Summary of Prequel By Rachel Maddow : An American Fight Against Fascism

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of Prequel By Rachel Maddow : An American Fight Against Fascism

IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:

• Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
• Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
• Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book

Rachel Maddow's book, Ultra, explores the rise of American authoritarianism, tracing its roots back to World War II. A clandestine network aimed to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens' confidence in elected leaders. This campaign, supported by an ultra-right paramilitary movement, worked alongside a sophisticated campaign to overthrow the U.S. government. Despite the U.S. Department of Justice's frontal attack in 1941, the scheme involved influential elected officials, bending the rule of law under political intimidation. The failure of the legal system has had lasting consequences, but the heroic efforts of activists, journalists, prosecutors, and citizens make the story relevant in our current political climate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Oct 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223383543

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AUTHOR’S NOTE

The rise and fight against fascism in pre-World War II America was a complex and multifaceted topic. Numerous sources, including books, magazines, newspapers, congressional hearings, government investigations, FBI files, trial transcripts, and personal correspondence, were used to explore this topic. Notable historians include Steven J. Ross, Charles R. Gallagher, Bradley W. Hart, and Nancy Beck Young. Other key historians and writers include James Q. Whitman, Laura B. Rosenzweig, Mark Lamster, Gerald Horne, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, and Steven Watts. Contemporary sources, such as Henry Reed Hoke's It's a Secret and Black Mail, John Roy Carlson's Under Cover, Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn's Sabotage, and O.

John Rogge's The Official German Report, are also valuable. Academic sources and biographies on this topic are scarce, but some are indispensable.

PROLOGUE

The House of the Vampire, published in 1907, is a novella that blends elements of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. The hero, Reginald Clarke, is a handsome middle-aged boulevardier who attracts impressionable young males with subtler, more sympathetic, and feminine ways than the general run of men. The book's author, George Sylvester Viereck, was a self-professed sensualist who worshipped Wilde as one of his three life models.

Viereck's vampire, Reginald, seeks rarefied elements from his prey, absorbing them from life to achieve artistic completion. Although the book was not considered the world's greatest gay vampire fiction, it did have its first known publication in that now ample oeuvre.

Viereck was born in Munich and immigrated to America with his parents in 1896. His family history in Germany included mystery and intrigue, including unproved claims to royal lineage. His father, Louis, was rumored to be the issue of a brief affair between a famous stage actress in the Prussian royal court and Kaiser Wilhelm I. Louis ended up becoming a Marxist, joining the anti-monarch Socialist Party in Germany and possibly getting involved in a plot to assassinate the kaiser.

By his mid-twenties, Viereck was recognized as a rising star in American literature, publishing a volume of well-regarded poems. He was the most widely discussed literary man in the United States today, unanimously accused of being a genius. However, his true distinction was as an advocate for his beloved fatherland during World War I. When a German U-boat torpedoed a New York-bound passenger liner in May 1915, Viereck defended Germany for doing so, arguing that Germany means business and does not bluff.

In the early 1920s, German journalist and publisher, Friedrich Viereck, was embroiled in a fury when he left behind a briefcase of secret documents that revealed the German government's financial transfers into private U.S. bank accounts and discussions among German officials about their efforts to keep American public opinion aligned against the United States joining World War I. The documents showed that Viereck was not just a high-profile pro-German U.S. citizen but a paid agent of the German government, which was financially supporting his publishing efforts.

Viereck changed the name of his pro-German magazine from The Fatherland to Viereck's American Weekly, but the damage was done. The documents revealed that the German government was spending $2 million per week on propaganda and espionage efforts targeting the United States and discussing serious sabotage plans, including using straw buyers to secretly purchase U.S. munitions factories and military supplies to prevent them from being provided to allies fighting Germany in the war.

After World War I, Viereck began cultivating relations with more celebrated men, seeking out statesmen, soldiers, doctors, scientists, businessmen, and writers. He became an annual visitor to Doorn, where he helped the fallen, mostly despised, mostly insane German monarch make sense of why God had abandoned him in his pursuit of a Christian empire in Europe. The kaiser settled on the shortcomings of the German people as the problem, stating that they should have fought to the very last carrot, the very last man, the very last round of munitions, and could still have prevailed with complete faith in God, not in human logic.

George Sylvester Viereck, a journalist and poet, interviewed numerous Great Men, including Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla, Benito Mussolini, Albert Einstein, and military and political generals of the late war. Dr. Sigmund Freud understood his interviewer best, stating that psychological complexes are the sources of weakness and strength. Viereck asked Freud about his complexes and was told that the great man is a symbol, while the great man is the search of the heart.

As a young man, Viereck worshipped a particular father figure, Adolf Hitler, who was already a divisive figure in Germany. He believed that Hitler was welcomed even by his countrymen who were shy to say so. Hitler spoke to Viereck about the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles and the communist doctrine that now ruled Russia. He believed that decapitating Bolshevism required ridding Germany of the alien in their midst—the Jews.

Viereck remained neutral on Hitler's politics but not on his personality, stating that if he lived, Hitler would make history. As Hitler was about to ascend to the chancellorship of Germany, Viereck recycled his interview for the popular U.S. magazine Liberty, emphasizing Germany's need for physically healthy citizens, reexpansion of territories, and national spirit. He warned his fellow Americans of the futility of challenging Hitler's military machine and deemed it unwise for the United States to test the man's resolve.

In 1940, George Sylvester Viereck, a poet, became a reliable servant to his father figure, Hitler, who was the center wheel of a propaganda campaign funded by the German government and its agents in the United States. Hitler's plan was to destroy the enemy from within and conquer him through himself. Viereck had written a book on the subject in 1930, assessing the weakness of the kaiser's propaganda campaign in America during the first great war.

The lead-up to the next world war was different: lessons learned, no expense to be spared. Nazi Germany poured money and manpower into dividing the American polity, hoping to keep the United States and its arsenal of democracy out of the war in Europe. The German Foreign Office poured down on Americans more than 1 million leaflets, postcards, pamphlets, magazines, and 135,000 books in the single summer of 1941. The Nazis' Special War Fund expended seemingly endless resources in the effort.

A good chunk of the German money devoted to this effort passed through the hands of George Sylvester Viereck, who used it to exploit a key weakness he had discerned in the American political system. The German government and individual Germans could not prevent the American sympathizers from making their money talk for Germany. The Foreign Office in Berlin also funded Nazi shortwave radio stations around the United States, all with the same messaging.

The German propaganda campaign in the 1930s and 1940s was facilitated by a cadre of American troops, including Lawrence Dennis, Philip Johnson, William Dudley Pelley, George Deatherage, James True, Joe McWilliams, and other conspirators. These individuals were part of the intellectual godfather of American fascism and had plans to overthrow the U.S. government. They planned to launch hundreds of simultaneous armed attacks on U.S. government targets after President Roosevelt's likely reelection in 1940, with the aim of sparking chaos and panic and radicalizing anti-Roosevelt Americans.

The fight against fascism in America was not limited to overseas events. Americans fought on both sides of the divide at home, with the U.S. Congress being rife with treachery, deceit, and actions on the part of people who had sworn to defend the Constitution but ended up implicated in a plot to end it.

The lead-up to World War II in America was a fast-paced affair, with powerful figures in Congress, media, law enforcement, and religious leadership working hard to keep the fascist boat afloat. The most interesting part of this story is about the Americans who took up the slack in the fight against domestic authoritarians, fascists, and heavily armed rightwing militias. People like federal prosecutors William Power Maloney, O. John Rogge, Leon G. Turrou, Peter Wacks, Leon Lewis, and other brave informants took physical risks, while journalists like Dillard Stokes, Arthur Derounian, and Arnold Sevareid were also involved.

These mostly unremembered Americans stood up and challenged both the fascists and the political figures who were running a protection racket for them. Their incredible stories about how they did it are worth telling.

THE GLASS HOUSE

In 1932, a young Harvard graduate, Philip Johnson, attended a Nazi

Reviews for Summary of Prequel By Rachel Maddow

[bilgeone · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Rachel is one very, very smart investigative journalist.
She has discovered some unwritten 20th-century history we should all know.
Listen to author's interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hrv-mtQZcv4

If you can't find the original book, this "Summary Books" rendition serves a purpose for historical accounts where brevity and events are of primary concern. But it's a bit like reading study notes when cramming for an exam.

The original book has a theme to celebrate "the good guys" who defended the country from fascism. This theme is lost in "Summary Books" version.
So I would rate Rachel's book FIVE stars, but "Summary Books" as three.