“Prequel” is a vivid, urgent, smart history of the years before and during World War II, when German agents, Nazi sympathizers, theocrats and others attempted to steer the United States away from fighting Germany — sometimes through isolationism, sometimes hoping the United States might align with Adolf Hitler’s Germany. Maddow examines how organized, pro-Nazi paramilitary groups planned to wage war on the federal government through selective targeting, built pipe bombs and other IEDs, and distributed hate materials. She also delves into their eccentric personalities and their general excitement about Hitler and Nazism.
In telling these stories, Maddow makes a vital contribution to the history of armed fascism in the United States. She demonstrates that a broad-based social movement of Nazi activists was afoot in the 1940s. It wasn’t just America First here and the Silver Shirts there, but a host of interconnected people (well documented in the book) who wanted to overthrow the United States and implement a fascist government.
Maddow also documents another common feature of then and now: stunning failures of surveillance, prosecution and government response. A central event of “Prequel” is the Great Sedition Trial of 1944. It ultimately accomplished little to nothing. The public was left largely unaware of the real threat posed by a coalition of Hitler-backed Nazi propagandists, not to mention the reality that there were sitting U.S. senators using their offices (and taxpayer money) to distribute disinformation designed to turn Americans against one another. And that was all in addition to an array of paramilitary groups ready to go to war on the United States so they could install a fascist regime.
The judge, quite simply, seems to have died of the stress.
Looking at this story in aggregate is a shock to our usual thinking about this historical period. It’s an era that, as Maddow notes, is ordinarily remembered as a time when Americans unified against fascist threats. The trial was such a failure that most of us don’t know that the politics of the era were far more divisive than Greatest Generation mythologies would have us believe.