Years ago when the History Channel was more interested in Hitler than aliens and ice road truckers, I happened upon a documentary there about German-Americans in the United States who supported the “New Germany” from their adopted country. I was young and had never thought about how immigrants’ native cultures could influence their politics, so it was fascinating. Hitler’s American Friends revisits that subject to some degree, though it examines the pro-German or pro-Nazi sympathies of various factions within the United States, not merely ethnic Germans. They include members of economic and political schools of thought sympathetic to various aspects of fascism, from its economic policies to institutionalized antisemitism; Americans who were studying in Germany to take advantage of its technical programs; corporate magnates whose business interests in Germany made them eager to work with the new regime and sharply critical of anything that would lead to war; and Americans of any stripe who opposed intervention.

The book is a mixed bag: it dwells on a lot of interesting characters like Father Charles Coughlin, and has many interesting revelations, like the fact that American car manufacturers kept trying to keep business as usual going in their European plants even after France had fallen and the war begun in earnest. I was not impressed, however, with the casual lumping of non-interventionists in with American fascists: Venn diagrams exist for a reason. Related and more substantial is the lack of context: Hart refers to fascism throughout the text, but never defines it and never explores why people might be attracted to its manner of political and economic organization, so he leaves the unlearned reader with the impression that there were just gogs of people in 1930s America who wanted to strut around in Hugo Boss uniforms and build death camps like Levittowns. This is most obvious in regards Father Coughlin, who was the 1930s version of a superinfluencer: he could command a fifth of America’s ears at any one time, and had his own ideas about politics and economics that made him a force against the New Deal, with a sixteen point plan that inspired a political party. Hart quotes one source dismissing these points as identical to fascism, but even a 1965 critic of Coughlin, Tull, described them as ‘mild socialism’ or ‘reform capitalism’. The closest thing I can find that shares the sixteen points is a list from the Holocaust Encyclopedia, and the most interesting part of the list is his attack on the public-private corrupter of American money, the Fed. Frankly, Hart tends to push every critic of Roosevelt and the New Deal into the “Hitler’s American Friends” camp, which is inaccurate. He likes to write with a bit of clickbait energy: at one point he declared that within a year of one man’s speech, his “scattered remains would be recovered in a Virginia field”, with mysteries remaining to this day. That sounds like a hell of a story, but when I did some digging I discovered that the fellow died in a plane crash. Fortunately, the book is salvaged somewhat by the many outrageous characters it covers, including one Hupa tribe member who went around calling himself Chief Red Cloud and giving pro-Hitler speeches. (He was under the influence of one Silver Legion fellow named Pelley, who argued that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was run wholly by Jews.) There were so many big personalities in the German-American Bund, Silver Shirts, and similar organizations that they continued creating drama and falling apart, so much so that Hitler and German consuls were actively disavowing connection with them and urging good Germans in the United States not to associate with them. Hart’s treatment of Charles Lindbergh is surprisingly charitable, treating him as someone who was naive, overly impressed by his experiences with modern German aviation, and who listened to entirely too many anti-Semitic friends.

This was an interesting if flawed read, but it did make me do some digging around some of the bizaare characters involved, and I suspect I shall be researching more into Coughlin: I’ve ILL’d a book on him and Huey Long to compare their particular brands of populism, and their policies compared against one another and Roosevelt’s own economic re-ordering.

Highlights:

“One cannot always be certain of what Pelley favors, but one is seldom left in doubt as to what Pelley opposes, and he opposes many things. The Jews, of course, are his chief objects of hatred. To Pelley, the Jews are the root of all evil. Whenever he is against anything, it is because Jews are connected with it, and if he can’t find Jews, he creates them. Thus, his chief objection to Communism is its alleged Jewishness.”

Pelley’s sudden interest in Native Americans stemmed from a supposed divine realization that the Bureau of Indian Affairs had been taken over by Bolsheviks. Native Americans were therefore natural allies for his political movement because they too were supposedly victims of the Jewish conspiracy Pelley saw everywhere. Among the many problems with this eccentric plan was the fact that Pelley did not actually know many Native Americans. His efforts to reach out by referring to himself as “Chief Pelley of the Tribe of Silver” and writing articles in prose that could have been lifted from the stock characters of Hollywood Westerns gained few supporters.

One Native American ally Pelley did manage to recruit was a mixed-race Portland attorney named Elwood A. Towner who soon took on a bizarre role. Adopting the “Indian title” of Chief Red Cloud, Towner began attending legion and Bund meetings up and down the West Coast and drew sizable crowds as he wore a stereotypical feather headdress and clothing covered in swastikas.

With a higher degree of personal discipline, Pelley might well have become the leader around which the far right could coalesce. With his ideological flexibility, flair for the dramatic, and ability to harness religious language (even in his own unique way), Pelley could have been formidable. As it turned out, he was merely a flash in the pan who ended up being exposed as an unscrupulous fraudster.

American businessmen with holdings in Germany had a vested financial interest in making peace, especially with the Royal Air Force starting to bomb German factories that might soon include their own. Remarkably, even after the war’s start American corporate bosses tried to maintain a sense of normalcy in relations with their German divisions. Ford’s Dearborn office continued to communicate with its Cologne factory, and even sent new equipment to the plant in 1941 to boost production for the German military.