Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

After a two-week break, the trial resumed in September 1944. Senator Langer showed up regularly in court, adding to the disruption and showing support for the defendants. Meanwhile, Allied troops were winning victories across Europe. US troops marched toward Berlin. President Roosevelt earned a fourth term in office.

During the trial, the briefcase that Charles Slocombe had recovered from Henry Allen was a key source of evidence in Rogge’s indictment. The documents in the briefcase connected all the defendants to each other, supporting Rogge’s argument that the defendants were part of a vast and coordinated web with a concentrated objective: to disunite the US and spark a revolution that would destroy democracy. The court would have to decide whether this amounted to seditious conspiracy.

On November 29, 1944, the defendants showed up to court with franked envelopes provided by Senator Langer. They formed an assembly line, folding and stuffing the envelopes with Nazi propaganda. Judge Eicher was exhausted by the trial. While he had tried to assert control by meting out fines and punishments for various defendants and attorneys, he had not taken strong action in this regard for fear of further antagonism from US officials; members of Congress were already talking about impeaching him.

The day in court when the defendants formed a propaganda assembly line, Judge Eicher had trouble breathing. That night, he died in his sleep of a heart attack. Many believed that the stress of the trial had killed him. Faced with the decision of starting the trial all over again, the attorney general held the decision in abeyance, but it was clear that the DOJ would drop the case.

In 1946, when a slim chance remained that the sedition trial would resume, Rogge and his team traveled to Germany to interview captured Nazi officials during the Nuremberg Trials. They came back to the US with evidence that supported the claim that Germany had started orchestrating a propaganda operation in the US long before the two countries were at war. When Attorney General Clark read Rogge’s initial report, he advised Rogge to remove the names of all prominent Americans from the document. When Rogge submitted his final version, Clark saw that Rogge had not scrubbed all these names, and decided to mark the report as secret and shelve it; President Truman (who succeeded Roosevelt after Roosevelt’s death in 1945) agreed with this decision. Clark and Truman believed that now that the war was over, the government should drop the matter.

O. John Rogge asked for a two-week leave of absence so that he could go on a speaking tour of the US. He felt that the public should know about just how deeply Nazi propaganda had infiltrated the country. He began his speaking tour at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia. While he wasn’t allowed to cite his report directly, he described the nature of the Nazis’ multimillion dollar schemes to sway the US.

Senator Wheeler grew angry when he found out about Rogge’s comments. He met with Truman, who was an old friend. The next day, Rogge was fired. Rogge continued to speak out about Nazi propaganda and claimed that he was writing a book based on his findings. He finally released the book in 1961, but it received almost no attention. The chapter concludes by noting that while examining America’s history with fascism is difficult, learning from the past will enable US citizens to fight fascism in the present.

The Epilogue gives brief accounts of what happened to key figures from the book after World War II. Philip Johnson became a celebrated architect. His reputation as a Nazi sympathizer and “likely a Nazi spy” fell away and became a footnote to his legacy (310).

Lawrence Dennis remained a prominent figure of the American ultra-right. After revealing that Dennis was half Black and that he had rejected his heritage and had lived his life passing as white, the text comments that this adds more dimension to Dennis’s advice to the Nazis, specifically his suggestion that the Nazis should treat Jewish people as the US treated Black people.

William Langer was the only senator to survive the sedition trial politically. He continued to espouse racist and pro-Nazi views. Langer proposed legislation to deport all Black Americans to Africa; this was taken up as the central cause of a neo-Nazi group. He also successfully gained clemency for at least one Nazi war criminal.

George Sylvester Viereck was convicted in a retrial and sentenced to four years in prison. After his release, he continued to advise neo-Nazi parties in the US.

Leon Lewis’s legacy as a spy was largely forgotten by his death at age 65. The text takes the stance that this is an oversight and that Lewis deserves to be celebrated as a key figure who selflessly fought against fascism in the US.