Rachel Maddow on History, Now, and What’s Next

greetings fellow humans and thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities tapes the spot for the biggest names and brightest Minds direct from the Chicago Humanities live spring and fall festivals to your ears I'm Alisa Rosenthal and today I'm bringing you one of the most impactful conversations from our most recent season msnbc's Rachel Matt th returning to Chicago Humanities to share her thoughtful and informed wisdom on the American history of fascism and what we can do about it we've got a trea

sure Trove of great speakers coming up in our live spring 2024 event season all to help give us perspectives on this election year politicos like George Stephanopoulos Joy Reed justice Steven Brier plus Caris Wier on Silicon Valley Judith Butler on gender and a preview film screening of the new Netflix film Shirley starring Regina King as Shirley Chisum with with so much more to come it's such a fantastic season tickets go on sale for members March 12th and for the general public March 14th so h

ead to Chicago Humanities dorg to sign up for our email list and be the first to know today number one New York Times best-selling author and Emmy awardwinner Rachel mattow goes deep into the surprising history of Select World War II Americans some familiar some that should be from her fascinating new book prequel an American fight against fascism inspired by her number one apple podcast Rachel mat presents Ultra she chats with Professor Kathleen blue historian and author of such works as bring

the war home the white power movement and paramilitary America please enjoy Rachel madow in conversation with Kathleen blue live at the University of Illinois Chicago on October 19th 2023 you are very very kind and there are so many of you all right this is crazy uh when I do my TV show I can't see you so I'm wearing my reading glasses so you are blurry but it's still crazy all right I'm really excited about being here I'm very touched that you're here I know there's a lot to think about and and

talk about and want to hear about in the world right now other than a book um so means all the more to me that you're here I'm also really looking forward to talking to Professor Baloo she is brilliant um and she's exactly who I wanted to um talk with about this in Chicago so I'm great it's great I'm gonna um read a little thing uh and say a little thing and then I will stop talking um I I swear did do you remember in the um democratic debate in the first democratic debate in 2008 when Joe Bide

n was running for president when Obama ended up getting the uh the nomination the first democratic debate I remember Brian Williams um said to him Senator given what's been described as your uncontrolled verbosity I remember that phrase your uncontrolled verbosity can you reassure voters that you'll have the you know discipline you need on the world stage I remember that moment you remember what Biden did he said yes I've been trying to take that as my inspiration stop talking anyway all right h

e was one of the most successful and celebrated industrialists on the planet his anti-Semitism was Rank and it was unchecked he spewed it freely in private TI raides among friends family close business business cohorts newspaper reporters or pretty much anybody within earshot in the office in private chats and interviews at dinners even on camping trips one close friend wrote in his diary after witnessing one late night round the campfire di tribe that Ford quote attributes all evil to Jews good

point Ford even ordered his Engineers to forgo the use of any brass in his model te automobiles calling brass a Jew metal he said wherever there's anything wrong with the country you'll find the Jews on the job there he blamed a vast and incoit Jewish conspiracy for inciting his workers to demand that he share a sliver more of the expansive Ford motor company profits he blamed them for the gold standard he blamed them for the Advent of the Federal Reserve Bank he blamed them for ruining Motion

Pictures in America he blamed them for ruining popular music he literally blamed the Jews for ruining baseball he was hardly the only radical anti-semite in the US Circa 1920 but in addition to his fortune and his famous name and his iconic automobile company he had a megaphone your average crazy uncle theorizer lacked he had a newspaper the Dearborn independent which he had purchased for a song in 1918 it wasn't 44 billion but it was I'm sorry it's terrible joke the paper was a big money loser

in the beginning with poor to midling circulation and Ford's editorial horang did little to draw new readers how many attacks on the man who'd beaten Ford in the most recent Michigan Senate race did the public really want Truman H Newbery had stolen that election one of the independent editorial staffers who was a veteran of the New York newspaper Wars had an idea he wrote to Ford's right-hand man find an evil to attack let's find some sensationalism and lo the answer landed unbidden not long af

ter a newly translated English language Edition titled the protocols of the meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion the pamphlet was the work of fabulists Russian fabulists furious at the Bolshevik toppling of the old zaris arist rcy theorists portrayed the Russian Revolution as not just a local Affair in their telling it was the early Innings of a plot by a cabal of all powerful Jewish schemers to take over the world the protocols was build as the product of a surreptitious notetaker at a top se

cret meeting wherein these Jewish Puppet Masters had drawn up their strategy and tactics there was no secret meeting obviously there was no secret plot the whole thing was a work of fiction a considered very deliberate lie a very very dangerous piece of propaganda Henry Ford seized on it he and his newspaper bore down on a new weekly series in the Dearborn independent based on the protocols it was a weekly series it ended up being a 92p part weekly series every week for 92 weeks headlines like t

hese in his paper the international Jew the world's problem and Jewish Jazz music becomes our national music and The Perils of baseball too much Jew these were splashed onto the pages of Ford's paper which is distributed in Ford Ford motor dealerships across the country Ford also saw to the publication of his Series in book form it was titled the international Jew and it ran to four volumes never mind that the protocols was exposed as a total makeb believe right in the middle of Ford's 92 week s

creed of a newspaper series Ford's weekly essays continued without pause and Ford motor dealers kept tossing the latest issue of the Dearborn independent onto the front seat of every newly purchased Model T automobile Ford saw to it that the four volumes of the international Jew were translated and published worldwide in 12 International editions including one in Germany and stick a pin in that of all the contributions Henry Ford made to this world one of them was this the most prolific most sus

tained published attack on Jews the world had ever known other Americans organized an anti- anti-semitic publicity campaign of notable and notably Gentile Americans to stand up against against Ford prominent public figures such as woodro Wilson and Clarence Darrow and web Deo and William Jennings Bryant joined the fight they called Ford's utterings unamerican and unchristian the former president William Howard Taft soon to be named Chief Justice of the Supreme Court accepted a speaking engagemen

t at an Anti-Defamation League meeting in Chicago two days before Christmas 1920 at that speaking engagement he lambasted Ford in his Looney assertions about a Jew conspiracy stripping power from Christians around the world Taft said there is not the slightest ground for anti-Semitism Among Us it has no place in free America the go tapped on [Applause] that the German edition of Ford's book landed in the hands of one particularly gifted propagandist when Adolf Hitler's book mine comp was publish

ed in 1925 the author appeared to lift not just ideas but whole passages from Ford's own Publications mine comp's first edition extolled Henry Ford by name Hitler wrote it is Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union every year makes them more and more the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of 120 million only a single great man Ford to their Fury still maintains full Independence Hitler by this point had already molded sending some German shock troops to Amer

ica to Aid in what he hoped would be Ford's run for president in 1924 when a reporter from the Detroit news showed up at Nazi party headquarters in Munich in December 1931 to interview Hitler for her series her series was called five minutes with men in public eye she was surprised to find hanging on the wall behind Hitler's desk a large framed portrait of a famous American Hitler explained to the newspaper woman quote I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration the reporter asked Hitler that day poin

t blank why he was anti-semitic he said without hesitation somebody has to be blamed for our troubles so the basic idea of democracy just at its fundamental Basics um is that everybody gets a say right that we all together as Citizens we use the Democratic process to elect our leaders to make manifest our preferences for what our country should do how it should be run um right now there are a lot of very smart people um who study the rise of authoritarianism and the fall of democracies lately th

ese people are very busy in addition to being very smart all of those smart people if you ask them they'll all have slightly different definitions along these lines what to look for in a country that's at risk of sliding from democracy into authoritarianism so I just say that as a preface so that you know that you shouldn't just take my word for it lots of don't this isn't definitive lots of other people who know this stuff better than I do see it different ways but my own sort of back of the en

velope checklist is that there's four things you have to watch for sort of four cornerstones and the first one I think is the most obvious it's the the technical literal part of democracy are people able to vote do people have their votes cast as they were counted do people believe that the Democratic political system is real that it isn't rigged that it works that it is the system we use in our country to effectuate what we want for our country that's the first Cornerstone to assess the second

Cornerstone is scapegoating a disfavored group or minority being not just attacked but the subject of conspiracy theories about how they're secretly powerful they're really to blame for what's wrong in in the country they're they're a secret Elite that's out to destroy all that's right and good they're evil everybody else needs to be protected for them you watch for that you watch for violence entering what should be the political sphere paramilitary groups or violent groups associated with cert

ain political factions normal political acts like voting or working at a polling place or certifying election results or going to a rally or even talking about politics with your friends or talking about it online if that makes you subject to physical intimidation or violence that's bad and you watch for the disinformation and attacks on the whole idea of Truth and this is one that I know can sound a little woo woo um but I mean it as a sort of basic tactic if you're telling people not to trust

journalism experts in science telling them that you know books are bad and and news is fake and history is dangerous what you're telling people is that nothing is really knowable or true and so they should therefore go with their gut go with your prejudices also maybe just trust what the leader says and so those if you think about those four things to watch for if again democracy is that everybody gets a say through the Democratic political process well why are why are those cornerstones importa

nt scapegoating seeds in people's minds the idea that we can't let everybody get a say because some people are bad and dangerous and maybe not even fully human so they can't participate in a mutual Democratic process with us violence and the threat of violence well that puts the political process off limits to normal people devaluing the political process making democracy not work or making it seem like it doesn't work that is of course its own reward for people who want us to abandon democracy

and that last point that dislocating people from the truth that untethers people from reality and knowable facts and that separates us from our ability to recognize real practical problems and come up with real practical Solutions and that means that we stop caring about government and what it ought to do and we start becoming suceptible to these useful distracting conspiracy theories it softens us up to do what the leader wants instead of what we know is right so when all those things start get

ting Wiggly I mean any any one of those starts getting Wiggly it's kind of a heads up when I when all four of them get Wiggly I think it's all Hands-On deck and so that that's basically what I want to talk about I will just say that the um the reason the book is called prequel is not because of it's not because I believe we're dealing with some new iteration of World War II that we're we're not dealing with some new iteration of Hitler or the Nazis um today there there's no analogy even between

anything in modern history and Germany under the Nazi party and Hitler from 1933 to 1945 only Hitler is Hitler only Nazis are Nazis um the book is called prequel not because of the bad guys in it actually but because of the good guys because from that era America an who fought Nazis Americans who fought Nazi operations that were at work here in America who fought their fellow Americans who sided with the Nazis who were working for the Nazi cause who tried to implement fascism here who tried to i

mplement an American form of Nazism in this country I believe those Americans gave us a gift I believe they at least left us stories and lessons for how to think about what your options are when an American Ultra right Rises and starts agitating to end our system of government and replace it with a strongman form instead what to do in particular what your options are in particular when a movement like that isn't just On The Fringe it has unnerving connections to elected politicians and people wi

th real political power we're not the only people in America who's ever who've ever confronted something like this so um I will just say that you know I'm I'm not an activist and I'm not here to tell you to do anything or even to tell you to see anything one particular way but in 2023 I feel like history has sort of come for us um we are in an era in American politics right now where we we do have stuff that Americans haven't had to contend with for a long time where we've got people subject to

physical intimidation and violence on the edge of politics we've got right-wing armed paramilitary groups we've got the D denial of election group results we've got mass disinformation and conspiracy theories and the intimidation of minorities and Rising anti-Semitism turns out that's our time and it has been some other times too and it will likely be some other times again but that means that in the future somebody will do a book or whatever the future version is of a podcast about our time abo

ut our sort of turn on the chore wheeel when this came around for us as Americans who are called upon to save our democracy and what we do now will be what our descendants and future Generations learn about and hopefully learn from because hopefully we're going to be good at it so thank you [Applause] Kathleen Belo [Applause] yeah [Music] hi so this book is fantastic if you have not already read it you are in for a treat um one of the things that I love about this book as someone who studies the

paramilitary ultra right groups that are on the rise now the landscape of conspiracy theory and disinformation and sort of the I I like this chore wheel analogy I I think that makes them like dust or maybe stuff in my garage I don't know um compost compost um so one question that came to mind listening to this is because you're in the business of telling stories and directing our attention to things I would love to hear you talk about why you think as we look back across a century where these g

roups Surge and resurge where there are always as you say in the book extremists out there somewhere there are always anti-democratic actors what is it that allows them to evade public opposition what is it that allows them to research um in other words what is it about the present moment that puts us in this position again there is something I think inherent in democracy in that if we are in a democratic system agreeing that we're all going to work together to make decisions about what we're go

ing to do as a country there will be a human impulse in a lot of us a lot of the time to say I actually know what we should be doing here I don't really want this to be a group decision um then that's you know that's human it's okay but then if you decide to embark on that as a project to get rid of the democratic system you need to persuade people not only that you ought to be in charge you ought to persuade people that there's something wrong with the idea that everybody should be in charge th

at there's something wrong with the idea that we can all as equals determine our future together and so you need I mean that's part of the reason I read that section of the book we need somebody to blame for our troubles and once you've blamed somebody pick pick whoever you want to pick it doesn't necessarily matter but once you've blamed somebody that means that we're no longer all the same type of people who are all pulling in the same direction there's some Among Us from whom we all the rest

of us need to be protected and then what kind of a system do you have well then you have a system that not only isn't Collective decision-making you also need somebody in charge who will use Force to protect us all from that evil and there you go and so I think the seeds of it are always there but you need things to fall in place for it to ascend and you watch for the technical functioning of the Democracy you watch for the how powerful the movements are to scapegoat minorities you watch for um

disinformation dislocating people from the truth I believe you I mean I I just think I just think there are structural factors and then it's worth knowing just as humans this is we're capable of this one of the things that's stunning about the book is that you take a number of events that people might have learned something about in their history education I hope um and reveal that a lot of these are interconnected so we see America First militias connected to um um huy Long's electoral machine

connected to Charlie coughlin's radio serm connected to sitting lawmakers who are in the business of attempting to undermine American democracy and even who align the country with Nazi Germany um those network connections I find really interesting um and it all builds to a question that we are always asking I think when we are dealing with anti-democratic movements but to what extent can the court system effectively respond um and I'm thinking of the recent string of sedition conspiracy seditiou

s conspiracy convictions for people in the proud boys and the oathkeepers um particularly coming out of January 6th and the run on the capital um there are other examples in the 80s that we can talk about if people ever want to um but the centerpiece of this book is the great sedition trial of 1944 which is huge and just utter chaos so I'd like to invite you to cue that up for the people who have not yet read the book and then I have sub questions well yeah it's very hard to convict um somebody

in the United States of seditious conspiracy um we have the right to not just think Terrible Things um we have the right to associate with other people for terrible reasons I mean we have a lot of Rights protected under the Constitution and God bless us for it um but it means that a lot of political organization even of the most um sort of Nefarious kind is protected right up until the point where you take action to use Force to undermine the government of the United States but if you think abou

t it if you are in the position of being put on trial for sedition that means your effort to overthrow the government by force did not work because there is a government still standing to put you on trial for sedition and so and so almost inherently the prosecution has an impossible task of convincing a jury or convincing a judge in a bench trial that this plot was a real threat and is worth testing the boundaries of our constitutional protections for speech and Association and political activit

y because obviously it didn't work so maybe it was never going to work and that is what you run up against that's part of why this the great sedition trial was forgotten I think it's part of why the the whole movement around them was forgotten is because it was in their interests at the time to say oh we didn't mean it it was it wasn't it wasn't ever going to be a threat and I think a lot of observers can sort of dismiss it that way um when the Christian front U militia father Cogan's militia wa

s put on trial in New York in in 1940 the FBI raid on the Christian front militia they thought they believed was less than a week out from when the Christian front was going to start its plan for violent overthrow of the US govern government that was going to start with the murder of 12 members of Congress they thought they were a week out from that and the Christian front guys all got off and their defense was effectively ah these guys were going to do something like that come on they had stock

piled bombs they had stolen US military machine guns they had um lots of members of the National Guard and the New York Police Department who were on their side they had a lot of money and they had Direct support from Nazi Germany so in the moment and looking back at it you can say oh these were a bunch of clowns but I don't think they were that Trope of these were a bunch of clowns the coup could never have happened it couldn't have happened like it's not really a threat comes up over and over

and over again as do all of these other factors except the part with direct support from na Nazi Germany which is of course not a thing after this book um but in the 1980s we're looking at the same set of things organized paramilitaries with some amount of buyin from official people um we're looking at stolen weapons from armories and posts we're looking at military grade stuff we're looking at Readiness um and again it's that same tactic of saying it could never have happened these guys are a b

unch of um Loney they they describe one of them as the Bayou of Pigs by way of making fun of it they describe others as being um you know various kinds of redneck hij Jinks um the Christian front they were the Brooklyn Boys yeah oh sweet yeah and their ma guns and their stockpiled bombs exactly the Brooklyn Boys and it occurred to me reading this book so mild spoiler the Sedition trial in 1944 is a really big mess like 29 defendants and 26 defense councils um plus a lot of Marshals plus a lot of

prosecutors plus a lot of reporters all in the same courtroom pre-air conditioning um and it went on it was bedum and it went on for s months and then the judge died um it was and he and the the prosecution hadn't even gotten 30% of the way through their witness list at that point prosecution had a pretty compelling case but they got nowhere near being able to put it together they can't even make the opening statement right the opening statement takes an entire day and nobody hears a word of it

because people are just shouting over the they're chanting and screaming together yes there's people like leaving Court to go lead anti-semitic song somewhere else or like showing up on the steps wearing just a night down and doing all kinds of hygs that just distract from The Trial um it made me think about the Charlottesville case um which is a Civil Trial of course this is the the case coming out of the unite the right rally in 2017 but it made me wonder about to what extent do you think a w

hole bunch of defendants choosing to represent themselves makes them look disorganized is that a tactic inste of a feature yes if you maintain a professional um organized um dignified defense you kind of seem like a professional organized dignified person whose actions and words ought to be taken seriously but if you behave like the pray defendants did the defendants who defended themselves in the Charlottesville civil case or you or you behave like some of my defendants did in this case literal

ly showing up in a night gown and one guy standing up in the middle of the trial and saying I demand a mental exam and he meant for himself I this is this this is it's hilarious and it's say and I have an eight-year-old sense of humor and so I find all of this hilarious I'm instant evidently entertained but it also is strategic and there's also just technical nuts and bolts about it I was very interested in the oathkeepers and and proud boy stitious conspiracy um trials that we've had in the las

t few months that even though they indicted about as many prot Trump right-wing armed paramilitary militia members um in the Post January 6th trials there was about as many of them as there were my guys in in 1944 they did not make the mistake this time of putting them all on trial at once they broke them down into groups of of four and five and just that just learning that okay take take that lesson to the bank as well it's it is hard to prosecute people for crimes that have political intention

s but crimes are crimes and violence is violence and the justice department has to be a role it can't be the only thing do it almost never works on its own but you can't abandon it either at least that's what I think this era was trying to teach us yeah so relatedly what role do you think the news media plays in this story um and also today in shaping how we think about and have conversations about anti-democratic movements and threats well I mean I hope we're getting better at it there are are

among the heroes in prequel um a number of journalists so part of when I say the justice department has to be part of it but it can't be all of it um one of the most effective forms of activism and it's not even activism so it's sort of pro-democratic practice that I think it's helpful at least to me to study and to learn from and to know that people did it before us is just documenting what these groups are doing so it's controversial investigative columnists like Drew Pearson who everybody hat

ed um everybody on all sides of the aisle hated um everybody talked to him but nobody trusted him he was he was more controversial than any mainstream journalist today and more influential I would say but he had sources in the Justice Department that told him that Senator Ernest lundine recently died in a mysterious plane crash and the subject of um all of these strangely lukewarm warm endorsements and and uh eulogies from his colleagues was at the time of his death under investigation by the ju

stice department for working with a Nazi agent Drew Pearson blows that open Dillard Stokes blows open a different part of it involving the America First Committee in in Washington including um spy movie style stakeouts of um of of evidence that's transiting the city in the dark of night and there's there's journalists who do great work there's also American citizens who do effectively journalistic work researching investigating in some cases infiltrating these groups and then writing up their fi

ndings and telling law enforcement and telling the public that's very dangerous work but exposing the nature of what these groups are doing and they do all try to stay some level of secret how's the benefit of exposing the American people to the truth of it and then the American people can make their decisions about whether or not these guys arguments are going to to be compelling you can see what they're trying to do with their arguments and you can judge for yourself these members of Congress

who seem to be defending them siding with them or even working with them and that allows you to vote those people out and so having information real knowable checkable information is indispensable yes what do you I I want to talk about Ojon raggy and I'm looking for my Inn um but he's a major character in the story um partly because of the great sedition trial but also in his dealings with huie Longs Louisiana so I wonder if we want to start raggy in Louisiana and then follow him a little so Hue

y Long um I feel like is is due for a a historical moment in pop culture I feel like we're ready to learn a lot more about what huie long was like in his time both in court proceedings and in newspaper accounts and even like in the titles of books about him everybody just matter ofly described him as America's most likely candidate to be our Hitler um he was routinely described as running a dictatorship in Louisiana he was governor of Louisiana and then he got elected US senator from Louisiana b

ut while he was US senator he decided he'd stay as Governor gives you a sense he I mean it didn't last forever but for a long time he was both after he was no longer Governor he had built a gigantic skyscraper state capital in Louisiana that had an apartment for himself at the very top of the tower and after he was no longer governor of Louisiana he kept the apartment he also once mounted an armed invasion of New Orleans and just got away with it um huie long was amazing he was um the person who

Franklin Delano Roosevelt most wor would run for president against him in 1936 and huie Long's politics are for me of less interest than his tactics a lot of people identify him as a figure of the left I think there's a great argument to be made for that he certainly was a populist he was also um a a an unreconstructed demagogue and profoundly profoundly profoundly corrupt and the justice department after Huey Long was assassinated in 1935 realized that the long machine in Louisiana was so well

put together that even the death of huie long had not taken it apart and so they sent this young whipper snapper prosecutor down to Louisiana um after the death of huie long to go break up his machine to go return Louisiana to democracy and this young prosecutor went down there he said he thought he'd be there for a few days and he was there for months and there's a scene um that you might remember from the ultra podcast if you listen to it where he gets a letter at his hotel room where he's st

aying that includes both a death threat and a bullet and he receives that and he walks straight out onto the street in the middle of the night and calls a press conference in the middle of the night and says effectively um you can't stop me we won't be intimidated and if you get me there'll just be another prosecutor behind me give it up and he breaks up the Huey Long machine and he puts the governor in prison and he puts the he breaks the machine up and it's this it is a it's a career making th

ing for this young prosecutor and the next thing they have him do is go prosecute the Christian front the Brooklyn voice in 1940 and he blows it and he does not recognize how positively inclined the Brooklyn jury pool is toward these Christian fascist militi men who have been stockpiling bombs and planning to kill a dozen members of Congress he so is so blind to the local support for these guys that he neglects to discern during jury selection that the forom of the jury is not only the first cou

sin of the Christian front's priest and leader she is related as well by marriage to the Christian front's lead defense Council and John raggy misses this and the Christian front guys walk and then when political pressure is brought to bear on the Attorney General of the United States and the investigator the prosecutor who is leading the investigation of a nationwide sedition trial um is fired from his position because he's getting too close to members of Congress who are implicated in that plo

t they bring in John ragy to clean up and run the prosecution instead and he does an amazing thing thing for this country and it is work that I believe stands up 80 years later but he doesn't put any of those people in jail he does write a report though which we get much later yeah tell about the report and why nobody reads it so small spoiler sorry after the judge dies in 1946 important it's 46 so World War II is over that means that John ragy um while the justice what happens when the judge di

es is that um the defendants at least in this case were offered the chance to just pick up where the trial left off with a new judge which of course they said no to um and then it's gonna it's a mistrial is declared and the justice department has to decide whether they're going to start all over again with this trial with the 29 defendants and the 26 defense attorneys and the dead judge and the 30% I mean it's are they going to do it again while they're mulling this possibility John ragy says pl

ease boss can I go to Germany because what we have alleged here is that these people want to commit sedition they want to overthrow the US government by force but they are doing so in a conspiracy with the Nazi government in Berlin that America's purportedly homegrown fascists also have foreign ties to the enemy that we just beat in this war can I go check with the Enemy that we just beat in this war and find out if it's for sure true from their side too and he goes to Germany and he interviews

Nazi war criminals at Norberg and he goes through the German government's files and he sure enough documents all the ties between America's fascist movements of the time and Hitler's government and he brings this information back to Washington and he has made an arrangement with the attorney general that whether or not the trial is going to be pursued this information will be laid before the American people in a public facing report and that is the operative assumption that he brought to Germany

with him and that he brought home when he wrote up his report but the Attorney General takes one look at it and sees the names of two dozen members of Congress there including President Truman's best friend and he takes it to President Truman and he says effectively they they the two of them make a decision and they decide this report will never be released to the American people and this will be put in a desk this will be this is this is it and um raggy is fired and he goes on a speaking tour

to tell the country to tell everybody what's happened and he very briefly is a national hero and then everybody moves on the war is over and he fights for 15 years to have that report published and it is finally published in 1961 and boy has the country moved on by them nobody reads it nobody reviews it nobody it doesn't sell part of the reason it's so hard to get now is they printed so few copies of it because there was no demand for it and yet that that report which did not pay off in his life

time I believe is an indelible and I believe invaluable history lesson and instruction book for us in terms of what it means As Americans to face up against a movement that is that anti-democratic that powerful that connected that Wily and that resistant to control by the criminal justice [Applause] system so there's a great audience question from Dr Marilyn stalker who would like to know with all that you know and see going on in our world are you hopeful and if so what is that optimism based o

n if are you hopeful and if so why there's this thing that Susan my partner Susan and I say to each other which is sometimes the answer is in the question in that case I know what um our audience member believes about whether or not we ought to be hopeful um yeah you know listen I I started working on this because I felt like I needed help from history to know the origin story of some of the ugly things that I feel like are coming back around that I didn't expect to be coming back around and lea

rning the origin of these things helps me understand them myself and helps me explain them to other people and I see that as my job so that's why I was looking into it and trying to learn it the reason I decided to make a podcast about the the trial and this book about other parts of it is because I do think history helps us not just explain precedent I do think it gives us a sense of what the options are for how we can act I mean again there's no there's no new Nazis right there's no new Hitler

there's no there's nothing that's not not that's not the lesson here it's not to find in today's authoritarian movements Echoes of previous authoritarian movements authoritarianism and fascism is always the same shirtless guy don't trust the Jews we can't have democracy like don't go to the rally people will beat you up like it's it's the same thing it's in all it's all in all countries um it's it always kind of looks the same and I'm being reductive but it's basically true what is different al

l the time are the resources that are brought to bear to embarrass discredit oppose and beat back those movements there have been fascist movements all over the world and in our own history and there's all of these forgotten Americans and forgotten anti-fascists everywhere all over the world and in our own history who had great ideas and did things that were hilarious and effective and surprising and very few of them were even thanked for it in their own lifetimes but we don't have to be constra

ined by that we can go back and find what they did in their lifetimes that's helpful to us that's interesting to us that gives us new ideas about what to do today um and so I just I do I do feel hopeful I feel like there's endless depths of stuff to Plum here and if if if we were up against a movement in the world leadup to World War I an anti-democratic anti-semitic pro-fascist pro-nazi movement that had effectively on its side the most famous industrialist in the country Henry Ford the consens

us national hero of America the most famous man in the country who was not the president Charles Lindberg and the most influential media figure who has ever existed in this country since the beginning of this country Charles cogin all on their side and the largest voluntary political organization in the country and growing by Leaps and Bounds at the time if all of those forces were arrayed on that side of the equation while Germany was steamrolling through Europe and those people lost here well

we can beat the pikers that we're up against now right I [Applause] mean well said we um historians have a word for one of these things we talk about contingency which is the idea that events are not predetermined so if you're in Germany in 1933 we know from here the string of events that's going to happen but people then didn't know that string of events people didn't know when they're stepping up to confront this threat that America was going to win the war that this was going to get resolved

that things were going to work out for them that these forces would have to go back underground in some cases um there's a sense of contingency and I think that that amplifies many of the acts of sort of real world heroics that appear in this book so I would like to before we move on invite you to talk about that we can't do all of them um but there are a few characters in here that maybe deserve a highlight I like the secretary oh the secretary yeah yeah yeah you know this the contingency point

I will let me just say on that point one of the things I was thinking about today getting ready to come over here was that when you read like The America First committee speeches one of the points that they make that is most compelling even now even knowing how it turned out is when they are arguing about how if we join the war we will lose I mean they're arguing against the United States joining the war in Europe in part because Hitler has taken everybody except England and why do we think we'

re going to be able to turn that back around it's actually one of the strongest most rational arguments that they make and of course we know from history that that's not at all how it turns out but it's to me looking at the primary source stuff looking at the text of what they were doing rather than just people later writing about it it's a good reminder when Gerald NY who's one of the Senators Who's involved in all this stuff um on on the day that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor Gerald NY was leadi

ng an America First rally and somebody brought up a piece of paper to him on the stage Ag and told him Pearl Harbor has been attacked by the Japanese and he just kept going with his rally he just put the piece of paper down and kept going arguing about how we would lose and we will never be attacked and we are protected by our oceans and this isn't our War and why it's the war is lost anyway and why are we going to plight our tro with all these defeated Empires and ultimately people Americans in

uniform I don't know whether they were active duty or what was going on but soldiers ran in and tried to stop the rally to say we are at War now you need to like you need to know this is happening and he all but fought with them not wanting to tell his audience that the Pearl Harbor attack had happened because he said he could not believe it because I believe he couldn't believe it I believe he had talked himself to the idea that we would never be attacked and that we would ultimately end up ne

eding to side with Germany we should do so as early as possible to cut the best deal for when Hitler invaded us and it's just it's it was very present and very real and to me that is also heartening as you say because it does heighten the heroism of the people who had Clarity of purpose even against that kind of uncertainty absolutely I think history has a lot of lessons for us not only about where we are and how we got here but also the many roads not taken the near misses the possibilities and

sometimes um it can be an engine for kind of widening our realm of thinking about what's possible yes yes and and just the idea that nothing is inevitable everything looks inevitable in retrospect nothing's inevitable in the moment that's um can I the secretary yeah so just thinking about um human level heroism and and um uh people who did a solid for their country even though they woke up that morning not knowing they were going to be called upon for it um one of the people who I think it's it

's it's worth spotlighting is um somebody who worked in the office was a secretary for Senator Ernest lendine the guy who died in the plane crash Senator Ernest lendine he may have had a lot of nice things about him I didn't find any um one of the things that was not nice about him was that he stole from his staff so his Congressional staff would get paid every week and then he would demand from them a cash Kickback in their salary and would pocket it and if you wanted to work for Senator Line T

his was part of the price of admission and so one of his secretaries um who was in a weak enough position at work that this was her job that she was handing over a piece of her salary every week in cash to her boss so it's not like she was in an empowered position at work nevertheless after he was killed in this plane crash his wife scurried across the country as fast as you could get uh as fast fast as you could go and this wasn't at a time when air travel was easy to align and on short notice

but she she got her husband died in a plane crash and within two days she had gotten herself from Minnesota to Washington DC in a hurry and all she wanted from his office was one file of correspondence with one guy which she took away and Senator Line's secretary had the presence of mine to recognize what this was about and she went to the FBI and said the correspondence that you're looking for of my boss with that guy who you're now putting on trial as a Nazi agent his wife has it and that's um

I mean you never know when history is going to come knocking right when heroism is going to ask if you're home um but it's it's not it's not just people who join the Marines right it's it's Americans getting called upon in all sorts of ways um to save their country Nancy would like to know um what is the United States of America fighting for in the 2024 election what is the United States of America fighting for in the 2024 election I I think this is going to be a very difficult year um and in s

ome if you were just writing a novel about your time on Earth maybe this would be a great time for the drama of of life because it is I think not hard to have moral and even strategic clarity about what are the stakes for us in this country over this next year heading toward the 2024 election I think that it is not hard to see around the corner to know that we want this not to be the last election that we want to hold on to democracy way we do things in this country um but it's not just drama ri

ght and it is something that we're living through and the result is not inevitable and um things can go bad and things can go surprisingly bad and things can go bad quick and at a time when there is this much precarity um in in in our Democratic project I do think it's an all handson deck moment and not everybody needs to do the same kind of work but everybody does need to do something even if you don't imagine yourself having a determinative effect you might be the secretary you never know when

you're going to be called upon um and I will also say that part of standing up for democracy means making democracy work and so democracy isn't a concept it isn't something that exists um as the negative form of fascism democracy is a decision process that we use as Citizens to make manifest what we want for our country and so if you are standing up for democracy that means you believe in democracy and that means in this year I mean I believe it means you put aside whatever cynicism you might h

ave previously earned in life about whether or not democracy is awesome right now we're it's we're in the position of missing it when it's gone and so yes it needs to be fixed and improved but that's what it means to use democracy so whether or not you were planning on being a pole worker this year think about it whether or not you were thinking about working on a campaign think about it whether or not you were thinking about doing souls to the polls think about it whether or not you were thinki

ng about doing anything in your local community to make sure democracy just works you're doing something for your country at a time your country needs [Applause] you so speaking of everyday Heroes we have a question from Tara Tate who you're going to want to clap for in a minute that says I am a high school government teacher and I include media literacy in my curriculum oh God bless you what is the one piece of advice you would give young adults in how to process information from all of the dif

ferent Outlets they are exposed to ah this is a great question and an inspiring questioner so thank you um I listen I it's actually it's not a very inspiring answer I think it's very nuts and bolts but I actually think that learning what journalism is is a helpful thing um so there's lots of different ways that people can get information and circulate information and social media has made it a much more iterative process than it ever was before you know back and forth between people um and that'

s good and that's that's Democratic in its own way but learning the difference between information and journalism I think is helpful um just so you know if you do want to assess the veracity the trustworthiness the validity of something that you want to site or share with somebody else you have some tools to do that and so learning about sourcing what is the source of this information is the source named are there multiple sources are the sources that are named in this piece of reporting or this

piece of information sources that are the type of source that should know the truth of this thing that is being attested to in this reporting and what is the entity that is standing behind this reporting is it a news organization is it a news organization that you know anything about is it a person who you have reason to trust or distrust and is there anything that you can do to see any of the raw material that they used to put this piece of information together if they're talking about somethi

ng that happened in a courtroom there should be a link to a court document you don't have to read the whole Court Document but you might want to look and see if it's there if it's something that's being described for which there were news photographers or even civilian photographers there are there time stamps on the photos that purport to be of the thing that you are describing as having happened in a time sensitive way just learning about what that is learning that in a in in a news organizati

on you not only need to Define your sources your sources need to meet certain standards and then you need to answer to an editor who is responsible for the Professional Standards of that news organization and you can judge news organizations by their standards know just knowing that having that be a basic part part of your alphabet that you use when you read the news um can help cut out a lot of the drw I think um and it gets worse all the time in terms of the way information circulates online b

ut for me working for NBC and MSNBC it's um it makes me feel all the more grateful to have the job that I do and that we have big reputable news organizations who don't always get everything right but who at least have standards have professional tactics and who correct things when we get them wrong [Applause] I will also just say um my boss is here tonight his name is Corey and it's his birthday and he'll like that answer so happy birthday Corey good happy birthday Corey relatedly we have a que

stion from Frank Crest who asks in a world where we were all in our own bubbles regarding sources of information how do you recommend trying to see issues from other people's perspective so this goes to polarization and the way that we consume totally different news sources um and also the way that we have very different ideas I think now about what is evidence what is an argument what is a fact yeah I mean part of it is making sure that you're consuming quality information paying attention to s

ourcing looking at who's the author of the information that you're getting that that's that's part of it but I also think just in It's A good rule for journalism it's a it's a good rule for life to just read widely um don't let the short attention span um sort of way that we live now constrain your ability to read book length ideas um and if you're not up to reading a book length idea how about a magazine article instead of a newspaper article and if a magazine article feels like that's too expe

nsive or too much how about a long newspaper article instead of a short one I mean honestly it's it helps part of the reason that I changed my work schedule at MSNBC is I felt like I was thinking shorter thoughts and I was reading shorter pieces of information and I wanted different deadlines that arrived at different times on different Horizons so that my brain could Flex a little bit I recommend reading widely and reading not necessarily on things that you are already convinced you're interest

ed in but something that maybe grazes it I would also say just at a human level and I think this is an important small D democracy thing that we can all do is just to make sure that you have personal relationships where you talk with people about maybe current events and maybe the news but maybe not um having relationships with people who are different than you who are coming from different places than you where maybe you're not talking about Donald Trump and maybe you're not talking about Joe B

iden maybe you're not talking about the election maybe you're talking about the Cubs still having a oh some we're going to start um maybe you're talking about the [Laughter] 49ers maybe you're talking about the weather maybe you're talking about music maybe you're talking about other things having personal relationships not mediated through your phone or if they are mediated through your phone at least they're with individual human beings with whom you text or talk having human connection to oth

er people makes you see things through other people's eyes and not everybody in your circle of friends will see things the same way you do even if you're all liberals or you're all conservatives you'll have different family backgrounds you'll have different backgrounds in terms of immigration and work and family life and taking care of elderly parents and taking care of kids and having a multiplicity of human appreciation in your life and not living in your phone not just living online makes you

a more empathetic person and helps you see things through other people's eyes and that is sometimes in extremist that's what things come down to um but it's also it's a I think it's a recipe for a healthier life and I think it's a recipe for a healthier [Applause] [Music] democracy I think Community formation and neighborhood ties interpersonal ties is also a really important tool for any kind of organizing but especially for or organizing against intimidation and scapegoating and and the sorts

of um what did you call it the four corners of the envelope four cornerstones yeah yeah the four Cornerstone so the Cornerstone to do with scapegoating and the rise of paramilitary groups Community wellness and Community organizing in in the sense of just knowing your neighbors making sure people are okay is one of the single things everybody can do quickly to that's really important point because you when you say community organizing people think oh organizing toward a political end and you th

at's true too sure but this is about resilience just knowing your neighbors whether or not you like your neighbor just knowing your neighbors is helpful if something comes down in your neighborhood yeah knowing people enough to say Hello can be an important thing when something befalls you together and Chicagoans know this lesson really well from everything from you know shoveling and putting the chairs in the spot which is a highly contentious local issue to things like how do you actually get

a tree removed when it falls on your block we know about this right so this is a an application of a Chicago skill set I would also say that you know people talk about urban and rural divides in terms of what Americans think about the Democratic project and I live in Rural America where I feel very I live in rural Western Massachusetts I feel very interdependent in my neighborhood and in my community because we have 14et of snow a year and we have all sorts of crazy things that happen to us and

we have bears and we you know like stuff happens and you need to know who you are and you can't be like that guy watches Hannah and so I am not letting him dig out my fire hydrant like you know who cares who cares it helps there's this idea that like in Rural America we're conservative and we care about each other and in urban America we're liberal and we don't care about each other and I just feel like it's completely totally untrue that it's it's not one thing or the other it's plaid that we h

ave interdependence and Community strength of all different kinds in urban and rural areas and it's I I I think it's worth if if you don't have enough of that in your life don't see that as the truth for now to the end of your life that is something that you can work on too and if you don't have enough other people in your life who you see regularly ask do stuff with other people that you might have to ask to do tell somebody you're I'm looking to make friends I would like to talk do a book club

with you guys I would like us to get together in person rather than only seeing each other at Thanksgiving you can you can make make change along these lines and you never know when it might save your [Applause] life not sure we can follow that but I'll try um oh here's a okay Lisa Martin would like to know looking at all of the events that have unfolded over the last several years and I I'm just going to assume that we all know what they all are but I mean we could pick any but she would like

to know what has shocked you the most and why in other words is there a development in American politics or American life that really took you off guard H um I don't know I'm pretty I think I'm pretty humble about knowing that my crystal ball doesn't work I mean I get like reporting on politics and stuff like that I'm the world's worst predictor I get stuff wrong all the time but I also don't believe in my predictions in the sense that I don't put much stock in them I know I'm always wrong so I

don't get shocked when something that I expected to happen doesn't happen um I I think I I'll will go back to something that we said at the beginning here part of the reason that I started working in in this in this area of research in this part of History was because something came around in US politics that I didn't expect to see anywhere other than the the Deep Fringe yeah and that was the Resurgence of Holocaust denial as something quite close to American mainstream politics um and Holocaust

denial among other things is insane it's it's it's terrible and it has it functions it it it it has a million horrible functions in the world and is morally odious but it's also just weird the Holocaust was not that long ago there are Holocaust Survivors Among Us there are there are American GIS um who were not Holocaust Survivors themselves but were eyewitnesses to it who are among us this is something that we started contending with people denying this reality as early as as far as I can tell

as early as 1948 when there were so many people around who had lived through it and in many cases just barely so how is it that that's back around how is it that we've got groups with swas on the overpass of the 405 in Los Angeles or outside Disneyland with swastikas in one hand and Rhonda santz Flags in the other how is it that we've got I mean actually in western Mass in rural Western Massachusetts where I live right now there's an article in the local paper right now about a local Nazi group

putting anti-semitic uh pro-nazi flyers on people's front steps and and and car windshields why is why is this stuff coming around again it's part of the reason that I wanted to do this work because I did I do find it just not just bad but weird and starting to look into the origins of it in the United States brought me back back to to Brass tax which is that that kind of stuff exists not because somebody's been mesmorized into believing it that kind of stuff exists and is not just a privately

held belief among people but something that they are propounding in the country for a reason because they want to advance an anti-democratic project that is that depends on scapegoating that depends on anti-Semitism that excuses what we associate with authoritarianism Fascism and Nazism and they need Holocaust denial to be able to do that and so once you start to see it as a thing that's being done for a reason I think it makes it a little bit less scary it's still just as disgusting and angerin

g but it's not as scary because you can see that people are doing it for a reason and once I understand somebody's motives I'm less subject to the power of their words once you tell people hey this is being given to you this is being shoveled to you to manipulate you if people can understand that they're less manipulable when faced with that again and that's valuable I [Applause] think so thinking about wrapping this up I wonder if there is a lesson that you would like to draw from the process o

f looking to history to understand and the present in other words um would you like us after reading this excellent book which we're all going to do would you like us to go out and read additional history are there ways that you would like us to approach the world with that set of Curiosities or is it sort of a mindset of looking for that kind of loose thread on the sweater and then like not letting go that we can take with us out into the world well obviously everybody should be a history major

um you have to say that in front of your interl the history Professor um listen I I think that everybody's brain works differently um my brain works in such a way that I cannot um I was telling Kathleen earlier today like Susan said like didn't you have a story to tell me about something that happened you said something weird happened in the parking lot at the Stop and Shop when you went to do the grocery shopping and I'll be like yes I been thank you for reminding me okay first the dinosaurs w

ere destroyed by a meteor and then as the Earth went through one of its early ice ages and she's like cut to the chase like my brain I get rightfully dinged for always going back to the prehistory of the prehistory of the prehistory of the great great great great grandmother of the story but I Corey I'm sorry um and you you know you either like that or you don't um but that's the way my brain works and so for me I need to know the origin story of of the people that I'm talking about or the movem

ents that I'm talking about or the moments that I'm talking about and so for me I need to I don't need to I don't always need to go back to the meteor but I need to go back pretty far until I'm I'm confident that I have some sense of where this came from how how else it might have gone if it hadn't gone the way that we're talking about um and so maybe your brain works that way too if it does I would tell you don't be afraid history is there to help um look stuff up if you get to a part uh if you

're reading something that is starting to make sense some sense and then you get to a part that doesn't make sense then look up that thing um the the access that we have to information right now makes this a fun way to spend time um but I would also say that maybe history isn't your jam um if that's not the way you learn one of the other things I would encourage you to do is as I said earlier read widely read stuff that is longer than you are typically comfortable reading read um if you if you f

ind somebody who's written a magazine article or written like a news analysis piece that you find valuable go figure out what else they've written read those things too um there is a way that I think you can kind of widen your intellectual stance and get there and therefore get more stable um by just doing more to understand the world around us and in in in the weird year that we're about to have and in the incredibly highstakes election that we're about to try to have um I think that the more c

onnected we are to our families and our communities and to the intellectual tradition of this country that is why we have the system of government that we do the more resources we're all going to be able to bring to bear to doing something to help because this is going to be a year when your country needs your help so Kleen thank you so much this has been amazing and thank you all very much for coming thank [Applause] you that was Rachel mattow with Kathleen Belo live at the Chicago Humanities F

all Festival on October 19th 2023 for links to all of the works mentioned scroll down to the show notes or head to Chicago Humanities dorg explor podcast for all that good stuff and more Chicago Humanities tapes is produced and hosted by me Alisa rosenball with assistance from the hardworking team over at Chicago Humanities who are producing these Live Events and making them sound amazing we'll be back in 2 weeks with a brand new episode for you but in the meantime stay [Music] human