of the 20th century.

Maddow: The Attorney General -- future Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark -- and President Harry Truman had the report sealed. They buried it.

For John Rogge, who had just seen his sedition case fall apart, who had just watched as implicated members of Congress did everything they could to obstruct that investigation and the subsequent trial. This report, which he had been told was for the public -- it was now being intentionally suppressed. For Rogge, it was too much to take.

Hart: Rogge realizes that this report's not going to be made public, even in a highly redacted form, I think he's understandably outraged. And I think this is where we again see his sort of crusader mentality, if you will.

Maddow: There is a Latin term that’s used in the law, "ultra vires." It roughly translates to "beyond the powers."

When it comes to the law and criminal justice, ultra vires is not good. It essentially means acting in a way that is beyond your legal authority.

When John Rogge learned that his report from Germany was going to be stuffed in a drawer somewhere to never see the light of day he rejected that decision, that decision by the Attorney General, that decision by the President.

He said he believed the fascist threat in America was real and ongoing, and for a democracy to defend itself, the people needed to know what they were up against.

Details from Rogge’s secret report began leaking out in the press. Some of the report’s key findings turned up in the columns of Washington journalist Drew Pearson.

Hart: Rogge, of course, strongly denies that he has leaked any classified information to the press. And it's not necessarily true that Rogge himself would have leaked anything. But I think it's fair to say that Rogge would've been aware that this was leaking before it took place.

Maddow: Over the course of ten days, Drew Pearson's columns spelled out what Rogge had found: the Nazis' plan to interfere in the 1940 presidential election, their funding of influential right-wing media in the United States, Father Charles Coughlin writing to the Hitler government and sending an emissary to Berlin to ask the Nazis to help him here in his war at home against Roosevelt and against the Jews.

Once those pieces of Rogge's report started landing in the paper, John Rogge didn’t exactly go out of his way to avoid commenting on it.

He decided that, actually, it might be a pretty good moment for him to launch a nationwide speaking tour.

Hart: He actually goes on a lecture tour, even as a current official in DOJ, talking about the findings of the report and essentially only talking about the aspects that have been publicly reported.

Maddow: Rogge applied for some vacation time from the Justice Department. And then he started to give speeches, discussing details in his report that had already leaked out in the press.

And he wasn't giving these speeches in particularly high-profile venues -- it's not like he was booking Madison Square Garden. His first speech was literally at a poli sci class at Swarthmore College. But given who he was, and given the absolutely explosive content of his remarks, even that trip to a college classroom ended up in the front section of "The New York Times."

Later that week, Rogge was flying to another speaking engagement in Seattle, but his plane was forced to make an emergency stop because of bad weather.

While he was waiting in the airport terminal, getting ready to continue on that trip, an FBI agent came into the airport looking for him. The agent introduced himself, and then handed John Rogge a one-page letter from the Attorney General informing him that he was being terminated, effective immediately -- like, there in the airport.

The agent asked Rogge to hand over any Justice Department material currently in his possession.

Rogge told him all he had was his DOJ parking pass. The agent took it and said goodnight. And that was it.

And John Rogge, honestly, had earned that termination. The Justice Department speaks only through its court filings, and its official statements and its official reports for a reason.

John Rogge was subverting that on nothing but his own say-so, his own belief in the rightness of his cause. That meant that he was using the power of the Justice Department's investigative functions for an unauthorized purpose. Him going ultra vires on this, it's an important, substantive breach of DOJ protocol. It’s definitely a firing offense, and maybe even then some.

But that's the call he made. These threats to democracy that he had uncovered, ongoing threats to democracy from within this country and among powerful people. To him, it was a five-alarm fire. To him, it was worth going rogue.

Hart: I think Rogge goes public with this information because he just sees it as so important. What Rogge is saying is that the United States needs to be honest with itself about what has happened. It's partially about exposing wrongdoing from the past, but I think implicitly it's about trying to ensure that this never happens again.

Maddow: It's also a scandal at about 10 different levels. And it’s an extraordinary news story at the time.

Bates: Mr. O. John Rogge, former Special Assistant to the Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division, who recently stirred up a hornet's nest by releasing a report to the public over the insistence of Attorney General Clark, that it be kept secret.

Maddow: What Rogge was saying, and that he had been fired for saying it, all of that is what led to Rogge’s must-hear appearance on "Meet the Press."

Bates: Rogge, until recently, was Special Assistant to the Attorney General, in charge of prosecuting a group of alleged seditionists, men and women accused of working against the interests of our country, spreading Nazi propaganda.

In April of this year, Mr. Rogge was sent to Germany to gather additional evidence. He questioned dozens of Nazis and screened some 30,000 documents from the German foreign office files. When he returned, he wrote a report which contained, among other things, the names of 24 Congressman. He insisted that the facts of his report be made public.

Attorney General Clark wanted the report kept secret. But in spite of that, Mr. Rogge made public some of the information in a speech at Swarthmore. Three days later, Mr. Clark fired him.

And since that day, Mr. Rogge, and the things he has been saying, have been front-page news all over the country.

Maddow: In that radio appearance, as passionate as Rogge felt about what he needed to tell the American people, what he wanted them to know, he was also, frankly, a little ticked off that he had been fired in the way that he had.

Fleeson: Mr. Rogge, in plain American, you were fired. And I believe you believe that you got a raw deal. Who do you think gave it to you, the President? And why?

Rogge: I've never called it a raw deal, Miss Fleeson. It's true the Department and I disagreed as to whether the people should have the facts. I think the reason for the disagreement lies in the fact that 24 Congressmen, including the name of Senator Burton K. Wheeler, were mentioned in the report which I prepared.

Maddow: You caught the name that he mentioned there? Senator Burton K. Wheeler.

Senator Wheeler was the America First Senator from Montana who had gotten Rogge’s predecessor William Maloney fired off the sedition case. Senator Wheeler had been involved in the Viereck propaganda scheme on Capitol Hill. Senator Wheeler had threatened reporters and papers that dared to print the details of the scheme. Wheeler had inveighed in the senate about the sedition trial being a disgrace. In Rogge's new report from Germany, Senator Wheeler was said to be involved in the German government's plot to interfere in the 1940 election.

According to John Rogge, it was Senator Wheeler who had just gotten him fired, just as he'd had William Maloney fired before him. And in Rogge's case, Wheeler didn't just threaten and pressure the Justice Department into firing him. In Rogge's case, Wheeler went straight to the top.

Rogge: I do know he saw the President the day before I received, may I say, the notice of dismissal.

Fleeson: Do you think the President fired you or ordered you fired?

Rogge: Again, my feeling is that I received my notice of dismissal as a result of Burton K. Wheeler. Yes.

Maddow: It’s worth unpacking this just a second.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had of course died during the war. He died in the spring of 1945. Harry Truman was FDR’s Vice President and so when FDR died in office, Truman ascended to the presidency.

But before that, Truman had been in the Senate. And he was still very friendly with some of his old Senate colleagues, like Gerald Nye and like his old Senate mentor Burton K. Wheeler. Both Nye and Wheeler had of course been involved in the Viereck scheme, and both of them were all over John Rogge’s new report from Germany.

Hart: Truman is a former Senator. And not a former Senator years and years before, but a former Senator months before he becomes President, actually. And so many of the men, Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald P. Nye, even people like Hamilton Fish in the House, these are people that Harry Truman has known for years and in fact worked closely with.

And so, John Rogge uncovers this incredible story of corruption, of people like Lundeen taking payoffs from Viereck and being involved in this Nazi operation. Of people like Burton Wheeler, Gerald P. Nye, venerated figures on Capitol Hill who have become, wittingly or unwittingly, Nazi propagandists. And Rogge's put all this in his report. And Harry Truman seemingly looked at this and says, there's no way this can come out. This is just far too explosive for the American people to handle.

Maddow: This incident does not get remembered as a capital-S scandal when people think of President Harry Truman. The implication here is that President Truman kept secret the findings of a Justice Department investigation because it showed that his friends in Congress had been facilitating a fascist attempt to subvert democracy.

The President orders the report kept secret to protect people like Senator Wheeler, and then when the investigator doesn’t keep it secret, Wheeler tells the President to fire the guy. And President Truman does so.

Rogge gave his first speech about his findings in Germany in that classroom at Swarthmore on a Tuesday.

The next day, Wednesday, was when it was in the papers.

The day after that, Thursday, is when Senator Wheeler went to the White House and took a two-hour meeting one-on-one with his old friend President Truman.

Thursday night after that meeting, President Truman called his Attorney General, Tom Clark. Attorney General Clark went up to the White House that night and apparently got an earful from the President.

Then later that same night, the Attorney General called a very unusual press conference -- unusual in the sense that it was called after midnight. And at that press conference, he announced the firing of John Rogge.

And that's what led to that FBI agent tracking down Rogge in a little airport in Spokane, Washington, to take Rogge's parking pass and tell him his career was over.

Given that very clear course of events, given what John Rogge understood to be the cause of his firing, you can understand why he might have been peeved that day when he went on "Meet the Press."

Rogge: I was told before --

Fleeson: By whom?

Rogge: -- by Attorney General Clark, before I went to Germany, that I could make public any evidence of Nazi penetration that I might find. And why did he change his mind? Because 24 Congressmen are mentioned in this report that I have prepared. Now, do you think that's a sufficient basis to keep these facts from the American public?

I operated on this basis that if democracy is going to work, if our assumption is correct that people can make wise choices on issues, it can only be if they know the inside story. My conscience wouldn't let me do anything else than make those facts public at one time or another.

Maddow: Aside from the particulars of why he was fired, why he handled himself the way that he did, John Rogge wanted to make something else clear to the American public, too.

He wanted to say that was there an ongoing fascist threat in the United States, one that involved very powerful people, one that would get worse if it was not openly recognized and dealt with. But also -- and this is something he knew a lot about -- he wanted the public to know, to really understand that the American legal system really had no good way of dealing with this threat.

Rogge: We had reached the point where our legal remedies were inadequate. As a matter of fact, I'd prepared a report in which I'd said legal remedies are inadequate.

Now, if you're going to say to me that I can't use the facts in an educational way, then you are in effect, saying there's no way of meeting the fascist threat. You can't do it legally. And you say to me, ah, but you mustn't talk about these things because the case was nolle pros. And if you put me in that position, there are no remedies against it.

The law is powerless in this situation, the law says these people may say what they please, I say, Okay, we will accept the law as it is. These people may say what they please --

Fleeson: In other words --

Rogge: Give me the same right of freedom of speech --

Fleeson: -- you will break the law in a good cause? It doesn't seem to me that's quite good enough --

Rogge: No, I'm not breaking any law. I'm not breaking any law. Democracy says that the people in the fascist side are entitled to a full measure of freedom of speech. I say that democracy should give the same measure of freedom of speech to those who are supporting democracy.

Maddow: “We had reached the point where our legal remedies were inadequate.”

What John Rogge saw, what he had been up-close to in his prosecutions, was an entrenched ultra-right movement in this country, opposed to democracy, which saw violence as a legitimate means of achieving political aims. One that had support not only among some parts of the far-right media, but also among elected political leaders on the right.

He saw alongside that a criminal justice system that was simply unable to deal with that threat.

What do you do as a country when you are faced with that?

When you are up against those kinds of forces, trying to tear apart the very thing that makes you the country you are? How do you push back against it?

And what are the consequences for the country if you don’t push back enough?

That’s ahead, in the conclusion of "Ultra."

There is something that nags at Nancy Beck Young. She’s a historian. She's chair of the history department at the University of Houston.

But Professor Young has a suspicion that an unsettling chapter of history, that she happens to be an expert on, has somehow managed to slip down the national memory hole entirely.

Nancy Beck Young: I suspect you could go up and down the halls of the fifth floor where we're sitting now and ask my colleagues who are all very well-trained and very well-regarded historians, I suspect that there are only one or two others who might know of this episode in history. If people with Ph.D.s in history don't necessarily know of this moment, certainly average voters don't know of this moment.

Maddow: This moment that she’s talking about is this moment in the '40s when American democracy faced this threat.

A fascist movement on the march around the world that crept well into our own politics.

Disparate far-right groups all around the country, arming themselves, threatening violence to achieve their political aims. Some of the most influential voices in right-wing media demonizing minority groups, singing the praises of authoritarians and fascists. Americans plotting to overturn election results. And elected leaders in this country aiding and furthering those efforts, either through their own sincerely-held beliefs or just through political opportunism.

Young: We don't have a full understanding of what we're living through now, if we don't understand the parallel moments from the past. It's dangerous for the public, it's dangerous for the experiment of democracy that always has been fragile, and that is ever more fragile today.

Maddow: At the very start of the Justice Department’s sedition inquiry, when they first appointed William Power Maloney to be the special prosecutor in charge of that investigation, Maloney talked to some of his friends about this thing he was embarking on, and his fears about where it might lead.

He told them, God help America and everything it stands for if the Justice Department ever backs down on this case. We've got to go fast. The time to try the case is now, not five years from now. We are going to bump into some of the most powerful forces in the country. The Department of Justice will be attacked from all sides. Pressure will be brought to bear to stop the investigation. But the prosecution must never stop until the whole story has been told to the American people and the guilty ones are punished. If we don't, these people will be made into martyrs. It will be worse than it was before.

That was Maloney's fear: God help us if the Justice Department ever backs down on this case.

And of course, the Justice Department did back down on this case.

But William Maloney, while he was in charge, he used every tool in his prosecutorial toolbox to expose these activities to the light. And then he was forced out.

And it was the same with John Rogge. He did everything he possibly could.

After Rogge too was fired from the case, he fought for years to get some version of his report from Germany released to the American public.

And he was ultimately able to publish it in a book which came out more than a decade later, in 1961, by which point the country had very much moved on. Nobody cared. Nobody bought it.

Rogge by then had faded as a public figure -- he had been smeared and attacked as a red, as a communist.

He'd also been smeared and attacked by the communists, for what that’s worth.

John Rogge died in relative obscurity, in 1981. His obituary was headlined: O. John Rogge, Age 77, Anti-Nazi Activist.

Hart: I think we have to see Rogge as this figure who is very well-intentioned. And I think we also have to see him as really the reason why we know much of this today.

Maddow: That hard to find, largely unread book that John Rogge left us in 1961, Rogge's German report for which he gave up his career, it is the history. It is the record. It is the whole ugly truth from that period.

Hart: He really is the key documentarian, I think, of the extent of this sort of Nazi activity. And so it would've been a great tragedy, I think for historians, had this report simply been classified and stashed away in a government archive somewhere, because it really, even today, sheds astonishing light on what was going on in this period.

Maddow: When John Rogge decided that he was going to break the rules and commit a fireable offense to get the information he had discovered out to the public, he told the Justice Department that he was going to do that. And he told them why.

He said, "Laws will go but a small part of the way toward meeting the fascist threat to American institutions. The case against American fascism will not be decided by courts, by judges and juries. The case against American fascism will have to be decided by the American people. That is where I now propose to take it."

As frustrated as he was as a prosecutor about the limitations of the criminal law in meeting this kind of threat, John Rogge wasn't the only one who did bring news of that threat to the public.

This threat of American fascism in the World War II era, it’s something that couldn't have been left to the Justice Department alone. And so, yes, this is the story of William Power Maloney and John Rogge, and what they tried to do, and what they sacrificed and what they lost.

But it is also the story of individual American citizens who didn’t work for the government, who didn’t work for the Justice Department, but who worked to expose this threat. To confront it however they could. To alert the country to the danger. Even sometimes at great personal risk to themselves.

It's the story of journalists, reporters like Dillard Stokes of "The Washington Post," who dug and dug and faced down threats, and harassment, and lawsuits in order to chase down the details of this story and tell the public what was going on.

Hart: Most of the derogatory information about these people is exposed by journalists and activists because they're the appropriate people to expose it. And I think that's really the importance of journalists especially, is bringing those stories and exposing the views of these people and opening the discussion about what they mean.

Maddow: Reporter Dillard Stokes was called a spy. He was threatened by powerful members of Congress. They threatened him, they threatened his bosses. But Dillard Stokes did his job. He reported what he knew. He would ultimately be honored for his work on this story with one of the most prestigious awards in newspaper journalism.

There were other journalists, too. Like Henry Hoke, he was the guy who first noticed the weird envelope stuffing assembly line that the sedition defendants had formed in the courtroom during the trial.

Henry Hoke was an expert in direct-mail advertising. He saw, before most people recognized it, that something strange and potentially dangerous was going on with members of Congress using the mail to spread Nazi propaganda. Hoke was called himself to testify before the grand jury.

And then during the sedition trial, he published a blistering and very popular exposé, laying out the whole Viereck scandal for the American people in plain English, connecting all the dots.

Hart: He writes an incredibly powerful, I would call it sort of a pamphlet called Black Mail in which he really blows the lid in some ways off the extent of the Viereck congressional scandal -- actually names many of the members of Congress. The Black Mail pamphlet, when it comes out, becomes this sort of explosive source material.

Maddow: Henry Hoke had the expertise to tell that story well and in understandable terms. And when he did, it had a major impact.

HART: Various citizens committees would take out advertising saying, you know, while your son was dying in the war, so and so was still operating with a Nazi agent.

So you can just imagine how powerful this is when people are actually now in the war, they have lost husbands and sons. Now they're being reminded that, gosh, I remember that scandal. I remember that my Congressman was involved with this guy. It's incredibly powerful stuff.

Maddow: And then there was the bestseller. After journalist Arthur Derounian was handed an antisemitic flyer at a subway station one day, he decided he would go undercover to infiltrate American fascist groups.

He spent four years inside these violent ultra-right groups, involved in everything from street violence against American Jews to planning and training for the overthrow of the U.S. government. And then, under an alias, Derounian wrote a tell-all book about what he had seen.

The book was really well-written, it was legitimately shocking, it was full of photographs and original source documents. His book was a smash success. Derounian's book was called “Under Cover , and it was the top-selling book in the United States in 1943.

What he did, what Henry Hoke did, what reporters like Dillard Stokes did was open the eyes of the American people to how extreme the ultra-right had become and what they were planning.

It was also citizen activists.

People like Leon Lewis and his undercover agents in L.A., who infiltrated far right groups, filed detailed reports on them, tipped off the police over and over again -- even when the police didn't care -- until finally they did care.

Lewis and his team also tipped off journalists, they tipped off military intelligence for plots that involved the military, they even used civil lawsuits to try to expose the workings of these groups, to trace their funding, to stop their ability to plan in the shadows.

Ross: Leon Lewis and his men never pick up a weapon, never pick up any kind of gun. They defeat their enemy through brains, through undercover operations that will eventually lead to the dismantling of many of these groups.

Maddow: That’s historian Steven Ross.

While Leon Lewis and his group were at work in Los Angeles foiling the efforts of fascist groups like the Silver Shirts, on the other side of the country, in Boston, it was a woman named Frances Sweeney.

Sweeney was a devout Catholic and an organizer who made it her personal mission to stand up to Father Coughlin’s radical Christian Front militia in her city, which was led by the unprosecuted Nazi agent Francis Moran.

Charles Gallagher: She is adamantly opposed to the Christian Front. She becomes, kind of, the street-level nemesis to Francis P. Moran.

Maddow: That’s historian Charles Gallagher.

While Moran was convening huge antisemitic rallies, and sparking street violence against Jewish Bostonians, and spreading Nazi propaganda, Frances Sweeney dogged him every step of the way, to counteract what he and the Christian Front were trying to do.

Gallagher: Her main motivation is to take down Moran, or at least make his existence miserable in Boston and diminish the influence of the Christian Front. She does this through picketing Christian Front meetings, letters to the editor, kind of coalescing various Boston journalists against the Christian Front. She is very forceful and very successful in moving Moran off the public scene.

Maddow: When you look at what happened to the characters in this crazy part of American history, this confrontation between American fascists and the Americans who were trying to stop them, what emerges is that, yes, the courts have a role, the law has a role, but they're no magic bullet.

To face this kind of a threat, there has to be a John Rogge and a William Power Maloney, but also a Frances Sweeney, a Leon Lewis, Dillard Stokes, Henry Hoke, Drew Pearson, Arthur Derounian. There has to be the Secretary to Ernest Lundeen going to the FBI with her fears about what was going on with her boss. It's the staffer for Hamilton Fish, who had his attack of conscience and turned state's evidence.

It's also the voters, who learned what was going on through the efforts of all those people, who then threw the culprits out of office in Washington.

North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye, who hosted regular strategy sessions in his office for the lawyers for the sedition defendants -- he, at one point, had been seen as presidential material.

Gerald Nye: Saying to them no, no, no and again, no.

(APPLAUSE)

Radio Announcer: You have been listening to Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota.

Maddow: But when Nye ran for re-election during the sedition trial in 1944, he lost his seat -- he very nearly lost in the primary, and then in the general election he just got trounced.

Hamilton Fish III -- good old Ham Fish-- he was also soundly beaten in the 1944 election.

Radio Announcer: And over on the House side, Ham Fish of New York winds up a 22-year record.

Maddow: Thanks to a campaign that focused almost exclusively on his Nazi ties, Ham Fish was run out of Congress in 1944 after he’d held that safe seat for over twenty-two years.

And then there was Burton K. Wheeler.

Rogge: Again, my feeling is that I received my notice of dismissal as a result of Burton K. Wheeler.

Maddow: Wheeler was such a powerhouse in the Senate that he was able to throw his weight around to get both Maloney and Rogge fired off the sedition case. He was a towering figure in the Senate. But when Wheeler was up for re-election in 1946, Democrats in Montana threw him out in the primary. They didn't even let him compete to hold his seat in the general election.

Hart: Most shocking of all, Burton K. Wheeler, an absolutely legendary figure in, sort of, Western Democratic politics, loses his seat in the Democratic primary in 1946.

Maddow: Democratic Senator Rush Holt of West Virginia, Illinois Republican Congressman Stephen Day -- both of them had been in lucrative arrangements with Viereck -- both of them were singled out in Rogge's German report as willing collaborators with that Nazi agent. They were both abandoned by their respective political parties, both shoved out of office by voters.

Even Jacob Thorkelson, the Montana Congressman who had worked with Viereck to mail out thousands of copies of a sympathetic interview with Hitler. Thorkelson was such a Germanophile, he had also adopted what was then the German cultural craze of nudism and nudist camps -- in Montana. Thorkelson, too, was voted out of office in favor of a Democrat who challenged voters to choose the New Deal from Roosevelt, over the Nude Deal from Thorkelson.

And yes, the courtroom might have maybe been a more satisfying place for these members of Congress to face consequences for what they had done. But the voters did it instead once they had the information they needed about what those members of Congress had been up to. It’s not jail-time accountability, but it is political accountability.

Radio Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, once more it is my privilege to present to you Father Charles E. Coughlin from the Shrine of the Little Flower in Royal Oak Michigan.

Maddow: In the aftermath of the sedition trial, Father Charles Coughlin --

Radio Announcer: Immediately following, Father Coughlin will come to the microphone.

Maddow: -- who had by then been taken off the radio by the Catholic Church, he was revealed to have a secret overseas bank account stuffed with what would be about $14 million dollars in today's money. Coughlin became a kind of real estate speculator.

When he died in 1979, he was no longer a man of influence. He was no longer even really a public figure. But he did die rich. Coughlin's man in Boston, Francis Moran -- he ended up a completely forgotten figure.

Gallagher: Moran is leading the charge here. His stage presence is extraordinary. His public speaking ability was off the charts.

Maddow: Historian Charles Gallagher found that after Moran's heyday as a rabble-rousing, antisemitic leader who could spellbind massive rallies, Francis Moran's final mention in the local press before he died was as a crime victim. He’d been working as a cab driver and he'd been held up for all his money -- 14 bucks.

Radio Announcer: George Sylvester Viereck, you remember the man who has been prominent for several years as a Nazi propagandist --

Maddow: George Sylvester Viereck -- the Nazi agent -- he got out of jail after the war in 1947, by which time his wife had not only left him, she had sold all his earthly possessions and donated the proceeds to groups helping Jewish refugees. Viereck’s eldest son -- his namesake, George Sylvester Viereck, Jr. -- had by then been killed in battle, fighting heroically against the Nazis as a U.S. Army corporal. His father was still in jail as a Nazi agent when he received the news.

After he was released, Viereck, Sr. went on to advise the National Renaissance Party, which was the first neo-Nazi party in the United States.

News Announcer: American justice returns a verdict of guilty in the trial of William Dudley Pelley, the Silver Shirts Leader.

Maddow: William Dudley Pelley -- the Silver Shirts Leader -- he eventually faced additional charges of securities fraud because, amid everything else he was up to, he was running a fake stock scheme involving his weird Silver Legion empire. Pelley’s virulently antisemitic writings are still in vogue; they’re still circulating on the far-right today.

Norma Lundeen: I am the widow of Ernest Lundeen, United States Senator from Minnesota, who was killed in an airplane crash --

Maddow: Norma Lundeen, widow of Senator Ernest Lundeen, went on to marry a Senator who had served alongside her husband, an Oregon Republican Senator who had been a senior member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Norma would also go on to give speeches at racist rallies organized by Gerald L.K. Smith. After John Rogge broke up the Huey Long machine in Louisiana, Smith was the protege of Huey Long, who was considered to be his most successful political descendant.

In the 1950s, Gerald L.K. Smith became a pioneer of American Holocaust denial. He preached something called Christian Nationalism

Gerald L.K. Smith: Fight mongrelization and all the attempts being made to force the intermixture of the Black and White races. Preserve America as a Christian nation, being conscious of the fact that there is a highly organized campaign to substitute Jewish tradition for Christian tradition.

Maddow: Gerald L.K. Smith had raised money for the sedition defendants during their trial. He's the guy for whom that one sedition defendant was given leave from the trial, so she could lead antisemitic songs at his rallies while he ran for President on the ticket of the America First Party.

Radio Anchor: Those indicted include such people as Elizabeth Dilling, author of The Red Network --

Maddow: After the trial, Elizabeth Dilling resumed her antisemitic organizing. She became a Holocaust denier. She claimed that President Eisenhower was a secret Jew. She said just as FDR has pushed the "Jew Deal," President Kennedy was pushing the "Jew Frontier." She opposed Barry Goldwater's run for president because his running mate had been a prosecutor at Nuremberg.

Bizarrely, in 2010, then-Fox News Host Glenn Beck tried to revive interest in Elizabeth Dilling, enthusiastically promoting one of her books to his audience.

Senator "Wild Bill" Langer, he was not personally implicated in the Viereck plot in Congress, but he had thrown himself into the work of defending the sedition defendants.

William Langer: As long as I’m in the Senate, I will be in there battling for North Dakota.

Maddow: Langer actually did have a long career in the U.S. Senate. His proposed legislation to deport Black Americans to Africa was later taken up as a rallying cry by the National States' Rights Party -- another early neo-Nazi group, whose members were put on trial for allegedly bombing an Atlanta synagogue in the '50s. Senator Langer went on to advocate -- successfully -- for the U.S. to grant clemency for at least one convicted Nazi war criminal.

As for the America First Committee…

Radio Announcer: In Chicago, the America First Committee was dissolved until the war is over. Officers said it had about a million members, who now are urged to give full support to the government’s war effort.

Maddow: The committee itself folded in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. And the committee’s rich and well-connected founders experienced not much of a hiccup in their establishment credentials.

The name American First, though, has lived on in various iterations since -- from Gerald L.K. Smith's America First Party, which called for the sterilization and deportation of all American Jews, to something called America First Inc. which was set up by sedition trial defendant James True.

You may remember back in Episode 3, the San Diego Police confiscating a bludgeon that was supposedly specially designed for killing Jewish people. James True of America First Inc. had actually filed a patent application for that. He called it -- forgive me – he called it the “kike killer."

That phrase "America First" has since been recently revived. But you know that.

When the sedition trial collapsed at the end of 1944, when the United States won the war and defeated fascism in Europe, in certain ways we just declared victory and moved on.

By necessity, the world needed to be rebuilt. Our whole economy needed to be retooled. There were millions of veterans who were coming home from the war who needed jobs, and education, and housing and care.

And there really was no reckoning at that point about the fascist forces that had been at work in this country, in the lead-up to and during the war -- forces that really did seek to topple democracy and institute authoritarianism here.

Ross: Whenever somebody says it's time to move on, let's heal and move on, that's always a mistake. The idea was that these right-wingers ultimately aren't really a danger to America. After the mistrial in 1945-1946, it would've done this country, I think, real good by saying, you know what, we have known about a left-wing danger in America.

But we have never really openly as a country discussed right-wing danger. We need to hold people responsible. People who call on fellow Americans to pick up arms need to be held accountable. And we have never done that in our history, really for the right-wing.

Maddow: One of the uncomfortable truths that you find in the dark corners of our history is that fascism happens, recurrently. Movements, and demagogues, and media figures and elected officials promote elements of fascism, antisemitism, hatred of minority groups and immigrants, worship of strongman leaders, wishing for the end to elections, the end to rule by law -- it comes up, repeatedly. It has a certain appeal to a certain percentage of the country, in a fairly dependable way.

And seeing that history of recurrence -- in some ways, of course, it's horrifying -- but it can also be instructive and practical.

Because previous generations of Americans have confronted this same type of threat before us. And learning what they did gives us some lessons learned about what works and what might not work.

In a world that is always going to have some William Dudley Pelleys, we know that you can be a Leon Lewis. In a world that's going to have some Francis Morans, you can be a Frances Sweeney.

In a world where the widow of the Nazi-connected Senator is calling up news organizations and berating them, telling them to spike their reporting, don't be the executive who agrees to do it.

In a world where there will always be a Burton Wheeler, who throws his weight around, who leans on the Justice Department and tells them to fire the prosecutor who has him in their sights, don't be the Justice Department official who agrees, who caves, who fires the guy.

It's not just one thing that works. It has to be everything.

If they’re making war on the battlefield, you have to fight them in war and beat them.

If they’re running for office, you have to fight them in elections and beat them.

If they're discrediting electoral politics and trying to make fascism seem like the cooler alternative, you have to defend electoral politics and make fascism seem as stupid and boring as it is.

If they're secretly organizing stuff to terrorize Americans, you need to infiltrate and investigate what they're doing and make that secret stuff public -- preferably in the most embarrassing possible way.

And if they are doing crimes -- they are usually doing crimes -- prosecutors have to charge them. The criminal justice system can’t do it all, but it does have to do its part.

It all has to happen, all at once. There are no silver bullets.

What was required then, in the 1940s, was all of it. It was the plucky, creative, heroic efforts of clever, brave Americans, journalists, activists, lawyers, people of faith, citizens of all stripes who came to democracy’s aid when it needed them the most.

That is what got us through back then.

And now, almost a full century later, we get to learn from what they left us. We inherit their work.

"Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra" has been a production of MSNBC and NBC News. This episode was written by myself, Mike Yarvitz, and Kelsey Desiderio. The series was executive produced by myself and Mike Yarvitz. It was produced by Kelsey Desiderio. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez.

Fact checking support from Eva Ruth Moravec. Archival support from Holly Klopchin. Sound design by Tarek Fouda. Our Technical Director is Bryson Barnes. Our senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway. Our web producer is Will Femia. Madeleine Haeringer is our head of editorial.

Archival radio material is from NBC News, via a little operation called the Library of Congress which you should maybe look into sometime; you will not be disappointed. With additional sound from CBS News, and also from the great Woody Guthrie.

You can find much more about this series, including the full grilling of O. John Rogge on "Meet the Press" at our website, MSNBC.com/ultra.

Woody Guthrie: Mister Charlie Lindbergh, he flew to old Berlin. Got 'im a big Iron Cross, and he flew right back again, to Washington, Washington.

Mrs. Charlie Lindbergh, she come dressed in red, said: "I'd like to sleep in that pretty White House bed, in Washington, Washington."

Lindy said to Annie: "We'll get there by and by, but we'll have to split the bed up with Wheeler, Clark, and Nye, in Washington, Washington."

Hitler wrote to Lindy, said "Do your very worst." Lindy started an outfit that he called America First, in Washington, Washington.

All around the country, Lindbergh, he did fly. Gasoline was paid for by Hoover, Clark, and Nye, in Washington, Washington.

Lindy said to Hoover: "We'll do the same as France. Make a deal with Hitler, and then we'll get our chance, in Washington, Washington."

Then they had a meetin', and all the Firsters come, come on a-walkin', they come on a-runnin', in Washington, Washington.

Hitler said to Lindy: "Stall 'em all you can. Gonna bomb Pearl Harbor with the help of old Japan," in Washington, Washington.

Then on a December mornin', the bombs come from Japan. Wake Island and Pearl Harbor, kill fifteen hundred men, in Washington, Washington.

So I'm a gonna tell you people: If Hitler's gonna be beat, the common workin' people has got to take the seat, in Washington, Washington.

And I'm gonna tell you workers, 'fore you cash in your checks, they say "America First, " but they mean "America Next!" in Washington, Washington.